Building synergistic collaborations

Collaborations are promising, but also difficult and vulnerable

Public security organisations are therefore increasingly collaborating with creative professionals who use their strengths in design thinking to arrive at new perspectives and proposals. This collaboration between public security organisations and creative professionals is promising, but also often difficult and vulnerable. The interface between these disciplines brings about interesting and creative ideas as well as inherent tensions. Where one works from frameworks, guidelines and protocols, the other works from serendipity, association and ambiguity. Closer, ongoing exchange between collaborators can greatly benefit the partnership, whereby the different parties are exposed to each other’s ideas, approaches and working methods. But how do you develop longterm, ongoing forms for collaboration in a context oriented towards purchasing and tendering, efficiency and end results?

Working across boundaries

In addition, boundaries to be crossed within a project: between different disciplines or roles within a team, between the project’s core issue and different organisational approaches to tackle it, or between the different internal and external concerns.It is therefore necessary to work across different aspects of the project simultaneously, instead of working sequentially from design to implementation. Within this process, how might collaborators recognise when exploring a tension could be generative or not? And how do collaborators promote a process in which a large part of the time is spent on learning instead of creating concrete solutions? In this research, we undertake some initial steps towards developing working methods that support synergistic collaborations. To develop increased synergy between security organisations and creative professionals – enabling and strengthening their collaborative impact on these complex security issues and the collaborator’s organisational approaches – requires boundary spanning practices. To this end, we are developing a model with sixteen building blocks for sustainable collaborations, as well as a series of creative methods and tools. This research was made possible with a KIEM GoCI subsidy, an initiative of the Creative Industry/CLICKNL top sector and the SIA Directorate.