Discovering Collaborative Advantage: The Contributions of Goal Categories and Visual Strategy Mapping

• Author: John M. Bryson,Colin Eden,Fran Ackermann
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12608
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016

912 Public Administration Review • November | December 2016

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 6, pp. 912–925. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12608.

Colin Eden is professor of strategic

management and management science

at Strathclyde Business School, University

of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.

He has research interests in how

negotiated strategies are developed. His

publications are in the fields of strategy,

project management, and managerial

and organizational cognition. Dr. Eden

is a fellow of the British Academy of

Management and has won awards for his

work from the INFORMS Group Decision

and Negotiation Section, Academy of

Management, and Operational Research

Society.

E-mail : colin.eden@strath.ac.uk

Fran Ackermann is professor of strategy

and dean of research at Curtin Business

School, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.

Her research interests focus on how strategy

is developed, with a current concentration

on multistakeholder collaborations. She

has published extensively in the areas of

strategy, group decision and negotiation

support, and complex project management

and has won a number of awards for this

work. Dr. Ackermann is a fellow of the

British Academy of Management.

E-mail : fran.ackermann@curtin.edu.au

John M. Bryson is the McKnight

Presidential Professor in the Hubert

H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs,

University of Minnesota. He works in the

areas of leadership, strategic management,

collaboration, and the design of

engagement processes. He coedited (with

Barbara C. Crosby and Laura Bloomberg)

Public Value and Public Administration

and

Creating Public Value in Practice

(both

2015). Dr. Bryson is a fellow of the National

Academy of Public Administration.

E-mail : jmbryson@umn.edu

Theory to Practice

Abstract : Collaboration can make sense when there is some sort of “collaborative advantage” to be gained, meaning

organizations can achieve something together that they cannot easily achieve by themselves. However, the literature is

essentially silent on how to identify collaborative advantage. This article addresses this shortcoming in the theory of

collaborative advantage for public purposes by proposing a set of goal categories that may be used to help articulate

collaborative advantage and introducing the use of visual strategy mapping as part of a facilitated group process to

figure out what the collaborative advantage might be. Collaborative advantage, as it is normally understood, consists

of shared core goals. Collaborative advantage for public purposes should take into account public values beyond shared

core goals.

Practitioner Points

• Treat goals as a networked system of aspirations rather than as a simple hierarchy.

• Consider all of the possible categories of goals: core goals, shared core goals, public value goals beyond shared

core goals, negative-avoidance goals, negative public value consequences beyond shared core goals, and not-

my-goals.

• Organizations from all sectors may and often do have contributions to make to collaborative advantage for

public purposes .

M any scholars have argued that a new

approach to public management is

emerging that goes beyond traditional

public administration and the New Public

Management (e.g., Denhardt and Denhardt 2015 ;

Moore 2013 ). The new approach is emerging

as a consequence of the importance of public

problems facing the world and the realization that

governments cannot effectively address many of

these problems by themselves. There is also a well-

founded worry that public values have been and

will be lost as a result of a powerful antigovernment

rhetoric and a host of market-based and

performance-based reforms (Bryson, Crosby, and

Bloomberg 2014 ; Kettl 2015 ). While government

clearly has a special role to play as a creator of

public value and a guarantor of public values and

the public sphere, in a market-based democracy,

government is not the owner of all the processes

and institutions having public value potential or

obligations (Peters and Pierre 1998 ). Collaboration

and cross-sector collaboration have therefore

emerged as hallmarks of the new approach in which

public managers frequently must work jointly with

nonprofit organizations, businesses, the media,

and citizens to accomplish public purposes (e.g.,

Agranoff 2012 ; Ansell 2011 ; Emerson and Nabatchi

2015 ; O ’ Lear y and Bingham 2009 ).

Collaboration is a way of achieving together what

collaborating organizations cannot achieve separately,

and the gain is referred to as “collaborative advantage”

(Huxham and Vangen 2005 ). When public

organizations are involved, collaborative advantage

presumably includes direct or indirect gains in

creating public value. Not surprisingly, elected

officials, practitioners, and scholars frequently tout

the benefits of collaboration, which is often required,

if not actually mandated, because the presumed

benefits—the collaborative advantage—are so obvious.

Or perhaps more realistically, there is no other viable

option. Indeed, often organizations must “fail into

collaboration,” having tried to go it alone and not

succeeded (Bryson and Crosby 2008 ). Unfortunately,

while the argument for collaboration may be strong,

the empirical literature is quite clear that any form of

collaboration is usually difficult and success is hardly

assured (Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2006 , 2015 ;

Huxham and Vangen 2005 ; Thomson and Perry 2006 ).

At least a part of the problem may be that the

collaboration literature is essentially silent on exactly

Hal G. Rainey, Editor

John M. Bryson

University of Minnesota

Fran Ackermann

Curtin University, Australia

Colin Eden

University of Strathclyde, Scotland

Discovering Collaborative Advantage:

The Contributions of Goal Categories

and Visual Strategy Mapping