Have you ever seen a bird swarm in nature? If so, imagine it for a moment (or watch this video): a group of birds moving in perfect harmony, with no one able to stop or break this gracious flow of unity.

Who's leading them? It's not a "leader bird" but, as I learned three social laws guide them: 1) keep the same speed, 2) stay close to your neighbour, and 3) avoid danger. This example from nature from Alex Pentland's book Social Physics inspired me to believe that successful human collaboration – however unique it may be perceived in our lives - follows underneath some universal patterns.

What if there is an universal pattern at work in human collaboration? It was during my PhD research over a decade ago that I discovered that it's seemingly three mutual social experiences that let successful co-creation emerge in hierarchical free spaces, such as between units, regions, companies and organisations. In my subsequent 14 years of consulting with a wide range of organisations, I've seen this pattern emerge universally in collaborative efforts, yet displaying in their own unique versions. I've come to realize that conscious awareness of this pattern has helped leaders have a clear language, approach, and framework for navigating the often intangible realm of cultural change toward more structured, systematic, cross-unit and cross-organizational collaboration success. One reason I publish, write, and teach about it at every opportunity.

How trust unfolds in collectives. Until I delved deeper into my PhD research that time, I always thought, as many do, that I trust a person. But if that's true, how can we trust a stranger's online restaurant recommendation or collaborate with freelancers we've never met? If that’s true how can we explain the co-creation of collectives, like the open source movement? I started to shift my focus from 'who' is collaborating to 'what' happens when people strive for collaboration? I found that our trust is not bound to people. Our trust is bound to social interaction experiences. More specifically, I found three key trigger experiences that help unfold the necessary trust that let us engage in successful co-creation. These experiences, which can only be successful if they are reciprocal, act as catalysts, helping us to cultivate our trust one level deeper each time, allowing us not only to engage in simple exchanges, but having the power to move us into co-creation settings, the most intense versions of collaboration (I talked about it in my aha insight #1). I have called them the three C's: Credibility, Communality, and Community Experience:

• Credibility Experience – Through a credibility experience, we trust people based on their competence and will be ready to exchange certain know-how, services or products. For example, when you choose a conference speaker based on their profile, or a IT expert to repair your laptop, a hotel for your overnight stay etc.

• Commonality Experience – However, from this one time interaction you might not trust the IT expert enough to hire him or her directly on an unlimited contract. For joining forces over a longer period, a commonality experience fuels a deeper trust, allowing us to sign contracts. It’s when we find common ground, whether it's shared values, interests, or experiences – be it a common idea how to serve clients in future, or a sailing passion. This is why informal personal exchange settings aside of workplaces allow to find these commonalities often lead to lasting partnerships.

• Community Experience - It allows us to work collectively for a common purpose that we cannot achieve alone, e.g. environmental protection initiatives, a certain innovative business model, etc. The community experience is about seeing shared responsibility in action, that everyone is committed to the higher purpose and putting it above personal interests. It's when we let go of individual claims to get credit, or are so inspired that we sacrifice personal time for the common goal. And that's the level of trust we need if we're going to be successful in co-creation.

I’ve observed that this experience-pattern is path-dependent, meaning they must build on one another, unfolding in a spiral and deepening the quality of trust with each cycle, again and again, like a muscle. Starting in neutral settings, this process can unfold quickly—within minutes in a meeting or over a few months in transformation efforts. When conflicts have already contaminated the ground, it takes longer and requires greater sensitivity to nurture these experiences.

Enabling co-creation to flourish in collectives

Of course, to cultivate the unfolding of this pattern of the three C-experiences may already be helpful to make traditional team settings more successful. It might serve you as a framework especially in situations where the team is co-located or where you don't have a chance to choose who you work with.

But I believe the greatest potential lies in applying this idea to open and ‘fluid’ collaborative settings. Such as e.g. ecosystems, social movements, large multidisciplinary labs, marketplaces, or any kind of purpose-driven collectives. In such settings, it's an illusion to think we only need to find the right people. It’s a matter of finding the right social routines, structures, processes and digital features that indirectly allow the scaling of the three C-experiences that nurture the collective trust.

Ready to trust the flow of collective co-creation?

For being able to unleash the potential of successful co-creation in open collectives we might need first to unlearn certain hold longstanding convictions about trust which in a digital networked economy turn out to have become limiting beliefs:

1.       Limiting belief: Trust requires knowing someone personally. While face-to-face interaction can help, trust is not tied to a specific person, e.g. members of a team; it can relate to a non-specific collective without knowing people and be built indirectly through digital channels and processes, e.g. a social media forum and specifically through a shared purpose.

2.       Limiting belief: Trust is tied to relationships. Rather than seeing trust as tied to relationships, I think it's more helpful to think of it as tied to certain experiences of social interaction. In that it’s like a fluid energy that can emerge even in large and anonymous groups, like in virtual meetings or open-source movements, where we do not see all people involved.

3.       Limiting belief: Trust, once established, is permanent. Trust is actually more like a muscle, it can shrink. Like a muscle, it needs to be used. To grow and maintain it over time a continuous nurturing of the credibility, commonality, and community experiences mentioned above is needed. Either in face-to-face interactions through social routines, or at the organizational level through processes, structures and digital capabilities. Over the years, I could observe and collect some good practices at both levels, which is one of the reasons I created the Partnering Leadership Academy to share them.

Scaling network connections doesn't automatically scale trust. In fact, the opposite is true. When companies talk about their networks, they often focus on achieving the "network effect" by expanding the sheer number of connections. Mostly at the expense of trust. Because trust is about scaling deep, not scaling up. Without nurturing the relationship quality, such as trust, of these connections, large networks can become a liability, creating collective conflicts that are difficult to understand and de-escalate. This is reflected in the current rise of stakeholder activism against corporate practices, products, or management, as we read about more and more in the news. Thinking about how to allow the three mutual C-experiences mentioned above to unfold on a continuous basis might open a door to scale networks not only upwards but also downwards.

Imagine what becomes possible when we crack the code for successful human collaboration? Multidisciplinary partnerships can form effortlessly across the globe to address societal issues. Businesses can collaborate more successfully with other organizations, and collective citizen action can spark meaningful social innovation and inclusion. Each of us would hold a key to facilitate a collective sense of belonging without excluding anybody - in our families, schools, workplaces, politics, government, and society. I hope the three experiences of social interaction outlined above will serve as a first guide to engaging your stakeholder network - not just to expand it, but to deepen it - to transform it into a unified, harmonious flow, much like a graceful swarm of birds, where 1+1 = 11.

Eva Bilhuber Galli

*) About this blog series

In this blog series*, I'll share my five most surprising insights from over a decade of research and consulting on business collaborations. By letting go of outdated beliefs and offering new ways of thinking, I aim to provide leaders, HR professionals and consultants with a fresh, thought-provoking perspective - one that allows us to elevate our human power of co-creation into a networked ecosystem environment. For all curious minds who believe that there is still more to be discovered and that it is possible to evolve our human collaboration into higher forms.

Part #1: There is not such thing as 'A' collaboration