News

It is with sadness that ICW has heard of the sudden death of Bev Waugh.

Bev served for many years on the ICW Management Board as the Atkins representative. David Hawkins paid this tribute to Bev...

"I had many interesting and valuable sessions with Bev, and her strong support for the ICW was always appreciated. She was a super strong character with a brilliant mind that contributed a great deal to the Atkins-ICW community."

We send our heartfelt condolences on behalf of all the ICW community to her family, friends, and colleagues.

On 7–10 September 2020, ICW successfully ran its first classroom-based Leaders Course since the Covid-19 lockdown in March.

With an emphasis on safety, we have to give a massive thank you to our hosts at Scarmen Conference Centre, Warwick, for ensuring the strictest levels of cleanliness, social distancing and availability of PPE. All delegates have expressed their appreciation for the many steps taken to ensure social distancing and the highest levels of sanitation and cleanliness throughout their stay.

On the course itself we welcomed delegates from public and private sector organisations. Benefitting from cross learning, and the unique material of the course, we are pleased to say all delegates successfully passed our testing requirements and will be invited to become members of ICW.

Equipped with new skills, perspectives and contacts, they will return to their respective organisations to play leading roles in the effective adoption of collaborative working. We at ICW will follow their collaborative journeys with interest!

Thanks to all who joined our recent online session, which brought together both ICW members and representatives from a number of institutes and associations to exchange experiences and ideas as to what we have learned so far from addressing the pandemic. The discusison and input was both lively and informative around the challenges faced and how these may influence us in the future. Many examples came across as to how organisations had quickly adapted to harness technology and the value of their robust relationships both internally and externally in difficult times. Several common themes developed including the need for leadership to ensure they create the right balance going forward where home working may be seen to have economic benefits carried the risk of diluting both internal and external relationships, people need interaction. There was a focus on the need to temper the use of technolology and build trust both within organisations and external relationships so the technology does not become a barrier to effective engagement. Behaviours at every level had a strong focus during the discussions to ensure maintaining a work/life balance. The full recording will shortly be available on the ICW website.

We are pleased to announce our new relationship with Resilience First.

Resilience First is a membership organisation with the mission to improve urban resilience for business communities in the UK and beyond.

"In the 21st Century, building resilience is one of our most urgent social and economic issues because we live in a world defined by disruption."

Judith Rodin, Author of 'The Resilience Dividend', 2014. We achieve our mission through convening, sharing, developing and amplifying resilience best practice to enable businesses and their communities across industries to bounce forward in the face of crisis. For more information, please visit www.resiliencefirst.org.

The Future of Collaboration

The World will never be quite the same again after what we have and are experiencing during the last few months. And there is no doubt that structured collaboration supported organisations in addressing the challenges that the pandemic threw at them that was an unexpected added value outcome from structured collaboration and one that we probably never expected.

But given the "new normal" it's hard now to imagine a work environment where governments do not need to collaborate in a structured way with its critical suppliers. Ensuring the things we need to keep our armed forces strong, our police ready and informed, our health workers safe, and our vulnerable citizens protected. A world in which organisations don't need to have secure, reliable, mutually beneficial relationships with customers and supply chain partners particularly when those supply chains might stretch around the world.

The new structured collaboration will look somewhat different than it does today; we will see virtual teams that rarely if ever meet up face-to-face using technology such as Zoom and Teams, and those technologies will respond to the challenge by improving their platforms still further to facilitate enhanced collaboration in a world in which we meet face-to-face less often.

To facilitate this our universities will need to upgrade the courses they run to ensure the collaborative leaders of tomorrow understand and have the right behaviours embedded within them, and of course we will increasingly do business in a world where "how we deliver" is as important as "what we deliver".

We will need to do develop the skills to do business with organisations from different cultures and with different values whilst still staying true to their corporate values and the values of the society into which they provide their products and services.

Organisations increasingly want a structured approach that is both highly adaptable and agile, that enables them to establish relationships rapidly, with different types and sizes of organisation.

And structured collaboration is a key ingredient it provides:-

• a clear understanding of the objective for collaboration
• a mutually agreed understanding of what value is and what value is expected to be accrued
• a basis for knowledge and information sharing
• governance structure(s)
• clearly defined ways of working together
• expectations around behaviours and the development and maintenance of trust within the relationship
• a culture of mutual respect

The future of collaboration is an exciting place; how we collaborate will be different and it will help us address new and emerging challenges, but the fundamental principles that underpin collaboration today will still hold true in the future.

Frank Lee FICW

We are delighted to announce that West Coast Partnership has recently joined the ICW Executive Network. This partnership is a ground-breaking arrangement and one where collaborative working will play a key role. We look forward to working with the team to support their success and share their experience.

"In June 2020 VolkerWessels UK achieved registration to ISO 44001:2017 with the British Standards Institute. We previously held several registrations to BS 11000 across our UK companies, but we saw the ISO standard as an opportunity to bring these under one common collaborative management system that could be applied consistently across all of our companies. The support of the ICW over the years has been instrumental in achieving this goal and we look forward to further collaborative relationships with our clients, industry peers and like-minded organisations."

Adrian Shah-Cundy
Corporate Responsibility Director, VolkerWessels UK

To kick off our newly formed Special Interest Group we held an online Share & Learn session, chaired by Jeremy Campbell the SIG lead. We were delighted with the number that attended and the wide range of issues and discussions. A special thanks to Martin Townsend from BSI for his presentation, which very much helped to stimulate a lot of ideas. There was a high level of both energy and support for ICW creating a focus for this topic. Jeremey will be pulling together the many ideas over the next couple of weeks so we can start to develop workstreams to support SIG core team.

ICW successfully delivered two online courses this week: 'Introduction to Collaborative Working' and 'Attitudes and Behaviours'. We had attendees from the UK, Portugal and Australia. Feedback has been very positive:-

"I learned a LOT!"
"Very insightful."
"I'm quite excited about learning more."
"A great group and I learnt a lot from you and them."

We will be looking to run further one-day courses in this way so watch this space and use lockdown to help hone your skills.

Find out more

On Friday 29th May we held the first ICW Thought Leadership online interactive forum. It was a great success with over 25 participants, all of whom made valuable contributions on how collaboration will develop in the future.

The session was led by Frank Lee from BSI - a Fellow of the Institute - and by our COO David Hawkins.

Key points that came out included a view that collaboration will become more and more valuable and relevant in the future and will continue to deliver value when applied effectively, but the nature of the value derived may well change as we understand how a collaborative environment brings business benefits, not just in traditional cost and efficiency measures but through increased welling, staff retention, sustainable business models and improved environmental and performance and profile.

The forum also focused on developments in collaborative competence and particularly the competencies to be a collaborative leader in the new post COVID world where relationships will have to be developed with less face-to-face interaction; the need for greater upfront effort in partner selection; the importance of culture, of understanding through rigorous internal assessment the profile of your organisation to collaborate and the cultural fit you will need with a potential partner.

Frank also led a short discussion on the importance of ethical partnering ensuring that your partner shares your commitment to human rights, sustainability, equality, habitat protection and diversity.

Given the success of this event we plan to hold more similar events in the future. The next is focused on Collaborative Leadership, on 4th June, 10:00-12:00.