Collaboration can be defined as the process of sharing ideas. It gives two or more individuals, who possess harmonizing skills, a chance to share their knowledge, skills and experience.
This interaction presents the parties involved with a shared understanding, creating a common meaning about an issue that none of the parties possessed individually. Collaboration leads to creation of something that was not in existent.
However, successful collaboration comes with its own set of challenges; modification of conflicting goals that are characteristic of any team is one such challenge.
For the collaborating parties to work together, decision making is approached from a collaborative point of view giving each of the parties some responsibility. This ensures that no one party is in charge of all supervision and decision making.
Cooperation is another important aspect in the process of strategic planning. Cooperation entails coming together of parties with the same interest in terms of combining resources, capacities, and competencies in an effort to attain mutual interests for the achievement of goals.
The joint application of efforts in various processes such as production or distribution leads to joint benefit. In any organization, there are different persons, divisions and the like, which together form the organization. For these different units to work efficiently there must be some form of coordination.
Without coordination, the units will overlap and create redundancy. There may also arise some sort of separation of units and in such cases productivity will be greatly reduced. Coordination serves to ensure that each unit has some set targets which should be achieved by some predefined deadline.
This way, work flows from one unit to another without delay or overlap in terms of resource usage and time allocation. For efficiency to be achieved there should be no duplication of efforts as this turns out to be costly in terms of resources, time and monetary value.
Therefore, efforts should be made to avoid it. This can only be achieved by employing proper coordination practices.
Strategic planning is a vital process for all organizations and countries that are out in pursuit of economic growth. This is due to the fact that efficient running of these organizations is highly dependent on the strategic plan deployed. A strategic plan will involve cooperation, collaboration and coordination.
For different teams of professionals that comprise an organization to work together, they must put their expertise together as one team. None of the parties in the team is superior to the other and hence, they should work collaboratively.
Each of the parties should shoulder some responsibility and exert control up to a certain extent that is arrived at using a collaborative approach.
Secondly, there are varying types and amounts of resources assigned to the different teams. These resources together with the staff’s abilities need to be combined to achieve the common goals. Therefore, cooperation among the team members is vital.
The members come together in trust and respect. Lastly, for the strategic plan to be effected, all the units, that is, the teams and the resources must be coordinated. There must be some organized layout of procedures that must be followed without which there will be effort duplication, resource wastage and redundancy among the units.
Strategic planning is all about maximization of productivity while cutting down on costs. Efficiency, effectiveness and unity of purpose will lead to realization of this plan.
The three C’s discussed above, that is, collaboration, cooperation and coordination must be incorporated in the strategic plan to ensure that it meets its desired purpose.