Emma Willis: Welcome to our Beyond Warwick podcast series. Today I'm with David Hawkins from Mindus Project, discussing the importance of effective collaboration in business. Welcome back to Warwick Conferences, David. A place that has been your second home for many years. We've been working together for over nine years and we're delighted to have you back here to support our podcast series.

David Hawkins: It's always a pleasure to come back to Warwick and having worked with your team WMG, WBS over the last, as you put it, nine years. Warwick was one of the first universities to take seriously what we were trying to do in terms of promoting collaboration, not just for industry, but also for the next generation of managers coming out of university.

where collaboration is going to be a key tool in their toolbox going forward.

Emma Willis: Given your years of experience working within the world of collaboration, what do you feel has driven your enthusiasm, and what type of things have you really been involved in?

David Hawkins: Over many years working around the world in different roles from procurement, contract management, project management, what I began to realize was that strong relationships were an important factor in improving decision making, performance, and delivering better outcomes.

Emma Willis: Brilliant. That's fantastic. And I remember you bringing the Institute over to Warwick Conferences and us working so closely together in helping delivering your programs of collaboration within our venues, which has been great. So David, over the many years that Warwick Conferences have been going, over the last five years, we really have invested on a collaborative and partnership approach with our clients, which has proved really beneficial in really understanding what our clients need, what the delegates needs are, and what they need to take back into their business to help and support them in their activity at Warwick.

How do you see the benefits for organizations in having a collaborative approach?

David Hawkins: I think it's become blatantly obvious these days that the industry now has become so much more interdependent. The relationships become more mission critical to delivering the outcomes. At being adaptable working collaboratively, which your team does in spades, is almost becoming the norm.

Emma Willis: that's brilliant and really you to say so. And when you say about Silo working previously around, Warwick conferences are really encouraged to work more widely around the university and work in the likes of WMG and Warwick Business School, which also, you've also worked with them as well.

And it has proved really successful with some great success stories as a result as well.

David Hawkins: That's excellent and good lead into why do we want to do collaboration in the first place? Yeah. And I think that's what drove me 20 years ago to look at why something so obvious wasn't being adopted more formally within organizations.

Yeah.

Emma Willis: David, that's really interesting because I never knew there was an ISO on collaboration and collaborative working. So that has been really insightful for me to read the papers that you've kindly given me and the insights, which I'm sure you're happy to share with the listeners. But do you want to tell me a little bit more about your work within designing, writing the ISOs and how that's how you've rolled that out?

David Hawkins: Initially, my focus was clearly on business and competitive advantage. But what I've begun to realize is that almost every organization now relies on other parties to achieve their desired outcomes. So working better together, is the sort of catchphrase. As things have progressed, I've found that there are almost no areas of activity that have been Where collaboration doesn't become a crucial element, including sustainability, social value.

All of those things bring together organizations from disparate positions. But if they can focus on how can they do that more constructively then they all tend to be able to deliver better outcomes.

Emma Willis: David, I remember you saying you did some research on the benefits of staff working on collaborative ventures.

Can you share a bit more about that?

David Hawkins: Yeah, I was interested to, to look at how collaborative working aids internal collaboration as much as it does external. Certainly my experiences over time have been the reason that these kind of relationships fail externally is because there's a lack of cohesion internally.

But I went a bit further and looked at how individuals working within a collaborative environment found This to be more in tune with their natural human trait of collaboration is something that we do. It goes right back to the caveman. You couldn't hunt for a dinosaur on your own because it was too big.

And I think that same issue comes out today. But what I think is more interesting is that we have now much more focus on things like being, stress. And when I talk to individuals who are involved in these kind of programs, at a working level, they found it much more enjoyable. And as a result, performed higher.

I also think that, today, Generation Z or whatever the latest term is they have much more focus on the outcomes that organizations look to. And are probably less tolerant of the world that I was brought up in, where command and control was the essence of how a business operated. So I think from a future perspective.

Collaborative environment has not just the benefit of the business output, but it also reaches across into human responses to less stress more enjoyment, better decision making and that in itself looks back at staff retention and staff development.

Emma Willis: Yeah.

David Hawkins: So I think there's a hidden benefit in there that organizations aren't yet really grasping.

Emma Willis: Brilliant. That's a great focus for maybe their listeners then to look back into their organization and see how the collaboration is going to help and support the well being and the innovation of their organization. But also the fact of around, you mentioned about the younger generation and about what fresh and innovative and inspiring and different insights that they bring to a collaborative working group.

And I think it's just different views is really important to, to take on from that. And then actually just picking on your point around the internally working across silos and stuff and work conferences are really Really encouraged to work with a wider university in terms of the WMG Warwick Manufacturing Group and Warwick Business School, whom I know you've worked with very closely, but it has proved dividends actually about how impactful that's been by inter silo working and it's been very successful.

Yeah, and I think it's

David Hawkins: quite exciting. When I've spent time up here with the students, when I talk to them about the challenges working within industry, it's been great. They sometimes look at you skeptically and believe why on earth does that happen? Yeah. And I guess it goes back to the sort of historical way that we structure organisations.

Where this control, command and control model. Is completely alien to today's generations.

Emma Willis: Yeah, understandable. David, you're an instrumental in the development of the ISO 44001. And you have shared some of those papers with me, which is really great. Thank you. How did that come about, you working with excess of three, thirty countries in this area?

David Hawkins: It's an interesting journey. Let me say firstly I'm not a standards person. I got into this almost by mistake. In as much as I developed a model and got into discussions with BSI in the UK about how do we put some structure back into organisations. And that goes all the way through from concept right the way through to exit.

But what was clear to me was that relationships within business had largely been left to individuals rather than being a functional. So we build trust between individuals but we don't necessarily build trust within organizations. So my view was that if we had a structure which would help people to understand the dynamics of that and how internal processes can be a constraint and a barrier.

For example, we live very much in a litigation society where contracts have become the norm for managing relationships. But actually most contracts are written, in my terms, contracting for failure. We don't write contracts to be successful. We probably put more effort, and certainly in my career I've been charged with doing that, is how do we protect ourselves when it goes wrong.

Emma Willis: David, that's so interesting when you say contracting for failure, with general terms and conditions, that's all that ever does is cover each other in the partnership and the business venture, and yet I haven't thought about it as a failure. Contracted for failure. So again, insightful and hopefully for the listeners as well.

David Hawkins: It probably doesn't please the lawyers

Emma Willis: No, absolutely not.

David Hawkins: Yeah, I think you know, I'm often mused that you know for a large part of my career I spent probably 30 percent of my time negotiating contracts and terms that I was never going to use So And you realized that all of that was wasted effort.

Rather than focusing on what do we want to achieve and can we do that together and it can it be mutually beneficial?

Emma Willis: So why do you think that organizers need a systematic approach to collaboration?

David Hawkins: It certainly starts from a perspective that everybody uses the term collaboration, but they use it quite liberally without really understanding.

What they meant by it, and because there's that lack of commonality of view, then you build up tensions within the relationships. So the idea of the standard was not to give people an absolute answer, but to create a framework, a life cycle. Where the questions are challenged by the standard for organizations to define what they mean by collaboration.

And therefore their expectations are centered on a common understanding of the direction of travel and what they're trying to achieve.

Emma Willis: David, you created the craft eight steps. Can you talk us through those eight steps?

David Hawkins: Yeah, I think put them into perspective and that was that when I looked at the failure of alliancing partnerships collaborations, whatever term you choose to use, what I found was that we weren't focusing on the relationship until after we'd gone through a more traditional commercial market engagement.

As I often put it, trial by combat to come to a decision. So what I did was to go back and say the reason that most of these things fail was because there was no background evidence. baseline that they were working on. So the 8 step model starts with awareness, which is, do we really need to be that closely engaged?

And then follows through with things like the knowledge, internal assessment, partner selection, working together, value creation staying together, and exit strategy.

Emma Willis: I'm really interested that is certainly all covered which is great. Can you talk to me more about that partner selection?

Cause that's really interested in the world of what when Warwick conferences are working in partnership and collaboration with our clients, but also within the wider university as well.

David Hawkins: I think it's this issue of the interdependency. If the relationship is mission critical. then there is more involved than simply what would be traditional financial, commercial, technical alignment of products or services.

It's about whether or not we can work with the organizations in a much closer way. And that will be defined by who the partners are. Certain aspects of that interdependency would be coloured by what the perception is of the external partner. And, to be fair, their perceptions of you as a client, for example in terms of Do you make the client, are you the client of choice, as opposed to the partner of choice?

Emma Willis: Yeah.

David Hawkins: In terms of partner selection, it's more about, is this an organization that I can work with?

Emma Willis: And obviously, we would love to be that person clients would love to work with. I

David Hawkins: don't think you're doing too bad a job from my

Emma Willis: perspective. And how about values?

David Hawkins: I think, again, this is something that I discovered when I was researching the model.

And that was organisations who had strong relationships weren't just standing on their laurels of what they initially started to set out and do, but they were looking at how do they gain more value. by looking over the fence or listening to external. For organizations that have a long track record it's very difficult to innovate.

But you bring in a partner who you trust and then they start to see things that you can't. So the more focus there was on value creation, the more strength was put into the relationship. So the things became self fulfilling prophecies that it was going to do better than we started out to achieve.

Emma Willis: Thank you. That's great. And then just finally, I think the exit strategy is always a difficult one. At what point in time that happens and for the reasons. Can you share a bit more about that?

David Hawkins: Yeah, that was another aspect of it and I have to confess, when I first introduced the 8 step model to a group of companies who were interested in partnering and collaboration, there was a sharp intake of breath when I mentioned exit strategy and the reality was, We're trying to convince people to get into partnerships and collaboration and you're looking at an exit strategy as to how do we get out of it.

There were two factors that were very apparent. The first one was that because we didn't define the rules for disengagement, over time, whatever that might be there was a reluctance on the part of individuals and functions within organizations to fully engage. So actually the exit strategy becomes something that you start with rather than finish with.

The other part of it was also to understand how that influences your choice of partner, the degree of knowledge transfer And all of that helped organisations to engage much more fully as they went through the development cycle.

Emma Willis: David, we spoke at the podcast around sustainability. How do you see sustainability and collaboration coming together?

David Hawkins: That's It's a good question. I think if you look at it from a logical point of view, when you look at the 16 goals, which are deliverables within the UN's ambitions they cannot be achieved unless a diverse group of organizations get together. That includes government, industry, NGOs. activity groups, local communities.

So the UN introduced a 17th goal as partnership. The challenge was, and I think it's a challenge for most, is that given the way industry and the world has evolved, without some form of collaboration, those goals can't be achieved. Alongside that, I think there is a conflict between industry and many of the active groups that industry is the problem.

And so one of my ambitions was to look at this from a more reactive view of saying if there's An outcome that can be turned into a commercial advantage without what was traditional greenwash by organizations, then the idea of turning those values into value becomes a more sustainable methodology for the future.

So within ISO they are developing a standard around 16 goals, and then realized that they couldn't address the 17th. So we're now bringing together two standards to help bridge that gap.

Emma Willis: Great. The UN Sustainability Development Goals are really important and being widely spoken about now more than ever.

And work conferences are very much working with those guidance goals around helping to create a more ethical work environment sustainability, and also operation as well. To see that the 17th goal is going to be the partnering side of it to make sure, help the, Sixteen help bring those together and be more impactful and it's really interesting.

David, following on from that, Values to Values is the name of your new book. Do you share?

David Hawkins: Yeah, it's a concept that traditionally we have looked at sustainability, environmental impact, and all of those things in a purely esoteric perspective, organizations doing the right thing.

But it's difficult for organizations, particularly in industry, to do the right thing when it's marginalizing their profit. And the impact that has on the shareholders and so on and investors. So one of the things I looked at was values to value. So if we have those values of the things that are the right things to do, how do you convert that into a commercial outcome?

And it's easy to start to, to see the synergies where if an organization is operating overseas, for example if you improve the local environment. If you improve the working conditions, if you have better governance all of that ends up producing better quality, higher performance. So there is a commercial return on having the right values.

And if we link those values to the bottom line, then they have a better chance of being sustainable over time. As opposed to some philanthropic investment which looks good on paper but doesn't have a lot of substance to it.

Emma Willis: David, who do you see the readers are of your book?

David Hawkins: I think it's on two sides.

One is the commercial organisations, industry, government, looking for a sustainable outcome. But it's also a question and a challenge in some respects to things like NGOs who rather than protesting against an industry's behaviours and let's be fair, some of them weren't very good but if they actually used their knowledge and experience and sat down with industry, they might between them be able to come up with some better ideas and better approaches.

And that was really the driver for the book, was to say, unless we pull together, we're never going to solve the problem.

Emma Willis: It's definitely on my read list, so interesting to know when that's published. Thank you David. So David, with the limited time we've got left, what would your key messages to the listeners be around collaboration?

David Hawkins: First and foremost, I think it's a sense of context for the business. Collaboration, as I said, is a very broad term. And it's down to industry and the organizations to define where collaboration needs to be actively pursued. And to embed that in the organization. It then comes down to issues like clarifying the objectives.

As I said earlier on everybody has their own aspirations of what collaboration is going to deliver, but unless we're pulling together, we're pulling apart. I think a couple of areas which might be contentious. But for me, if you're going to have an integrated relationship, there are two things top of my list, and that is, you need to have a very good focus on issue resolution, or in my terms, dispute resolution.

And it's not the problem that is generally the cause of disputes, it's the way in which they are handled. And, I think that is crucial to, because of all organizations, if you bring smart people together, you are going to get differing views on what the solution should be. If we're all dogmatic and intransigent about the opinion of the solution, we will never get to one.

I've worked for engineering companies for over 50 years. And I can tell you, from my experience, if you put four engineers in a room, you get five solutions. They're all right. But the sixth one is probably the winner. And that comes down to how you orchestrate that. And then lastly and again, I come back to this sort of sharp intake of breath.

If you're going into a collaboration without understanding the rules of disengagement, then you are going to miss the catalyst of making sure that everybody is engaged effectively because they understand where the journey ends. And for most relationships, it will end. If it ends on a high note, there's a good chance the relationship will move on to something else.

If it doesn't, then it's gonna be less productive than it could be.

Emma Willis: David, thank you so much. You have shared so much information on the standards methodology around collaboration. And it'd be really interesting to know if you're happy to share any of those resources with our,

Our audience.

David Hawkins: Absolutely. There are two routes that you can look at. You can look at the ISO website where we've got lots of guidance material being produced and more on the way. Or the Midas Projects Limited website. My contact details are there and I'm always happy to share information with anybody that thinks collaboration could help their business.

Emma Willis: And also, finally, I was just really interested to hear about the collaboration game. It's something that we at Warren Conferences are always looking at, innovative ways to support our clients in collaboration activities alongside their meetings and networking opportunities. Can you just share briefly what that collaboration game looks like and what the future may look like for that?

David Hawkins: Yes, it's been an interesting one for us. We wanted to find something that we could use within workshops, which would get people engaged in thinking about collaboration. So we've developed a board game that we've used and piloted, actually over in Portugal a few months back. Which gets teams thinking about this life cycle journey and how unlike most games where there's a competition to the end the life cycle game starts as teams and then builds to a point where nobody can finish the game unless they're working together.

It's proved to be quite successful. As I mentioned we piloted it at a workshop in Portugal. They never finished the game. And people said yeah, but that's not the right outcome, is it? I said if you watch the two hours that the teams were playing together, and the amount of dialogue that went on.

My experience over the years has been, good workshops are ones where the people learn from each other rather than from the tutor or the facilitator. And this was just a great way of getting them involved.

Emma Willis: I'm delighted to be following your journey with the collaborative board game, David, is something that we'd be very interested in.

And it sounds exciting, David. That comes to the end of our podcast. And I just want to thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge and experience and best practice for collaboration in the workplace. Thank you.

David Hawkins: My pleasure. And thanks for the invite.