Interdependence of Independent Consultants Part 2
Holding Space for Collective Labor and Care
By Virginia Roncaglione, Laura Lehman, and Kelsey Manne
This is the second of a two-part blog series sharing lessons learned about what it takes for independent consultants to collaborate in ways that center our humanity while operating outside of traditional organizational structures.
We are three independent consultants who, together, recently completed one of the biggest projects we have each undertaken since going solo. In our first blog, we reflected on our experience working as a small team. Here we share three lessons from expanding our small collective to collaborate with a broader group of learning consultants.*
Context: During a strategy redesign, our large foundation client extended our contract to conduct a project surfacing common themes and patterns across learnings from four initiatives, developed by four different consultant teams (including ourselves). To do this work rigorously and to honor the wisdom and labor of the people involved in each study, we designed the project to include the other three learning consultant teams.
Lesson #1: Practicing different ways of being and holding power is an iterative process
At the start of our design process, we spent time with our new collaborators grounding in each other’s ways of being, communicating, and collaborating. Within the power dynamics of our role as project leads, we had to stretch ourselves to create an equitable partnership by treating them with the same preparation and thoughtfulness that we would bring to a client. As often happens when people who don’t know each other come together around a common goal, we quickly unearthed very different understandings of the project and the client’s expectations among the other teams. By naming the assumptions we were holding, and making space for theirs, we were able to get to clarity together.
Get Laura Lehman’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Our prior experience collaborating as a team — learning how to be fair, adaptable, and kind while delivering high quality work — was foundational to forming the bonds necessary to support each other and guided our approach to bringing other teams into a project that was a new experience for all of us. As reality continuously shifted our plans, we leaned on our shared learning to adapt and respond together.
Lesson #2: For co-creation to be accessible, we need clear roles and right-sizing the ask
We initially intended to co-create the project structure with the other learning consultants. In reality, as they did not share the full responsibility of the project, they had limited time and resources to dedicate to our work together. We found that it was more helpful and appropriate to share power by designing a nimble process that could accommodate everyone’s commitments and ways of working, so that they could engage in co-creating the content that would be delivered to the client. This required:
- Creating clear parameters for our ask, e.g., defining timing and expectations for engagement;
- Sharing content and guiding questions in ways that lessen the cognitive load, e.g., synthesizing key points between sessions and setting up user-friendly structures;
- Making it easy for people to step in and out, e.g., providing clear communication, context, and reminders of where we have been and where we are going.
Lesson #3: Finding alignment is necessary to act as collaborators while also being competitors
Early on, we discovered a common challenge: for a number of reasons, our initiative-level learning had not been consistently operationalized by the client. This shared experience of pouring energy into evaluation work that led to limited concrete actions became a catalyst for genuine collaboration and dissolving competition between teams. Knowing that we all wanted our work to be used meaningfully to advance our client’s mission of health equity created a baseline for trust.
Six months of collaborating to make sense of complex information, including written reports and our unwritten experiences, expanded our trio’s interdependence on this project to include the other learning teams. When significant, unexpected shifts in the client’s organizational structure impacted all of us, we responded by meeting relationally first — creating space to process changes together and offer support to each other before moving into logistics. In that moment, we intuitively felt the alignment that we had built through our collective labor and care.
*Thank you to our friends at Emergence Collective (Lauren Beriont & Leah Josephson), Learning for Action (Katie McGeehan, Keerti Kanchinadam, & Emma Ramsbottom), and NewStories (Yve Susskind & Z Johnson) for your partnership in this work!
