There’s only one real way to know how strong a partnership is: failure. It’s when delays occur, things don’t go to plan, and the first few breakdowns begin to surface. That’s often the point when organisations want to hit pause and ask, “What did we get ourselves into?” It’s also when people start holding each other to account.
Yet breakdowns are precisely where collaboration is tested. When things go wrong, do people retreat into their individual responsibilities, or do they stay focused on the outcome they committed to creating together?
That question sits at the heart of what we call breakthrough collaboration. When everyone involved is fully engaged, empowered and committed to a shared outcome, the way people respond to setbacks changes.
So who’s responsible when the results don’t seem to be coming?
Whether we’re talking about collaboration between organisations, teams or individuals within a team, the division of responsibility matters. But only because, really, we shouldn’t be dividing it at all.
Why language matters so much
A lot of the time, when we talk about responsibility, we’re actually thinking about accountability. Accountability is an agreement, usually connected to the division of labour, centred around particular outcomes. It’s what we’re referring to every time we phone our internet provider because they aren’t delivering the connection speed they advertised.
Accountability has an important place in organisational life, particularly where trust hasn’t yet been established. But when teams and organisations are going after a shared, groundbreaking outcome, something more is required. We need to trust people before they have necessarily earned it.
The other language problem we run into is that we can confuse responsibility with acting responsibly. Acting responsibly can mean managing risk, protecting what already exists and limiting potential damage. Those things have their place, but they can also become an excuse to settle for a lesser outcome than the one we originally committed to creating together.
Responsibility is, ultimately, the ability to respond. It’s a way of being that goes far beyond a list of responsibilities. It means taking ownership of an outcome and recognising that the decisions we make today help shape the future we create. So what does 100% responsibility actually mean?
Everyone owns the outcome
In breakthrough collaboration, all parties need to be 100% responsible for the outcome. Without that, when a partnership starts to struggle, it can be tempting to look across the table and assess whether the other party is doing enough. Are they moving quickly enough? Are they delivering what they promised? Are they taking responsibility? And once our attention shifts towards the responsibility of others, we lose sight of our own ability to respond.
But when we take ownership of the outcome, we become motivated from within to take action and find a way forward, without worrying about how other parties may or may not respond in kind.
Learning from crisis attitudes
There are times when we need to clear the air for our own benefit, but simply voicing complaints without turning them into a learning moment can leave a sense of blame hanging in the room.
What we need is a crisis attitude. When a life is at stake in an operating theatre, there’s no space for saying, “that’s not my task” when someone asks for an instrument. Everyone in the room is focused on what needs to happen for the patient.
Similarly, in a crisis, when you’re trying to save something, there’s no room for passengers. If your usual job is simply to keep everything ticking over, it’s easy to settle into a comfort zone and stay within the boundaries of your role. But the minute everything is in jeopardy, we realise that everything we do matters.
It’s the same if we want to create a breakthrough result. We can’t entrench ourselves in the way we’ve always done things, fulfil our side of the contract and wait for everyone else to do theirs. Taking 100% responsibility for the outcome enables us to take risks, step beyond our usual sphere and push through setbacks to generate new possibilities.
Responsibility creates possibility
When everyone involved takes 100% responsibility for the outcome, it creates space to respond differently. People can step beyond their usual roles, take action and look for new possibilities, rather than waiting for someone else to fix the problem.
Roles, commitments and clear agreements still matter, of course, but when things go wrong, the focus can shift from establishing who’s responsible to asking what’s needed to move the outcome forward.
That’s where a breakdown can become a learning moment rather than a trigger for blame. When everyone remains focused on the outcome, rather than simply fulfilling their own part of the contract, collaboration actually works to achieve something beyond what we could alone.
If you’d like to explore how breakthrough collaboration can help your teams or partnerships take greater ownership of ambitious outcomes, get in touch.