Fostering interorganizational collaboration and sensemaking: a boundary perspective
discription workpackage 3
WP contributes to the understanding and support of interorganizational collaboration within learning communities and professionals’ sensemaking of changing work practices beyond them. In learning communities, organizations turn to others and look for help and input beyond their own boundaries. Collaboration is thus both a key asset and a sine qua non condition for collectively working towards digital transformation. This implies that participants must be able to navigate across their traditional professional and organizational boundaries, which in turn requires flexibility and the ability to switch perspectives. Members need to understand their differences and collectively confront these boundaries to successfully collaborate and transform their organizations.
Previous research on interorganizational teams has shown how professional and organizational differences not only stimulate, but also hinder interorganizational collaboration, leading to promising initiatives to evaporate within months. On a more individual level, professionals need to make sense of how their practices and professional identities transform alongside their work’s increasing complexity and fluidity, as imposed by digital transformation. WP3 focuses on understanding and supporting these processes and practices at both these levels: cross- boundary at the team level and changing professional identities at the individual level.
WP3 hence seeks: a) to better understand the organizational and professional differences (boundaries) that help and hinder collaboration within learning communities and, in relation to changing work practices and identities, to better theorize professionals’ boundary-work practices beyond the communities; and b) to support teams to engage in productive cross-boundary collaboration (by developing ‘boundary objects’) and to help professionals in shaping and making sense of changing work practices and identities.
Expected insights
Thinking in terms of boundaries is a helpful and widely used conceptual tool to depict transforming work and collaboration practices in the context of transformation, both at the team level within learning communities (e.g., how boundaries around organizations lose substance) and at a more individual level beyond them (e.g., how boundaries between different professions blur). Importantly, WP3 seeks not only to identify which boundaries change and in how far they do so, but to detail the practices of crossing and changing them, as the fundament for joint learning and innovation to foster digital transformation.
As a first step, WP3 seeks to scrutinize professionals’ collaboration practices through in-depth, ethnographic studies of learning communities (their innovation teams). We also seek to reveal how participation in the learning community impacts members’ professional identities, mobilizing different shadowing techniques. We focus on those learning communities, their innovation teams, and participants that work on AI, cyber security, and similarly complex technological changes as we expect that especially these technologies disrupt and transform existing professional practices. Our methodological approaches strongly embed the researcher in the field, which should facilitate establishing trusting connections with the studied professionals. This role aids WP3’s second part, where we seek to translate obtained insights into practical tools and workshops, developed and tested in co-creation with researchers and practitioners. Specifically, we plan for tools stimulating boundary- crossing practices and tools supporting professionals’ identity development. Feeding back our insights to our LCs and stakeholders (amongst through the use of tools) will lead to enhanced learning about one’s individual work practice and to improved interorganizational collaboration within LCs. Moreover, the insights obtained in WP3 will inform WP4’s development and design activities.
Expected outputs
Insights and tools stimulating boundary crossing practices
Learning communities that bring together professionals of diverse backgrounds and from different organizations are ripe with boundaries. Members’ differences in knowledge, work roles, organizational aims, etc. easily constitute wall- like boundaries in between them that stand in the way of fruitful communication and collaboration. At the same time, much learning and innovation potential resides in dismantling and crossing these boundaries, such as when unique insights are being assembled in new, creative ways. Participating in a learning community hence requires crossing boundaries. Boundary objects can be helpful devices for doing so as they can mediate understanding across different perspectives, irrespective of whether they have material (e.g., a visual or prototype) or immaterial form (e.g., a re-appearing metaphor). The proposed project will analyze how boundaries are crossed in innovation teams, with specific attention to boundary objects, so that in-depth guidelines and a repertoire of possible boundary objects can be developed, designed, and shared.
Support for sensemaking of new work and identities
While innovation teams will be the basic working units in the project, personal growth and development is still a crucial goal the project must address for all involved participants. Next to developing digital skills, individuals must be able to navigate effectively within and across innovation teams and organizations and to work in a more digital, increasingly complex environment. Learning to successfully do so requires re-consideration and adaption (or even transformation) of work roles, functions, ideals, and values. Such changes and professional developments are inexplicably difficult to undertake, which is why the proposed project will include a series of sensemaking workshops to support professionals in the re-creation of their job identities and work roles and values.
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