Leading Across Boundaries: Creating Collaborative Agencies in a Networked World

Introduction

Collaboration is vital, difficult, and learnable.

Vital. In today’s networked world, the most important work is done through collaboration—working across organizational boundaries. Whether the work involves protecting children from abuse, developing clean sources of energy, providing quality health care, improving our schools, or working with a host of other issues, nonprofit and government agencies are dealing with increasingly complex challenges. Meeting these challenges successfully is vital to our nation’s well-being. Yet none of them can be solved by any one agency or skill set: complexity by its very nature requires a variety of perspectives. That is to say, it requires collaboration.

Difficult. Simply put, collaboration ...