FCCS News & Insights

The Hand-Off from Deciding to Doing

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Collaboration is hardly a new concept across the Farm Credit System. Associations routinely work together, share resources, exchange ideas, and look for opportunities to solve common challenges.

But there is a big difference between agreeing that collaboration makes sense and actually making it work.

That was the focus of a session at FCCS’s Learning Exchange in Anaheim this June. Leaders from operations, branch leadership, HR, and technology explored a practical question: Once you decide collaboration is worth pursuing, what happens next?

The conversation built on a discussion that began at the SystemX conference in April, where participants arrived at an important distinction: collaboration is a tool, not a strategy. Organizations should collaborate when working together creates enough value to justify the effort, complexity, and potential loss of autonomy involved.

A simple two-question matrix helped participants evaluate opportunities: How much value could collaboration create? And how difficult would it be to accomplish?

But deciding to collaborate is only the beginning. The harder work comes in moving from “We should do this together” to “Here’s how we’re going to do it.”

Five Moves that Turn Collaboration into Action

• The Learning Exchange discussion identified five practical steps:
• Pick the target on purpose. Be clear about the specific problem or opportunity collaboration is intended to address.
• Set partner criteria in advance. Determine what you need from the organizations or individuals involved.
• Name an owner. Someone needs to be responsible for keeping the work moving, even when no one organization is officially in charge.
• Define the outcome—and the exit. Agree on what success looks like.
• Build a governance model. Establish how decisions will be made, information shared, and disagreements resolved.

These steps become especially important when collaboration crosses organizational boundaries. Within an association, a leader may have authority to assign responsibilities and make decisions. Across associations, that authority often doesn’t exist. Someone can own the process without owning the outcome.

Efficiency vs Control

Another challenge surfaced in both the SystemX and Learning Exchange conversations: collaboration often requires giving up some control.

The more organizations share resources, processes, or decisions, the less likely it is that everyone will get exactly what they would have designed independently.

One way to navigate that trade-off is to keep the desired outcome at the center. If the collaboration achieves what you need, how important is it that every detail is done your way?

Participants at SystemX captured the idea simply: Sometimes 80 or 90 percent is good enough. The remaining 10 percent may be preference rather than necessity.

At the close of the Learning Exchange session, participants identified one collaboration opportunity, one gap standing in the way, and one action they could take within 90 days.

It reinforced an important shift in the System’s collaboration conversation. The question is becoming less about whether organizations should work together and more about how to turn the right opportunities into action.

That hand-off—from deciding to doing—is where the real work of collaboration begins.