By Dr. Louise Muhdi
Polycrisis is rewriting the rules of competitive advantage. Organizations clinging to siloed operations are losing ground to competitors who have mastered collaboration across functions and ecosystems. Here, Louise Muhdi presents a five-dimensional framework for transforming collaboration from aspiration into measurable advantage.
In an era defined by polycrisis — AI disruption, geopolitical fragmentation, climate transition, and supply chain regionalization – companies that fail to embed collaboration (both internal cross‑functional and across their ecosystem, such as suppliers and value‑chain partners) risk irrelevance. Research from McKinsey & Company shows that organizations with strong collaboration, from cross-functional teams linking product development, procurement, manufacturing, and services to supplier and ecosystem partnerships, consistently outperform siloed peers.1,2,3,4,5 Companies that collaborate closely with suppliers and value-chain partners achieve higher growth, lower costs, and greater profitability, while those engaging in broader ecosystem models can unlock new revenue streams and strengthen their competitive position.
Internal optimization — streamlining operations or improving efficiency — is necessary, but no longer sufficient. Sustainable growth now requires a shift from siloed execution to integrated collaboration across functions, partners, and ecosystems. Organizations that formalize collaboration as a strategic capability accelerate innovation, enhance resilience, and unlock new sources of value both inside and beyond the enterprise.
The AI Transformation Multiplier
Generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how organizations collaborate. Cross-functional AI teams are becoming essential as companies deploy AI across operations, requiring data scientists, domain experts, ethicists, and business leaders to co-create solutions. AI itself is becoming a collaboration enabler, breaking down language barriers, synthesizing insights across silos, and accelerating knowledge transfer. Yet AI also raises the collaboration stakes; without strong cross-functional alignment, AI implementations fragment, creating competing systems and eroding rather than building organizational capability. Organizations that master collaborative AI deployment gain compounding advantages in speed, learning, and adaptation.
The Collaboration Imperative
Whether deploying AI, navigating geopolitical shifts, or building sustainable supply chains, the imperative is the same: internal collaboration keeps an organization running; ecosystem collaboration keeps it winning. Departments and partner networks that operate in isolation hinder innovation and responsiveness. The traditional silo mentality slows decision-making, blocks knowledge flows, and limits adaptation and growth potential. Organizations that embrace integrated collaboration are not only faster and more innovative; they are also more resilient in the face of disruption.
The critical leadership question is: how do you cultivate a collaborative culture that turns aspiration into measurable competitive advantage? The answer lies in a five-dimension framework, anchored by trust, the essential enabler of every successful collaboration.
1. Vision Alignment: Creating Shared Purpose
Collaboration begins with a clear, compelling vision that unites internal teams and external partners. Without it, even well-intentioned initiatives falter.
Key practices:
- Define a shared, inspiring vision: This “north star” should unify employees and partners around a common purpose.
- Prioritize initiatives strategically: Focus resources on the most critical initiatives to avoid collaboration sprawl.
- Communicate relentlessly: Repetition and clarity energize teams and attract like-minded partners.
- Example: Schneider Electric’s “Life Is On” vision exemplifies alignment. The company unites employees, partners, and customers around the mission of empowering everyone to optimize energy and resources. By embedding this vision into leadership discussions, strategic initiatives, and global communications, Schneider Electric ensures coordinated action, innovation, and a consistent market presence that reinforces its brand promise.
Reflective questions:
- Does your organization have a clearly articulated and compelling vision that unites teams and partners?
- Are there gaps between stated vision and day-to-day decisions?
2. Structural Innovation: Redesign for Co-Creation Across Boundaries
Traditional hierarchies often reinforce silos, slowing the flow of ideas and decisions. Leading organizations rethink structures to enable seamless co-creation internally and with ecosystem partners.
Key practices:
- Cross-functional co-creation teams: Integrate diverse expertise from project inception.
- Embedded external integration: Bring suppliers, customers, and ecosystem partners into development and decision-making processes – from the start.
- Innovation hubs and collaboration platforms: Physical and virtual spaces that act as magnets for experimentation and knowledge exchange.
- Example: IKEA’s Co-Create Hubs bring em–ployees, designers, startups, suppliers, and customers together from the start of product ideation and development. This structure accelerates innovation, ensures alignment on sustainability and design goals, and encourages diverse perspectives to shape products that resonate with the market.
Reflective questions:
- Are your structures enabling or blocking cross-functional collaboration?
- How integrated are partners in your development and innovation processes?
3. Process Excellence: Seamless Knowledge and Data Flows
Collaboration falters without efficient sha-red processes. Structured workflows and knowledge-sharing systems are critical for fast, transparent decision-making.
Key practices:
- Collaborative workflows: Engage all relevant teams early to reduce hand-off delays.
- Knowledge-sharing systems: Capture and disseminate insights across teams and partners.
- Digital integration platforms: Provide real-time visibility into key data across the value chain.
- Example: Veja’s Collaborative Value Chain integrates Brazilian recycling cooperatives with downstream manufacturing teams. Structured workflows ensure transparent knowledge flows, real-time traceability, and coordinated decision-making, enabling Veja to deliver sustainable footwear efficiently while maximizing social and environmental impact.
Reflective questions:
- Do workflows support fast, transparent collaboration and co-creation?
- Are lessons learned captured effectively and applied across teams and partners?
4. Aligned Incentives: Shared Success Through Joint Metrics
Collaboration fails when goals conflict. Aligning incentives ensures that participants act toward shared outcomes.
Key practices:
- Shared targets: Align goals with partner capabilities and market opportunities.
- Transparent performance measurement: Provide visibility into progress against joint objectives.
- Capability building: Equip partners to succeed through training and resources.
- Example: In an era of supply chain regionalization and friend-shoring, Unilever’s Supplier Climate Programme, launched in 2021, demonstrates how ecosystem collaboration creates resilience. The company has set joint targets with 300 suppliers whose materials contribute 42-44 per cent of its Scope 3 emissions. By requiring suppliers to adopt shared, science-based GHG reduction targets, share data, and report progress publicly, Unilever aligns incentives across its ecosystem, driving measurable sustainability while building the supplier relationships and transparency that buffer against geopolitical disruption.
Reflective questions:
- Are incentives aligned with organizational and ecosystem goals?
- How transparent are performance metrics across teams and partners?
5. Collaborative Leadership: Building Capabilities Across Boundaries
Command-and-control leadership cannot deliver collaboration at scale. Leaders must orchestrate ecosystems, balance diverse interests, and create value beyond formal authority.
Key practices:
- Shift from hierarchical to networked leadership: Empower self-leadership, autonomy, and trust.
- Orchestrate multi-stakeholder initiatives: Navigate complexity while aligning interests.
- Cultivate resilience and adaptability: Maintain clarity amid ambiguity.
- Example: Roche’s VACC Framework (Visionaries, Architects, Coaches, Catalysts)⁶ fosters collaborative leadership at scale. Leaders inspire purpose, design adaptive systems, nurture talent, and accelerate change across silos. This boundary-spanning approach allows teams to co-create value across organizational and partner networks.
Reflective questions:
- Do leaders foster trust, autonomy, and empowerment across teams and partners?
- Are leaders equipped to navigate complexity and drive collaborative outcomes?
The Trust Foundation: Building the Collaboration Enabler
Stop thinking of trust as a bonus; start seeing it as the engine of collaboration. It’s the foundation for all successful collaboration. When trust is absent, even well-designed teams and strong incentives fall apart. Trust must be earned through ongoing, purposeful interactions fueled by real commitment and active engagement.
Here’s how trust grows:
- Reliability: Do what you say you will do, every time. This consistency builds confidence.
- Transparency: Be open with information, even when things go wrong, to cement your integrity.
- Competence: Demonstrate a clear ability to perform the task. This is the root of credibility.
- Vulnerability: Have the courage to admit when you don’t know something and ask for support. It’s how connections deepen.
- Shared Risk: Commit joint resources or time. This investment is the ultimate signal of
mutual dedication.
In practice, trust-building requires deliberate action. Companies like Patagonia have built supplier trust through multi-year contracts and advance payments that share financial risk. Microsoft’s collaborative culture rests on “Model, Coach, Care” leadership behaviors that explicitly build psychological safety and is a central part of their leadership approach to empower employees and foster a growth mindset. The EU’s CSRD reporting requirements are forcing companies to deepen supplier relationships and data transparency, inadvertently accelerating trust-building across value chains.
Trust measurement matters. Organizations can track trust through employee and partner surveys, collaboration velocity (how quickly cross-functional decisions happen), knowledge-sharing metrics, and innovation output from collaborative initiatives. When trust erodes, these indicators provide early warning.
Reflective questions:
- How strong is trust across teams, functions, and external partners?
- What systematic practices build trust in your organization?
- Do you measure trust and its impact on collaboration outcomes?
- How quickly can you mobilize cross-functional or ecosystem responses to unexpected challenges?
The Cost of Collaboration Failure
The absence of these collaboration dimensions carries measurable costs. Consider the automotive industry’s struggles with electric vehicle transitions. Traditional automakers with siloed R&D, manufacturing, and software teams have watched Tesla and Chinese EV makers capture market share. Their challenge wasn’t technological capability; it was collaboration failure. Engineering teams designed vehicles while software teams worked in isolation, battery suppliers weren’t integrated into design decisions, and hierarchical leadership slowed adaptation. The result: fragmented products, delayed launches, and eroding competitive position.
Collaboration is not an abstract goal; it is a strategic capability requiring prioritization and systematic practice.
Similarly, many European companies’ ESG-reporting struggles under CSRD stem from collaboration gaps: sustainability teams lack access to supplier data, finance teams haven’t integrated ESG metrics, and external partners weren’t engaged early in measurement system design. The regulatory deadline doesn’t shift; the collaboration capability gap determines who leads and who lags.
Strategic Implications: Your Collaboration Road Map
Collaboration is not an abstract goal; it is a strategic capability requiring prioritization and systematic practice. Organizations ready to act can begin with these steps:
- Audit collaboration readiness: Assess your organization against the five dimensions. Where are the critical gaps?
- Prioritize one ecosystem relationship: Choose a strategic supplier, customer, or partner relationship and systematically strengthen it across all five dimensions.
- Measure what matters: Establish baseline metrics for collaboration velocity, trust levels, and innovation output from collaborative initiatives.
- Develop collaborative leadership: Invest in the orchestration, empathy, problem-solving, and systems-thinking skills essential for networked leadership.
- Start with trust: Focus initial efforts on transparency, shared risk, and relationship deepening, the foundation that makes all other collaboration possible.
Organizations that fail to act risk exclusion from the ecosystems where innovation and growth concentrate. In automotive, energy, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods, ecosystem orchestrators are already choosing partners based on collaborative capability, not just technical competence.
The choice is clear: remain trapped in siloed thinking and risk irrelevance, or embrace strategic collaboration to unlock innovation, resilience, and sustainable competitive advantage.
In a world defined by polycrisis, collaboration is not optional. It is imperative.
