Diversity and trust: How collaboration can drive innovation

Consider your work and even your personal life. Collaboration isn’t always something you think about all that much. You just do it — joining forces with colleagues, partnering with other teams to complete projects, sharing duties with your housemates or family members. You solve problems, gain knowledge, and achieve goals by working with others.

We asked two members of the UNHCR Innovation Fellowship cohort that began in 2021 what they had learned about collaboration — and its place in the innovation process.

The Fellowship, run by the Innovation Service, teaches participants about the principles of innovation, then helps them to deepen their knowledge by putting those concepts into practice. This learning process carries on well past the Fellowship’s end.

Emiliya Bratanova van Harten and Denise Venturi shared how they’re incorporating collaboration and innovation into their work. As in a previous piece on experimentation, the fellows’ insights are broadly applicable.

How did you think about collaboration before the Fellowship, and did the programme change your perception?

Emiliya Bratanova van Harten, former UNHCR Integration Associate, Sofia, Bulgaria: What changed for me wasn’t so much my understanding of collaboration, but rather the relationship between collaboration and innovation. Before the Fellowship, I understood collaboration as an important process in which we find allies to achieve our goals. The Fellowship expanded the scope of what I thought collaboration could entail.

Denise Venturi, Asylum Liaison Officer, UNHCR Liaison Office to the European Union Agency for Asylum: Yes, and also now I understand collaboration as not necessarily finding allies but maybe also finding someone who can challenge you. At UNHCR, we’re encouraged to work as a team, and I learned the ability to maybe challenge our assumptions by learning from others. Sometimes we’re resistant to abandon our own ideas and embrace what others may think, especially on projects we feel attached to.

Tell us more about why challenging assumptions is important to collaboration and innovation.

Venturi: It helps you look at the bigger picture. For example, think “what do we want to take out of this project?” rather than “what do we want to get out of this meeting?” Seeing the bigger picture can also help you step a little bit outside your own view, which can help you avoid getting stuck on one idea.

Seeing the bigger picture can also help you step a little bit outside your own view.

 

Bratanova van Harten: In my area of work at UNHCR — integration — I didn’t have to look for people who could challenge what I think, because so many people were not supportive of the idea. So all these people have different entry points and then you find a way to reach the same point, combining all these different points of view. You have an idea that’s like a ball, and every time you pass it, it transforms and it has a life of its own in the end. My job is to get it rolling and make sure it keeps rolling. The skills we learned in the Fellowship help us see that broader vision and see further ahead.

How have others responded to you bringing more collaboration and innovation to your work?

Bratanova van Harten: At the beginning of my Fellowship, I felt like innovation was something scary, and by learning more about it you understand there’s no reason for that. Then you’re working with innovation without really thinking about it. With my colleagues, I soon realized that having separate meetings on innovation is not what we need — innovation is part and parcel of everything we do. Rather than saying, “Here’s something I learned from the Innovation Fellowship,” I use the tools I learned about innovation without naming it as such, including collaboration. Otherwise people think it’s an extra effort that will require more time or energy from them.

Innovation is part and parcel of everything we do.

 

Venturi: It’s true. If you talk about “innovation”, people immediately think it’s about technology or something super-complex, and they also sometimes think it’s scary. So I think it helps to present it as something we can work on together, because we have a goal to reach, even though we may not exactly know what that goal is when we start. At first I didn’t name it as “innovation” or “collaboration”, either, but tried to use what I’d learned in the Fellowship to bring in some drops of innovation.

Can you give examples of how you incorporated collaboration and innovation without naming them?

Venturi: What worked well was to present it as, “Why don’t we try another path?” or suggest we have further reflection on something, or schedule some time to look at a problem in more detail. If you simply say, “Today we start doing things differently,” no one will follow you. But by finding agreement that something isn’t working or suggesting trying a different approach, we can bring our experience and maybe stimulate our colleagues’ appetite for collaboration and innovation.

Bratanova van Harten: You cannot really push for an idea and then reach a satisfactory conclusion unless you have consulted with important stakeholders before putting it out there for broader discussion. There’s a lot of preparation required before you can begin the collaboration process. It’s almost like a process of socializing, of building up a habit.

How do you make collaboration second nature to an individual or organization?

Venturi: Diversity is key to collaboration. For example, involving colleagues you wouldn’t necessarily think of as work partners, including people who may not know anything about the area you’re working on. A broader reach in terms of collaborations — regardless of qualifications as say, a manager or peers or colleagues working directly with you — can help create a space for collaboration.

You have to build a space of trust where people feel safe sharing their opinions.

 

Bratanova van Harten: I agree with Denise that you have to build a space of trust where people feel safe sharing their opinions. Our discussion here is an excellent example of collaboration. Within the course of this exchange, we developed ideas together and came to a shared understanding. So we leave this conversation with the feeling of being on the same page, and what can be better than that?

See more on the UNHCR Innovation Fellowship here and explore some of the fellows’ top tips on experimentation here.