I’ve written before about the fascinating way Amazon has managed to collaborate with competitors, and such coopetition is on the increase.
Suffice to say, whilst such an approach has many advantages, it also offers up a unique set of challenges, especially as most organizations are setup to compete rather than cooperate. It’s a situation that was explored in a recent paper that was published in Organisation Studies.
The study saw the collaboration that was established in the Logistics Emergency Teams (LET), which sees logistics professionals from four companies come together on projects such as disaster relief. Whilst they collaborate on this project, each of the four companies are ostensibly rivals in their daily lives.
To add spice to the relationship, the World Food Programme was a client of each of the four participating companies at some point in time.
The core tenets of successful coopetition
As you can perhaps imagine, working together in such stressful conditions can be a real challenge. The LET team was established with each company nominating a representative to manage the partnership strategically. These individuals would also manage ad hoc requests that came up in the heat of the action.
These managers also acted as both proxies and mentors for the senior managers in their own companies.
The team would provide a yearly training session to cover the way the unit would operate, both practically on the ground, but also in terms of collaboration between participants. This would typically involve mock exercises to give participants experience of working with ‘rivals’.
The cognitive dissonance was always bubbling under the surface however, even in relatively harmless things such as the clothing people wore. Many would come to LET sessions in their company uniform, even when official LET apparel was created for the project.
Going deeper
Things became more challenging still when participants needed to actively share knowledge in order to do their job to the best of their ability. How willing were people to share what might have been a core competency of their employer?
The study revealed that participants would typically set boundaries so that the day job was pretty much left behind whenever on LET duty. This required a strong sense of judgement to ensure that what was necessary was shared, but perhaps not what might have been sensitive.
Despite these efforts to distinguish LET work from the day job, there was an inevitably leakage of company practice, but even then there was never really a sense that this knowledge would be capitalized upon.
The analysis suggests that such instances of coopetition are well managed by experienced employees deploying a bit of common sense rather than having to fall back on strict rules and procedures. Of course, participants did nonetheless all receive training prior to joining the LET to ensure they were aware of the boundaries, but they all had to fall back on instinct once out in the field.
It’s probably fair to say that the kind of environments the LET team found themselves in bare little real comparison with the kind of coopetition that Amazon engages in when it encourages rivals to sell on its platform. Whilst the crossover lessons to your industry may be somewhat small, therefore, I thought it was an interesting study nonetheless.
