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What makes cross-sector collaboration in cities succeed or fail? This question started to interest Jorrit de Jong and his HBS colleague Jan Rivkin several years ago when they learned that many mayors were struggling with it. As the director of the University-wide and the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at ����vlog����, de Jong works with city leaders from across the United States and around the world on solving urban problems to improve the quality of life of residents.

“Every year we survey mayors who are participating in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative program,” de Jong says. “And we ask: ‘What are the biggest policy issues that you struggle with?’” The answers are not surprising: affordable housing, homelessness, crime, economic development, and transportation. “But we also ask a separate question: ‘What are some of the challenges that you face that cut across all of these issues that you see time and time again?’” This question gets at the challenges of public management: designing and implementing policy and delivering results in a public and highly political context.

Mayors indicate that they often lack useable data or the capabilities to leverage it, that they find it hard to make change in bureaucracies, and that their most complex problems cannot be solved by one department alone—or, indeed, by city government alone.

“One big challenge that cuts across policy issues is how you bring the parties together that that are required to do the work—diagnosing the problem, coming up with a better approach to it, implementing it, and delivering results,” de Jong says. “We realized that if we could help them with that, it would have meaningful impact. There is a research literature in the private sector about teaming and how to get different departments to work together, but there is not much in the public sector and even less at the local level.”

This led de Jong, Rivkin, who is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School,and research fellow Santiago Pulido-Gómez MPP 2018, who is now a PhD candidate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, to study cross-sector collaborations in cities. What helps and hinders their success?
 

Virtuous circles or spirals of blame

The researchers studied how three American cities approached problem-solving in so-called cross-sector collaborations, where city governments, private and nonprofit organizations, and other levels of government come together to address complex issues, such as those related to education, public safety, or economic development.

“We invested a lot of time and effort in designing a study that was both academically rigorous and practically relevant to city leaders,” de Jong says. “There was little existing research on this topic but many examples of the phenomenon in practice. Through systematic analysis and careful selection, we zoomed in on nine collaborations across three cities and three policy areas, allowing us to analyze collaborations within and across policy domains and jurisdictions.” 

The research team conducted 110 interviews with individuals, and nine in-depth group interviews, supplemented by surveys and extensive document analysis. Through many rounds of coding, they identified patterns in the evolution of collaborations and actions that contributed to success or failure. The findings were recently published in the and summarized for practitioners in the . “We are excited to bring these insights back to city leaders through our programs and fieldwork in cities,” de Jong says.

One surprising insight was that the structure of the collaboration—its governance model—was less important than the group’s adaptability and commitment to learning. The researchers found that all the groups needed a modicum of mutual trust for the work to get off the ground and that all the collaborations hit setbacks. Ultimately, however, the key to success was how the cross-boundary group responded to those setbacks—did they take it as an opportunity to embark on a virtuous circle of learning or to spiral into blame.

Five concrete actions for success

“The most successful collaborations had things in common that are very actionable ideas,” de Jong says. “Succeeding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of resources or a specific organizational setup, but it does require certain leadership behaviors and an intentional approach to problem-solving.”

The five actions the researchers suggest that can lead to effective collaborations are:

• Building on prior relationships: Preexisting professional and personal relationships can increase trust, and these relationships encourage participants to react to a setback with a commitment to learn rather than a tendency to blame.
• Relying on a trusted individual or participants: People in the collaboration who had already gained trust in previous efforts could help sustain trust in the face of a setback. These individuals had a good reputation and ability to navigate challenges.
• Engaging with the community: Engaging the people who will benefit or be affected by the work of the collaboration—through asking for feedback and other means—can “translate trust into collective commitment and action.”
• Using data and evidence: Evidence and data can give the collaborative group a better shared understanding of the problem they are addressing and keep the focus on learning together rather than blaming each other.
• Deliberately investing in joint problem-solving: The members of the collaboration should consciously dedicate themselves to solving problems together.

These five actions, the researchers found, can help cities and their partners in the private and nonprofit sectors learn together and collaborate effectively on social or economic problems.

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the researchers concrete advice to city leaders and their teams: “Spend time upfront with partners discussing how you will react to setbacks. Think about the difficulties your collaboration is likely to encounter in such moments—e.g., varying definitions of success, disagreements on how to make decisions, resource shortfalls—and devise a plan for overcoming them in a way that encourages learning and reinforces trust among members. Spending some time at the outset figuring out the group’s goals, values, processes, and limitations can help you devise an actionable strategy to keep learning in tough moments.”
 

Teaching collaboration

In the work with mayors, de Jong and Rivkin put these lessons to work: the has supported over 320 cities from around the world to date and is about to welcome its ninth cohort with over 40 mayors. The program is a platform to apply research-based insights to practice while at the same time generating new questions for further research.

“Every year, we have a subset of mayors who want to start or strengthen a cross-sector initiative to address their key policy priorities,” he says. “So, they pick a problem, form a team, and work with us for a period of nine months. The participating teams—some government, some private, some nonprofit sector, and some community voices—diagnose challenges, identify promising practices, develop an action plan, and create the conditions for successful implementation. That program has both informed and benefited from this research.”  For example, when Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was in the program, she brought a team to collaborate on . And when Oliver Coppard, mayor of South Yorkshire in the U.K., attended, his team collaborated on .

The faculty teaching in the program themselves represent different disciplines, modelling a collaborative approach to learning and teaching. “We bring people together whose expertise, if you put it together, is more than the sum of the parts,” de Jong says. “Taking real-world challenges seriously means taking multi-disciplinary collaboration in research, teaching, and field work seriously.”

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Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images.