When different organizational cultures—the proverbial “how we do things”—come together, tensions frequently arise. Working effectively with and across cultures is even more challenging when organizations come together to tackle social and environmental challenges.
Research reveals how inter-organizational collaborations for social impact often run into structural or governance issues like power asymmetries or a focus on the wrong metric of success. For example, a coalition of actors seeking to tackle poor water health in Australia’s Great Barrier region locked in to repeatedly producing detailed report cards rather than addressing the underlying issue, due to differing interests. Even when such obstacles are addressed, an important yet often neglected challenge stems from bringing different cultures together to deliver on complex problems that often defy standard solutions.
We know from more common settings, like mergers and acquisitions, that lack of cultural alignment can stymie delivery of intended goals. Beyond bringing different cultures together, however, collaborations for social impact serve to address complex and often novel problems, so they need to evolve ways of working tailored to specific settings, across scales and geographies, in which these problems manifest. This heightens the challenge from mere cultural integration to one of simultaneous adaptation of that culture to meet the needs of the problems and their contexts.
We were surprised, then, in our research with TRANSFORM, an impact accelerator run by Unilever; the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO, the UK’s equivalent to the US State Department); and EY, to discover that these three organizations both respected and leveraged their distinct cultures while also generating an inter-organizational culture to support their collaboration for social impact. TRANSFORM supports social enterprises in low-income countries through grant funding, bespoke technical assistance, and connections into value chains, and has positively impacted more than 15 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia since its inception in 2015.