One of the main messages that permeates through this age of uncertainty in which we live is the need to work together. The big problems of the world cannot be tackled alone climate change, youth unemployment, and geo-political instability all require people to work together. What’s more, the great megatrends of digitization, globalization, and sustainability, and the sheer pace and complexity of change mean that answers are difficult to find. There are fewer precedents on which to base decisions, less time to become accustomed to patterns and attuned to gut feelings, and while there is more data than ever before, it’s tough to make sense of it and not drown in complexity.

The job in front of us in leadership development mirrors this. Not only do we face these issues ourselves as individuals and leaders but we also have responsibility for preparing people in roles of current and future significance to become better at dealing with it all. It is a major responsibility and one we are more likely to succeed in if we collaborate in our response.

Collaboration is not new in Leadership Development. However, the kind of collaboration that is most appropriate for us now may be different from how it has been in the past.

Within the leadership development provider community, we often make a distinction between open programs and custom programs. Open programs such as Harvard’s Advanced Management Program or London Business School’s Essentials of Leadership offer companies and individuals the opportunity to sign up for a program with a pre-agreed curriculum and participate alongside other people from different organizations. Open programs are broadly instructor-led but can offer participants the opportunity to learn from the perspectives of their peers. What they do not offer is much flexibility or opportunity to shape the curriculum.

On the other hand, custom programs can be much more tailored to an individual company’s needs in terms of style and content. They offer the opportunity for participants from one company to learn together. However, there is a limit to the diversity and perspective that exists within any one organization, so the potential within a custom program for broader learning of the kind we need to deal with in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world can be diminished. Given the increased importance of being able to lead beyond the boundaries of your organization advocated by many thought leaders such as Peter Senge in his concept of System Leadership and Chris Ernst, it is also something that my company, Emerging World, a specialist in transformative, immersive learning, considers very important.

At Emerging World, our purpose is to help businesses shape a better future and we do this through leadership development, corporate volunteering, and building ‘shared value’ business initiatives. To fulfill our purpose, we increasingly work with groups of companies to achieve our goal of positively impacting both the corporate bottom line and the broader social landscape of the planet. We would calthishe kind of approach a consortium initiative through which a defined number of companies come together to address a common set of needs through working together.

Within leadership development, this approach offers an alternative to open and program. Interesting examples consort of a-type type approaches include CEDEP (a membership-based executive education provider based in Fontainebleau, France) and the NextMBA, a consortium management development program led by the accountancy firm Mazars. CEDEP has run executive development programs for over 40 years. Their programs are based on a partnership model through corporate memberships to support the professional development of European-based multinationals. The model is attracting members from around the world including Brambles, L’Oreal, and Tata Steel who have entrusted CEDEP with their management development activities. According to Della Bradshaw of the Financial Times, it is one of the executive education world’s best-kept secrets”.

Consortium programs also characterize the kind of collaboration that feels right for the world we live in, where we share the responsibility of tackling problems.

In 2014, Mazars NextMBA program was launched with participants from major corporations including Areva, Auchan, AXA, ENGIE, L’Oréal, Manpower, and Saint-Gobain. Aimed at experienced managers already in significant leadership roles, the program runs over a two-year cycle with six modules delivered in different locations around the world and aims to provide participants with an understanding of ‘what’s next?’ Rather than being tied to one learning provider’s faculty, the consortium approach enables a curriculum to be built that leverages the networks of participating companies and recommended faculty to be invited into the agenda. Putting the program together requires work but the cost per head is significantly less than equivalent Executive MBA programs.

Benefits and consequences

There are certainly great benefits to consortium approaches in leadership development. A well-designed consortium-based program offers companies the opportunity to share workload, reduce risk, and learn together while offering participants the diversity of perspectives that working and learning alongside people from other organizations brings. This can expand thinking and provide a very rich learning environment. These programs also offer opportunities for co-design that open programs do not and can provide a platform to build long-term, meaningful relationships between companies.

Consortium programs also characterize the kind of collaboration that feels right for the world we live in, where we share the responsibility of tackling problems and need to evaluate not just what we learn, but also how we learn and why we learn as seen in the triple learning loop process, famously described by Argyris and Schön.

Working in these ways does, however, have its consequences. You may lose some of the flexibility of a custom program, as the consortium approach will need to consider all parties’ needs, not just your own. Consortia also take time to build, so there are resolutions These consortineedsdss trust one another and that can take time whanging personnel and turbulent business environments can slow things down further, and, if there are competing business interests among members, things can get derailed. However, once established consortia can offer a very sustainable approach where the relationships built over time between members act as a glue. As an example, CEDEP was established over 40 years ago and is still going strong.

How do you make a program like this work?

You will certainly need patience and planning to make a consortium program work as the time schedules of different companies do not necessarily align. You also need time for representatives of the different companies involved to build relationships with one another and to enable this to happen in a face-to-face environment where possible.

As a participating company, you need to be flexible for you are part of a shared agenda rather than simply driving your agenda. However, working in this way will also help you as an L&D professional to appreciate the challenges and competencies required to work collaboratively and enhance your abilities to do so.

The sustainability of a consortium may also depend upon securing sufficient senior sponsorship from within member companies to ensure continuity over time given the inevitable change that happens inside each organization, which could affect personnel and regular attendance. Sometimes it is easier to have companies from different/ complementary industry sectors as that will reduce the level of competition.

There is also no point in forming a consortium for its own sake. Good consortium programs have a focus and are particularly valuable in new areas of thinking such as immersive learning that requires exploration or in areas where small populations of prospective participants exist in any one organization that are insufficient on their own to have something customized developed for them. CEDEP has a successful tax leadership program for talented tax executives within member companies for example. Very senior leaders could also be an interesting population to work with in this regard who are outside of the scope of usual talent development programs.

Role of facilitator/convener

One of the key determinants of a successful consortium is the role of the convener, which is a role that my company Emerging World often takes. It is usually very difficult for one of the companies to act as the facilitator and convener of the group. There are exceptions (Mazars is the coordinator of NextMBA for example) but it is often better that it is a third party’s ‘business’ to convene the group. This enables independence, reduces bias, and stops the consortium’s sustainability from resting upon the motivations of one company whose core business is unlikely to be this consortium.

Understanding where the energy for the consortium comes from is also key and balancing that energy with the ability for all voices to be heard is an ongoing process.

In our experience, facilitators need to have a vision for the consortium that they can convey and should be able to build trust with members quickly. The facilitator needs to listen to members but also understand which elements of the consortium are best designed as a collective and which are better delegated or undertaken independently of the group. They should also understand some of the dynamics that can be at play in collaborative work and Action Learning can be a good approach to overcome challenging group dynamics.

Understanding where the energy for the consortium comes from is also key and balancing that energy with the ability for all voices to be heard is an ongoing process. Plus, there must be a balance between sharing perspectives and committing to action that also needs to be managed.

Conclusion

If you get most of this right (and you won’t always get it right), you can build a strong consortium that enables members to do things that they would otherwise be unable to do in our Age of Uncertainty, where facing challenges alone can be daunting, that has tremendous value.

This potential has inspired us at Emerging World. In recent years, we have built several collaborative initiatives including Africa Working, a cross-company initiative focused on addressing employability and entrepreneurship issues in Africa. We have also established a best practice group for companies with Corporate International Service Learning programs, which has led to the publication of some innovative research.

Our next collaborative initiative is to build a consortium of companies that want to use our immersive approach to leadership development in a multi-company environment and simultaneously tackle some big social issues such as educatioemployabilityty a, and climate change. We’re looking for a small group of four to eight companies that would like to work with others to co-develop a signature leadership experience that makes a transformational impact on their talent bringing them together in a safe learning environment to sharpen skills that will allow them to embrace ambiguity, step out of their comfort zone, drive collaboration and be inspired by the world around them. All this while providing their leadership development function with a forum to experiment, learn from others, rs, and address some of the wider social challenges that impact us all. If this sounds like your company, we’d love to hear from you.