Collaborative relationships are a fundamental feature of civic life. They help people who seek change strategize about how to pursue their goals, and can either indirectly or directly influence collective action in service of those pursuits.
While many researchers have identified both normative and empirical reasons why collaborative relationships between diverse thinkers are important for civic life, we know much less about the core phenomenon revealed by the research4impact online platform described at the beginning of Chapter 1: why collaborative relationships that people would value may never arise in the first place. Having time and organizational incentives (or, at the very least, not having organizational disincentives) are important. Yet even people with all of these may still be hesitant to connect. The hesitation stems from the fact that new collaborative relationships often entail interactions between strangers, and strangers can be uncertain about whether others are likely to relate to them in ways they would like, and whether they will successfully relate to others.
Thus, to foster new collaborative relationships, we need to first acknowledge that unmet desire may exist and be able to characterize it. Then we need to establish ways to overcome any uncertainty about relationality that is contributing to it being unmet.
In this book, I’ve proposed and tested two new types of interventions to surface and meet people’s unmet desire to collaborate. One is using third parties, which may be organizations or individuals. Another is having potential collaborators directly communicate relationality. Taken together, these are arguably best thought of as possibilities – ways that can help overcome barriers to new collaborative relationships that people would value.
With all of that in mind, this chapter picks up on a point I mentioned at the end of Chapter 1. One of the main goals of this book is to produce what Stokes (Reference Stokes1997) labels use-inspired basic research. The basic research part focuses on advancing scientific understanding of the conditions under which diverse thinkers choose to interact with each other. That was my main goal in Chapters 2 to 5. In Chapter 5, I also discussed the use part to some extent, as the empirical results informed the design of the impactful hands-on matchmaking implemented as research4impact 2.0. In this final chapter, I go a step further toward unpacking possible uses of the results by identifying concrete ways to put them into practice. When people see new informal and/or formal collaboration as essential to achieving their personal and organizational goals, and it’s not happening on its own, how can they move forward? How can they foster valuable new collaborative relationships?
Three Strategies for Creating New Collaborative Relationships
Suppose we have reason to believe that a set of civic actors has unmet desire for new collaborative relationships, then what should we do? What strategies can we use to make expertise more useful in these moments? These were the questions that Jake, Don, and I faced when it became clear at the end of 2017 that the research4impact online platform was not working and we had to decide what to do instead. We knew based on our prior conversations with researchers, nonprofit practitioners, and policymakers that there was demand for new cross-sector collaboration, but also that the online platform had not been enough for them to form on their own. And so the question we faced was how to meet that unmet desire. Here I describe three possible ways that we considered responding.Footnote 1
Individual Third Parties
One possibility was that we continued doing what we were already doing prior to starting the online platform, which is to make connections ourselves. Individual matchmaking can be a powerful way to overcome relationality concerns, but it is also limited to individual networks – to those who know us and feel comfortable reaching out to us, and also to potential matches that we know and feel comfortable reaching out to ourselves. On top of that, relying on individual matchmakers advantages some people (those in our networks) and disadvantages others (those not in our networks), and that would be true for any individual matchmaker. The threat is that the rich just get richer – those with high social capital to begin with are easily able to acquire more, whereas those without are further locked out. This kind of outcome would also go against the spirit of new collaborative relationships between diverse thinkers in the first place, as often the goal is to democratize access to technical and contextual expertise that is either not readily available or not otherwise at the table.
All of that said, the major potential benefit of the individual third-party approach is its decentralized nature – in theory, anyone can engage in matchmaking in the form that we are talking about, and thus anyone can unlock expertise in their networks and create new opportunities for diverse thinkers to help solve problems. Thus, to the extent that we try to realize the benefits of this approach, and minimize the potential drawbacks, it is especially important that a wide range of people with diverse networks are involved.
“Self-Service”
A second option is what I call the self-service strategy: we could encourage people to initiate their own new connections. Recall from Chapter 2 that we would expect that people who initiate new collaborative relationships on their own are likely to emphasize competence over warmth (Wojciszke Reference Wojciszke1994, Kumar and Epley Reference Kumar and Epley2018). This means they are more likely to focus on whether they are clearly communicating why they want to connect (i.e., their substantive goals) and less likely to explicitly communicate how they will aim to relate to their intended audience. Now, given the empirical results from Chapters 4 and 5, if we encouraged individuals to reach out themselves, we would make sure to highlight how they need to make sure they are relating to others in the way that they expect, including overcoming uncertainty about relationality.
Yet even with an expanded appreciation of relationality, there are two major challenges with implementing the self-service approach. One is that potential collaborators need to have (or at least believe that they have) sufficient knowledge about the elements of relationality that their intended audience cares the most about. The interview and survey evidence from Chapter 3 underscore how “relating to others” can take on many different forms, including the information to be shared and what the experience of interacting will be like. My goal in that chapter was to demonstrate that these elements matter when people consider engaging in new collaborative relationships, but it doesn’t tell us which elements people may be uncertain about in any particular context and for any particular potential collaborator. The survey data from local policymakers and AmeriCorps program in that chapter underscore this point: the specific elements of concern may vary across potential collaborators.
In addition, recall that the main evidence I have in support of this strategy – the idea that potential collaborators can communicate relationality directly – comes from the field experiment I conducted in partnership with the climate organization in Chapter 5. In that study, I was only able to construct what I expected would be effective messages to reduce uncertainty about relationality because I was partnering with a staff member who had insight into what group leaders’ concerns about interacting with a researcher were likely to be. But even on top of that, we also needed to know that reaching out by email (as opposed to telephone, or waiting until the national in-person conference that happens once a year) would be a reasonable medium for relating to our intended audience, and also that it was perfectly fine that all messages were in English as opposed to translated into other languages. All of this again underscores how one challenge with the self-service approach is that it requires sufficient background knowledge to be effective.
The other major challenge reflects the role of status-based stereotypes (Ridgeway Reference Ridgeway, Michael and Scott Tindale2001). Recall that status-based stereotypes can drive a wedge between whether someone has expertise and whether that expertise is socially recognized. New potential collaborators quickly and unconsciously form these stereotypes about each other. As a result, their judgments about others are based not on what the person actually knows about the task at hand, but instead on a combination of the person’s salient social group memberships, and the shared cultural beliefs about the kind of task-relevant knowledge someone with those memberships is likely to have. Those who are members of social groups associated with low status are likely to have a much harder time initiating new collaborative relationships and having their task-relevant expertise being taken seriously.
Consider what happened during the Flint Water Crisis, a public health emergency that began in 2014 when the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, became contaminated with lead and other bacteria. As the crisis unfolded, residents (often mothers in particular) started bringing forth direct evidence of contaminated tap water and health problems such as hair loss and rashes to local authorities. Yet their expertise was repeatedly challenged. As Pauli (Reference Pauli2019:143) writes, “Residents found their claims about the water and their own bodies dismissed as hyperbolic, uninformed, paranoiac.” He also specifically identified the role of status-based stereotypes tied to their race and gender, which led officials to dismiss them for both lacking technical knowledge and also because they supposedly “didn’t know how to think” (144) about technical topics like environmental contamination and water quality:
Activists were keenly aware that their race and gender affected whether their knowledge was recognized as legitimate…. In many ways, the core of the struggle for clean water … was a struggle by residents to be taken seriously as knowers – by officials, by the media, even by fellow residents.
Pauli’s characterization of how their expertise was challenged because this was a technical topic in particular underscores a key point about status-based stereotypes: they are context-dependent and tied to what society views as important for success in a given task domain (c.f., Eagly and Karau Reference Eagly and Karau2002).
The existence of status-based stereotypes, and the prevalence of situations like what Flint residents faced, may lead those who are disadvantaged by such stereotypes to not feel comfortable initiating a new collaborative relationship and/or employing relationality language in the first place. They may doubt that their task-relevant expertise will be taken seriously by a potential collaborator, and on top of that, they may believe that employing relationality language will further feed into status-based stereotypes that undermine their credibility.
The upshot, which is akin to something I mentioned in Chapter 5, is that directly communicating relationality is a potentially effective approach given that relational information is so often left unsaid, but it is not without challenges. People can reach out themselves when they have reason to believe that others want to engage and when they feel certain about the elements of relationality that matter to themselves and their potential collaborator. Yet at the same time, this strategy is not always easy to implement, and it is also likely the case that not everyone will have an equal ability to implement this strategy. Similar to the strategy of individual third parties for matchmaking, there is a real threat here that relying too much on self-service will also produce a rich-get-richer phenomenon, as those who already have access to more information and/or are already more likely to have their expertise viewed as more useful will be strongly advantaged.
Organizational Third Parties
A third actionable strategy for reducing uncertainty about relationality entails third-party organizations as matchmakers. Here the focus moves away from what individuals can do and instead asks what kinds of opportunities and norms can be institutionalized at an organizational level. This is the strategy that Jake, Don, and I chose when we launched the hands-on matchmaking as research4impact 2.0.
One of the major benefits of third-party organizations is that they can arguably create a much wider network than any single individual. They also tend to have institutionalized mechanisms for data collection and are better positioned to gather more information about the context-specific relationality concerns (and prior experiences) from that broader network. In addition, third-party organizations are more likely to advertise themselves as doing this kind of work in a way that single individuals may not. Among people who do not already have access to individual matchmakers in their network, they may feel more comfortable reaching out to an organization rather than an individual they do not already know. Organizations also tend to have an easier time creating new norms. Their mere existence can create descriptive norms (“connecting with diverse thinkers around community problems is something that many other people do”) and also injunctive norms (“connecting with diverse thinkers around community problems is something you should consider doing, as otherwise this organization would not exist”).
All of that said, third-party organizations have potential drawbacks as well. As with individuals, no single organization can ever meet all of the need or create enough opportunities. In this sense, I agree with Butler (Reference Butler2019:374), who wrote about the value but also limitation of a single organization for fostering new collaborative relationships between civic actors like research4impact: “Research4impact is a development that will have a positive impact on the field; however, unless we are more proactive, we will miss many opportunities. We simply cannot wait for research4impact to find partners for us.”
One way to overcome this capacity-related concern is to make matchmaking a higher priority within existing organizations that are already devoted to bridging diverse forms of expertise. For example, Scholars Strategy Network is a voluntary federation in the United States with local chapters across the country that aim to increase the role of research in the policymaking process. Chapter members are local researchers, and historically their emphasis was on creating and disseminating policy briefs that summarized research findings for (often local) policymakers. Similar to research4impact, one could describe the organization’s goal at a broad level as bringing diverse forms of expertise to bear on complex problems in communities across the country. Starting in 2020, national staff began encouraging chapter leaders to engage in matchmaking as well, in order to more actively build new collaborative relationships between researchers and other civic leaders and community members (Levine and Mulligan Reference Levine and Mulligan2020). Given the federated structure of the organization, this initiative arguably leveraged the benefits of both the organizational third-party strategy and also the individual third-party strategy. It entailed cultivating matchmaking capacity among individual chapter leaders, thus creating many potential new third-party matchmakers who all have diverse networks across the country (and themselves are quite diverse) and are situated within an organization devoted to this purpose.
In addition to the capacity-related concern, there is one other potential limitation to third-party organizations, which echoes the point about democratic agency mentioned in Chapter 1. Those who have written about the importance of new collaborative relationships as a key element of democratic citizenship also emphasize the empowerment associated with initiating them ourselves. For instance, Allen (Reference Allen2003:161) writes that an “ease with strangers expresses a sense of freedom and empowerment” and that “the more fearful we citizens are of speaking to strangers, the more we are docile children and not prospective presidents … the more we are subjects, not citizens.” For Allen, a comfort level with speaking with strangers is essential for a sense of freedom and for the health of our democratic fabric. Based on this, one could argue that encouraging others to initiate new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers is an important part of the process unto itself. To the extent that people are not presently engaging in that way, then perhaps we need to find ways to provide new opportunities, incentives, and encouragement for people to practice initiating them on their own (and encourage people to practice relational responses when others reach out to them) rather than build new organizations for this purpose.
Two Caveats to These Strategies
I’ve discussed three actionable strategies for initiating new collaborative relationships in ways that overcome uncertainty about relationality: individual third parties, self-service, and organizational third parties. Each of them can be successful, yet each also entails limitations. My own belief is that among them there is no a priori single best way to encourage the formation of new collaborative relationships in civic life. Instead, we should work to create new policies and opportunities that encourage all of them to take root.
All of that said, before moving on, it is important to identify two important caveats. One is that, throughout the book and especially in this last chapter, my implicit assumption has been that more collaborative relationships are normatively desirable. This assumption reflects the wide range of private and public benefits that I identified in Chapter 1 (i.e., the ways in which those who seek change can use collaborative relationships to strengthen strategic problem-solving, enhance democratic agency, and establish broader norms of connection). Yet maintaining this assumption means taking potential collaborators at their word that the problems they are addressing, and the strategies they are developing, are “good.” As a general matter, this is an assumption that we should interrogate. While systematically evaluating what counts as a normatively desirable collaborative relationship is beyond the scope of this book, I agree with Peter Levine (Reference Levine2022) that we should judge those engaged in collective action by whether they aim to justly relate to others outside their group. That is a reasonable basis on which to evaluate whether particular types of new collaborative relationships in civic life are normatively desirable or not.
The second caveat follows from the first. We should acknowledge that, even when relationality is assured and new collaborative relationships between diverse thinkers arise, truly solving many problems that affect an entire community of people requires far more than that, such as political pressure, good leadership, and sufficient resources to implement the strategies that collaborators decide are best. Acknowledging this point is not meant to take away from the overall conclusions of this book, or the idea that new collaborative relationships can aid strategic decision-making in valuable ways. But these points do serve as a helpful reminder of key assumptions that may not always hold and that help to realistically situate the role of collaborative relationships in civic life.
The Unmet Desire Survey: A Tool for Implementing Third-party Strategies
The previous section discusses three actionable strategies for creating new collaborative relationships. Two of them involve third parties actively engaged in matchmaking, either as single individuals and/or as part of organizations. Yet even once a decision is made to pursue matchmaking via a third-party strategy, the question of what to do next – how to actually implement matchmaking – immediately arises. Thus, in this section, I describe a tool to guide implementation that is highly flexible and may be applied to a broad set of contexts.
I developed this tool after receiving several inquiries from organizational leaders who were uncertain about how to proceed. Their entry point to the topic of this book was typically a recognition that new collaboration was important for achieving their goals, but they were uncertain what to do next. The tool helps get from here to there, so to speak, and it directly builds off the main arguments in this book: the idea that collaboration may have informal and/or formal goals, that either way new collaborative relationships are needed to start with, that these new relationships are voluntary and often entail interaction between strangers, and that strangers may be uncertain how to relate to each other.
In some cases, the people who reached out had already read about the “Research Impact Through Matchmaking” (RITM) method I employed as part of the research4impact 2.0 (Levine Reference Levine2020a; also see description of it in Chapter 5). Yet they were uncertain about its applicability if the potential collaborators were not researchers and the collaborative relationship was not about achieving research impact per se. They also acknowledged that the two major steps of RITM – having scope conversations and facilitating a match – were helpful when someone else had already initiated the process, yet they were looking for more guidance about how to proceed when they were initiating it anew. In addition, they were uncertain how to think about logistics: when is the best time to initiate matchmaking, and who should do it? Last, they were looking for further guidance on how to structure scope conversations – that is, what short set of questions would apply broadly and also yield the necessary information for matchmaking?
All of these considerations ultimately led me to develop this new tool called an unmet desire survey. It is useful anytime an individual and/or organizational leader has reason to believe that there is an unmet desire to collaborate in their network or within their organization, whether that involves researchers or not. The tool’s design is inspired by several of the examples described in this book, including the surveys of local policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders in Chapters 3 and 5, and also the first stage (“defining the scope”) of RITM that I implemented as part of research4impact 2.0.Footnote 2
Unmet desire surveys measure the reasons people may want to interact with diverse thinkers as well as any sources of concern they have about doing so. In particular, the surveys involve posing questions that gather detailed information about decision-makers’ goals and challenges, the kinds of diverse thinkers they would like to be collaborating with as they strategize about how to meet those goals and overcome those challenges, and the kinds of hesitancies that they have about interacting with those people. As is common throughout this book, they are especially helpful for situations in which new collaboration is voluntary and potential collaborators may not know each other, though they can provide useful information even in the absence of those conditions being satisfied.
The information gathered by these surveys then provides good reason to engage in matchmaking, thereby actively creating the new collaborative relationships that people reveal would be most beneficial to them. Note how this process has a distinct democratic quality to it, as unmet desire surveys are premised on the idea that, when asked, decision-makers can identify the kinds of collaborative relationships that would be most helpful to them.
In what follows, I first describe the background conditions that should be met before a third party decides to conduct an unmet desire survey. I then describe the content of the survey along with several examples of question-wording.
Background Conditions That Should Be Satisfied
The ideal timing for an unmet desire survey depends upon four background conditions being met.
1) One is able to state a clear rationale for why new collaboration is needed, and a recognition that it is not happening on its own.
The first condition is that the survey designer is able to state a clear rationale for why new collaboration is needed and also why there is reason to believe that unmet desire exists. The part about clear rationale may seem self-evident, yet it’s important to acknowledge upfront because if instead what’s truly needed to tackle pressing challenges is only more money and/or more staff, then an unmet desire survey that surfaces opportunity for new collaboration will likely not be valuable (though see one caveat to this point in Policy Recommendation 1 later in this chapter).
The second part – that there is reason to believe that unmet desire exists – may stem from a general belief that people in one’s organization or network are interested in new collaboration (and/or would be interested if presented with the opportunity), but that the necessary collaborative relationships are not arising on their own for a variety of reasons. Sources of interest may reflect a desire to improve the effectiveness of one’s practice, policy, and/or more general understanding of a problem. They may also come from a new threat, opportunity, merger, and/or funding opportunity. Having a general sense of what shape the desire might take is important because it affects how the questions in the survey are worded.
I should underscore that the very act of asking people to report their desire to collaborate can expand their sense of what’s possible beyond what they had previously considered. For instance, fielding an unmet desire survey can itself spark new interest, as it is possible that survey respondents may not have given much thought to the way in which certain kinds of new collaborative relationships would be beneficial for their work, but have no trouble doing so when asked the question (and/or being asked the question may prompt a conversation with the interviewer about possibilities they had not considered or perceived as legitimate before). In addition, by explicitly asking about less-resource-intensive forms of collaboration such as knowledge exchange, the survey can also “reduce” the sense that there is no time for new collaborative relationships.Footnote 3 Overall, regardless of whether desire already exists or arises as a result of the survey, it still meets the definition of unmet desire if people are unlikely to act upon it on their own. In that case, we end up in the same place – there are new collaborative relationships that people would value, yet are not arising on their own.Footnote 4
2) One can decide which decision-makers to prioritize.
This second condition is that the survey designer can decide who to target. The term “survey” often connotes an instrument administered via a random sampling procedure in order to make statements about a well-defined population. Unmet desire surveys can certainly be used to make statements about a population (i.e., they can gather information that informs transparent statements of the prevalence of unmet desire within a population, along the lines I mentioned at the end of Chapter 5). Yet typically their primary purpose is more targeted. The reason for this targeting is that conducting these surveys is not costless, and there is a good reason not to seek a random sample of decision-makers from a population but instead target those who are likely to have unmet desire as well as the authority and time to engage in knowledge exchange and/or a new formal collaboration in the near future. That said, unmet desire surveys can be continuously fielded (or fielded in a staggered way) with different members of one’s organization or one’s network, as the timing will work for some and not others, and thus reach a broader set of people as time goes on.
3) One has a plan for implementing the survey’s results.
Unmet desire surveys are impactful to the extent that they surface actual unmet desire along with information needed for meeting it afterward via matchmaking. Thus, one of the most important background conditions that should be met is that the decision to field the survey is accompanied by a plan for conducting follow-up matchmaking.
4) One has the right people to field the survey
The person conducting the survey should be someone with whom the respondents feel comfortable discussing their needs and also someone who is able to effectively facilitate matchmaking. This includes having authority and also perceived credibility (ability and trustworthiness), both among the survey respondents and also the people who they might be connected with. Within certain organizational contexts, it may make the most sense to have a team of people to conduct the unmet desire survey, especially given varying levels of credibility and also varying networks that would facilitate new matchmaking.
The Questionnaire
Unmet desire surveys need not be very long, yet ideally they are conducted conversationally as opposed to in written form. That facilitates follow-up questions and further information gathering as needed, which is especially helpful if respondents have not been asked questions like this in the past. Table 6.1 provides an overview of the core questions. Questions 1 and 2 tap into substantive goals, including attributes of current work and collaboration goals (informal and/or formal).Footnote 5 Question 3 measures uncertainty about relationality from multiple perspectives (i.e., how people want others to relate to them; whether they perceive that they can successfully relate to others that they would like to). Question 4 is an opportunity for the respondent to highlight anything important to them that may have been missed by the earlier questions (e.g., any other barriers or hesitations they have about engaging). This last question can also surface important information about respondents’ previous experiences, such as the kinds of previous collaborative relationships they’ve engaged in, what has worked well, what’s been challenging, and so on.
Table 6.1 Unmet desire survey questionnaire
| Type of question | Examples of question-wording |
|---|---|
| Question 1: Why collaborate? | Is there information about other programs/organizations/experiences that would help achieve your goals/improve the effectiveness of your work/overcome challenges? What kinds of people have that information and would be helpful to connect with? |
| Question 2: Goals/resources for the collaborative relationship | Would you be looking for informal collaboration (oriented toward knowledge exchange) and/or formal collaboration (oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability)? What resources (human/financial/technical/etc.) do you believe are needed for your goals? Are they already available or, if not, where might they come from? |
| Question 3: Uncertainty about relationality | What hesitations (perhaps due to prior experiences, lack of explicit permission, stereotypes, and so on) do you have about interacting with them? What hesitations do you think they might have about interacting with you? |
| Question 4: Counterfactuals | Why do you think these connections don’t already exist? |
At one level, unmet desire surveys are very straightforward to conduct, and they are also very flexible. Yet what makes them especially useful can also make them challenging to conduct, as these questions are unusual and may be difficult for respondents to answer in the abstract. The key is that the question-wording must be tailored so that it resonates with respondents, matches the context, and provides actionable information for follow-up matchmaking. In particular, the results need to be useful for identifying the kinds of people who would make good matches and also the best way of facilitating those matches anew (i.e., when the survey reveals concerns, then that suggests the kind of information that must be conveyed to new collaborators in order to overcome uncertainty).
Examples
Here I provide several examples of each of the questions. First, Table 6.2 provides examples of Question 1 – several ways to inquire about the kinds of goals or challenges that decision-makers are facing and whether new collaborative relationships with certain types of diverse thinkers would be helpful. These examples underscore how the specific question wording should vary depending upon the context. For instance, the first example in Table 6.2 directs AmeriCorps program leaders to think about engaging with a researcher on program evaluation challenges. An alternative version of this question could inquire about connecting with a researcher on challenges other than program evaluation, or could instead focus on connecting with fellow program leaders around program evaluation challenges, or something else altogether. Which goal or challenge to focus on, and which types of diverse thinkers to ask about, depends upon what the survey designer knows about the nature of unmet desire along with what kinds of matchmaking are feasible given their network. Either way, the general point is that Question 1 should include enough specificity so that it resonates with respondents and the information gained from the responses will be actionable for matchmaking.
Table 6.2 Examples of wording for Question 1 in an unmet desire surveyFootnote *
| Decision-makers | Possible Question 1 wording |
|---|---|
| AmeriCorps program leaders are facing program evaluation challenges | “Are there challenges related to conducting program evaluation that you’re facing in which it would be helpful to speak with a researcher?” |
| Local policymakers are facing myriad policy challenges | “Are there policy challenges you’re facing in which you would like to be in touch with researchers who work at colleges and universities in your region?” |
| Climate organizers are looking to cultivate more committed volunteers | “We know that many organizers are seeing an influx of new volunteers and wanting to strengthen their volunteer base. Are you in those shoes, and would it be helpful to engage with a researcher to learn about the latest techniques for generating volunteer commitment and how you can apply them?” |
| Agency staff in the federal government | “How does the success of your program relate to what is happening elsewhere? Is there information about other programs within the government and/or outside organizations that would help improve the effectiveness of your work? What kinds of people from these other agencies/organizations would be helpful to connect with?” |
| Neuroscientists who are deciding what research topics to pursue | “Would you be interested in interacting with disease advocacy groups – organizations that aim to influence government or policymaking regarding a particular disease – to talk about how neuroscience research may be relevant to their mission?” |
* Some of these examples come from actual unmet desire surveys that have been fielded, whereas others are examples of questions that could be asked of particular types of decision-makers and are based on examples presented in this book.
Question 2 may be implemented almost word-for-word as mentioned in the previous section, and thus I do not provide any more details about it here. While the terms “informal collaboration” and “formal collaboration” may not be familiar to many decision-makers, the descriptions in parentheses are clarifying. The part of Question 2 focused on resources should also be tailored depending upon what goals are mentioned (i.e., the range of resources needed for formal collaboration will be much wider than what is needed for informal collaboration).
Question 3, just like Question 1, should be tailored for the context. When designing Question 3, one of the major decisions entails what types of response options to offer. The response options should cover the most common sources of concern that respondents are likely to have about interacting with the diverse thinkers mentioned in Question 1. This list will vary. For instance, here is the list that I provided to local policymakers in the survey discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. The context here was an unmet desire survey that asked local policymakers if there were policy challenges they were facing in which it would be helpful to connect with local researchers:
Here is the list of possible concerns policymakers may have when interacting with university researchers. Which of the following might you have when interacting with university researchers?
– They may not have domain-specific expertise.
– They may not have trustworthy information.
– They may not have practical information.
– They may not value my knowledge and experience as a policymaker.
– They may lecture me.
– They may use unfamiliar language.
– They may push a political agenda.
– They may just criticize everything I do.
Other decision-makers may share some of these concerns, or not. For instance, practitioners embedded in an organizational bureaucracy may be very hesitant to engage with diverse thinkers outside their organization due to concerns about authority. Researchers may be hesitant to engage with civic organizations or advocacy groups because they may worry that these organizations will misinterpret their work. The general point is that, as with Question 1, the precise question-wording should match the context and what the survey designer knows in advance about the kinds of concerns that respondents may have.
Last, whereas Questions 1–3 are mostly forward-looking, Question 4 asks respondents to look backward and reflect upon why these collaborative relationships do not already exist. It can capture information that may have been missed by the earlier questions yet may be relevant for any new matchmaking. Sometimes the answer is that it simply was not needed in the past (this echoes the point mentioned earlier that unmet desire often arises when decision-makers are facing novel challenges or goals), whereas other times responses to this question can yield important historical information that is important to keep in mind when conducting matchmaking anew.
Follow-Up by Making the Connection
Unmet desire surveys yield actionable information about the kinds of collaborative relationships that decision-makers would value, often with people they do not already know. They are a tool to prompt people to reflect upon and share any unmet desire, and “establish the scope” of what is needed for creating new collaborative relationships between people with diverse forms of expertise. Armed with this information, the next step is to locate a match and make a connection that meets collaboration goals and also overcomes any uncertainty about relationality expressed in the survey. With respect to locating a match, two possible methods are conducting targeted outreach to individuals or using organizational distribution channels such as social media or a newsletter.
Then, when making the connection, the three techniques that I described in Chapter 5 (in the discussion of the RITM matchmaking method) are useful: (1) state each person’s unique expertise (also known as “role assignment”), (2) frame the conversation as a mutually beneficial learning opportunity, and (3) re-state the goal of the conversation. The specific text that is used to implement these techniques will depend upon what is learned in the survey. For instance, suppose an unmet desire survey with AmeriCorps program leaders reveals a desire to engage with researchers around how to measure the impact of their programs, yet also concern around whether researchers are likely to share practical information. In that case, the ideal match would be a researcher whom the matchmaker knows has the requisite substantive expertise and is also able to share that knowledge in a way that is practical. When stating each person’s unique expertise, the matchmaker would want to explicitly emphasize how the researcher brings relevant expertise and will share that expertise in a way that emphasizes its practical relevance. The researcher (and the matchmaker) may know that she will share research-based insights about measuring program impact that are highly practical, yet the point is that the program leader is initially uncertain about that. That is why explicitly mentioning this point when making the connection is essential.
In summary, the unmet desire survey is a tool that individuals and organizational leaders can use to help implement third-party matchmaking. It is useful for any situation in which those who seek change in civic life would value new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers, yet such relationships are not arising on their own. And, while individuals engaged in the “self-service” matchmaking strategy (described in the previous section) may be unlikely to conduct new unmet desire surveys themselves, they can potentially use the results of pre-existing ones to inform their approach. For instance, researchers who want to initiate new collaborative relationships with local policymakers can use the results from the unmet desire survey in Chapter 3 and make sure to emphasize their non-partisan motivations, practical information, and desire to learn from the policymakers when they first reach out to and interact with them.
Policy Implications
Having discussed three actionable strategies for building new collaborative relationships and a tool that is useful for implementing the two third-party approaches, here I describe policies that create the conditions for their more frequent use. These policies increase opportunities for forging new collaborative relationships in a way that reduces uncertainty about relationality in general, and that apply broadly to a wide array of potential collaborators (e.g., they would apply to collaborative relationships that include researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, and they would also apply to those between diverse thinkers who do not have those identities).
Policy Recommendation 1: What Organizational Leaders Can Do
The first policy applies to those who lead organizations such as universities, government agencies, nonprofits, and foundations. Many leaders recognize the importance of collaboration between diverse thinkers to tackle civic challenges and advance organizational priorities. Yet recognizing that new collaboration is important in the abstract is not equivalent to actively creating the conditions for new collaborative relationships to arise, especially if these relationships are voluntary and between people in different organizations, agencies, and/or sectors who do not already know each other.
To create the conditions for these new collaborative relationships to thrive, organizational leaders need to actively pose the question “What kind of new collaboration do we need to achieve our goals?” and then start from the fundamentals to answer it. This means ascertaining if there is an unmet desire to collaborate among those who work and volunteer there, and when doing so, including the possibility that this unmet desire may be oriented toward either informal or formal collaborative goals. Here it is worth reiterating how calls for new collaboration often implicitly focus on its formal variety, yet by actively legitimizing and elevating informal collaboration, organizational leaders (a) demonstrate the value of less resource-intensive knowledge exchange and (b) show that they recognize that this form of interaction may be what potential collaborators need and have the capacity for at a given moment.
I am choosing to reiterate this latter point about the less resource-intensive nature of informal collaboration because I recognize that, to some organizational leaders, a focus on policies that support new collaborative relationships in civic life may seem off the mark for truly tackling problems in communities they care about. For some organizational leaders, what they tell me they need above all else is more staff and bigger budgets. While fostering new collaboration can certainly have those effects, the path is typically indirect, and so devoting already-scarce resources to fostering new collaborative relationships can seem like a luxury not a necessity.
Yet one response is that this is precisely the moment to focus on informal collaboration because it is less resource-intensive. And, as we saw at several moments in Chapter 5, even a single conversation can influence strategic decision-making. Making space for new knowledge exchange, especially with people who bring diverse forms of expertise to problems they are facing in their work and that are useful for setting strategy and that they do not typically interact with, can have an outsized benefit.
This point also speaks to a common concern raised by researchers and university administrators. On the one hand, many university-based researchers want their work to influence policy and practice. Yet on the other hand, they are busy and building collaborative relationships (and devoting time to public engagement more generally) is typically not incentivized within their organizations, either for those in teaching or tenure-track roles.
One response is to highlight the need for policies that change promotion and tenure standards. There is a good reason to support changes along those lines.Footnote 6 Yet here too it is worth emphasizing how new collaborative relationships need not be very time- or resource-intensive, especially when the goal is knowledge exchange and when a third-party matchmaker takes steps to actively overcome uncertainty about relationality and smooth the initial conversation. For busy researchers, we can frame a new collaborative relationship with practitioners and policymakers who bring diverse forms of expertise to problems they care about as worth the time.
In short, the first policy recommendation is for organizational leaders to communicate the value of both informal and formal collaboration and invest in ways to surface and meet the unmet desire to collaborate among their members, perhaps using an unmet desire survey and follow-up matchmaking (and recognizing the implementation of both as distinct practices that are valued unto themselves). Organizations also need to be clear about the need for matchmaking that crosses expertise-based lines of difference, not only those that cross other lines of difference in civic life such as partisanship (in practice they may overlap, but that need not be the case).Footnote 7
One example of an organization that has chosen to be intentional about surfacing and meeting unmet desire is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Its Evidence for Action (E4A) program “prioritizes research to evaluate specific interventions (e.g., policies, programs, practices) that have the potential to counteract the harms of structural and systemic racism and improve health, well-being, and equity outcomes.”Footnote 8 There is specific focus on understanding what works – they fund research that “should be able to inform a specific course of action and/or establish beneficial practices, not stop at characterizing or documenting the extent of a problem.”
Early on, E4A leaders observed that there were many organizations implementing promising community-level initiatives, yet they did not always meet the program’s criteria for “rigor, actionability, or research team qualifications.”Footnote 9 At this point, one response could have been to advise these organizations to remedy this shortfall themselves by finding a research partner, yet that approach was unlikely to be successful for many of the reasons explored in this book. Instead, they funded a matching service, in which a third-party organization would match them directly with research partners so that they can work together to conduct systematic evaluations.Footnote 10 This matching service is inextricably linked with the overall goals of the program, as it opens the funding opportunity to less well-resourced organizations who do not otherwise have access to the technical capacity that E4A demands of its grantees. Put differently, the matching service can help fulfill E4A’s equity goals. It also provides researchers with access to new data and opportunities that they would not otherwise have.
I highlight E4A because in my view, it is a great example of an organization taking the existence of unmet desire, and the need for new infrastructure to meet it, seriously. In contrast to E4A, in my experience, matchmaking is something that individuals may do in the course of their everyday jobs, but it is not often a central aspect of anyone’s title, job description, and professional identity, and not necessarily something that they think about in a systematic way. We need organizations to allocate sufficient resources specifically to the activity of matchmaking along with clear standards for who is best suited to the role and how they can expand the range of people in the network. Leadership plays a vital role in achieving this goal. Having explicit support from organizational leaders for matchmaking both legitimizes and elevates the activity.
Policy Recommendation 2: What Shape Science Policy Can Take
The second policy recommendation relates to science policy itself, and in particular the kinds of research that should be supported. The studies in this book are an example of the science of collaboration, and how our understanding of collaboration in civic life should include the recognition that there can be an unmet desire to collaborate among those who seek change. Moreover, the reasons why this desire remains unmet go beyond the most visible constraints – lack of time and/or organizational incentives – to also include people’s uncertainty about relating to others they don’t know.
This book provides several lines of evidence in support of these arguments. The examples and empirical analyses showcase a wide range of unmet desire in civic life, including interest in new collaborative relationships involving different types of researchers, local policymakers, nonprofit practitioners, teachers, federal government agency staff, and grantees. And the unmet desire survey examples from earlier in this chapter underscore the versatility of that tool for a wide variety of decision-makers.
Future work can deepen our understanding of the full texture of unmet desire in civic life, the reasons why it remains unmet, and how to meet it in a wide variety of civic spaces. We can build on the approach developed here and conduct a wider array of unmet desire surveys, perhaps by defining a priori broad categories of collaborative relationships that groups of people may wish to engage in, and then conducting studies to measure what elements of relationality potential collaborators are most uncertain about in those settings. Fiske et al.’s (2006) rich research agenda on competence and warmth, and how people’s perceptions of these fundamental attributes of social cognition vary based on occupation, race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, organizational affiliation, and so on, is perhaps a good model for how to construct a research agenda along these lines. One could start with many of the same social groupings and then investigate unmet desire as well as the elements of relationality that people would be uncertain about if they were to be engaged in a collaborative relationship with someone from another group. That research, in turn, could be the basis for new tests of the intervention hypotheses akin to what appears in Chapter 5.
This body of work would set the stage for broadening beyond the empirical analyses in this book in another way as well. Recall from Chapter 2 how status-based stereotypes influence whether one’s expertise is socially recognized – in particular, those with salient social group memberships and organizational affiliations accorded lower status are less likely to have their expertise recognized than others. Based on this, we would expect that these attributes would influence the success that different kinds of people have implementing the three actionable strategies for creating new collaborative relationships discussed earlier in this chapter. In particular, we might expect that people with salient attributes associated with lower status may have a more difficult time implementing the self-service strategy and acting as a third-party matchmaker. The empirical analyses in this book vary the ways in which uncertainty about relationality is overcome and also include several examples (especially in Chapter 5) that entail a wide variety of matchmakers, yet future research could systematically vary the attributes of the people involved in order to better understand which matchmakers are most effective and under what conditions.Footnote 11
Relatedly, another useful area of future research entails further expanding how we measure the success of new collaborative relationships. Recall that in Chapter 5, my measure was tied to short-term goal attainment: did the people who requested matchmaking gain knowledge that was useful to their strategic decision-making and, if applicable, did they launch a new research partnership? I argued that this measure was reasonable given the nature of the requests and that this measure had the added advantage of being comparable across new collaborative relationships that entailed very different contextual details.
That said, there are many cases in which we may want measures of impact that capture longer-term outcomes. In new collaborative relationships oriented toward knowledge exchange, we may want to know about the longer-term impact of gaining this new knowledge (what indirect influence on collective action ultimately emerges, and with what consequence?) and we might also want to study the enduring effect of overcoming uncertainty about relationality. When collaborators are interested in knowledge exchange leading to new formal partnerships, then long-term measures may want to assess the downstream consequences as well.
Last, in this book, my focus has been on individuals collaborating with each other in civic life, and these collaborative relationships have largely entailed two or perhaps a small group of people. They are situations in which back-and-forth interaction, the hallmark of collaborative relationships, is feasible among all parties. For many problems that people are tackling in civic life, this kind of intimate interaction is exactly what is needed. The people involved are able to either indirectly or directly influence collective action because they have leverage – that is, their decisions are able to move many other people (Peter Levine Reference Levine2022). For instance, the relationships between the researcher and volunteer group leaders in the climate organization described in Chapter 5 “only” entailed two people each, yet the knowledge exchange that happened went on to influence the actions of thousands of volunteers who were members of these groups all across the United States.
All of that said, it’s important to acknowledge that tackling some kinds of important civic problems requires interaction among a much broader set of people. The climate volunteers aim to put pressure on elected officials in their districts across the country, yet crafting and passing federal climate policy (and strategizing how to do so effectively) involves more than dyadic collaborative relationships. More generally, some kinds of collective problem-solving may require organizational collaboration at a higher level, with many more people involved, and in which decisions hold authority over a much wider range of people. The collaborative relationships I focus on have their place and can be very impactful,Footnote 12 yet they are not the only form of engagement that may be needed. Studying the degree to which the strategies for reducing uncertainty about relationality can apply with more people, and more complicated group dynamics, would be a fruitful area to investigate in the future.
Final Words: Collaborate Now!
My hope is that the book inspires readers to think about new ways to “collaborate now!” One immediate step to take along those lines is to reflect upon the possibility of unmet desire for new collaborative relationships in your own civic sphere and among others in your network. Are there collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers that you would value, yet are not currently happening? And what about colleagues? If so, what strategy (or strategies) would be best for trying to surface and meet this unmet desire?
Another immediate next step is to recognize the role of relationality more explicitly in collective action we observe in the world. One way to do this is to change how we talk about it. Here I return to the community garden example in Chapter 2. That example was about how, when people observe a new community garden, they may be likely to describe what happened along the lines of “neighbors came together to build a beautiful new garden that will bring accessible fresh food options.” While that characterization is a very reasonable way to describe the substantive goal that was pursued, it omits any mention of vital process-related details. Building a brand-new community garden requires many upstream decisions about where it will be located, who will do what tasks to make it happen, what to grow, and so on. If neighbors are new to this kind of collective action, it is reasonable to expect that they may need collaborative relationships with others they do not know in order to be successful, including people who live down the street that they’ve never interacted with before, business leaders who will help fund it, agricultural researchers who can help figure out what would grow best in the location, and so on. These are the kinds of strategy-focused collaborative relationships that precede collective action and may be necessary to make the community garden a reality, yet they are not typically part of how we describe collective action that we observe in the world. Thus, another immediate step is to recognize the importance of these collaborative relationships and practice talking about them in an explicit way alongside substantive goals.
In short, being on the lookout for unmet desire in our own networks and changing how we think about the collective action we see in the world are immediate ideas that I hope readers take away from this book. These individual-level changes coupled with the policy recommendations mentioned earlier will provide more opportunities to “collaborate now!”
