Congress of Territorial Administrators

“Our local authorities are engaged in transformation projects where cooperation between departments, between professions and between administrative levels has become a condition for success. How, in practical terms, can we create this cooperative dynamic? What encourages it, what stands in its way? We wanted to hear a real-world experience grounded in research that could shed light on our own projects.”

Gathered for their annual conference in Brest, the members of the French Association of Territorial Administrators wished to open a time of reflection on two notions that lie at the heart of their reorganization projects: collaboration and cooperation. Two words that are often used interchangeably, even though they refer to distinct organizational cultures and call for very different levers of action. How can one move beyond a strictly hierarchical coordination to bring about genuine cooperative dynamics? What conditions need to be met for a reorganization project to deliver its intended effects, rather than producing a mere redistribution of tasks?

An intervention designed as a real-world experience

The conference “Fostering cooperation at work: lessons from different experiments” was built from a six-month research-action project (September 2017 to March 2018) carried out in a large Canadian organization in the banking sector (over 20,000 employees), engaged in an ambitious digital transformation and work reorganization project. The aim was not to present a model ready to be replicated, but to share what this experiment revealed about the conditions, barriers and levers of cooperation in a context of change, and to put these lessons into dialogue with the projects of the participants themselves.

An analytical framework grounded in research

The talk drew on a structuring conceptual distinction between coordination, collaboration and cooperation (Jarche, 2015; De la Garza, 1998; Gangloff-Ziegler, 2009): coordination organizes behaviors according to known best practices, collaboration assumes a mutual engagement around a shared problem, and cooperation introduces autonomy on the part of participants who seek together to produce added value. This framework allowed the territorial administrators to characterize precisely the expectations of their own projects: do we always know, when launching a reorganization, whether we are aiming for optimized coordination, enriched collaboration or a genuine cooperative culture?

The conference also drew on the six categories of success factors identified by Mattessich (1986), the three profiles of cooperators described by Sheen (2014), and a collaboration and cooperation index built from a daily self-observation questionnaire covering five dimensions of work. So many tools that participants can reinvest in their own local authorities to give concrete shape to a reality that is often felt without being named.

Steps of the intervention

Framing: preparing the conference with the AATF to ground the Canadian research-action in the concrete challenges faced by French local authorities, in particular the reorganization projects led by territorial administrators.

Illuminating: presenting the conceptual framework (coordination, collaboration, cooperation) and the contributions of the research-action carried out in the banking sector, with a clear account of the method (cooperation index, daily self-observation questionnaire) and main results.

Putting into perspective: analyzing the observed barriers (organizational configurations that contradict the cooperative culture, the illusion of radical renewal, difficulty in accepting uncertainty) and the enabling factors, including the key role of management in embodying the change.

Engaging in dialogue: opening a discussion with the audience to compare these lessons with the ongoing projects in the local authorities represented, to identify points of convergence and to collectively bring out concrete avenues for action.

Why a research-based consulting approach was relevant

Reorganization projects in local authorities often run into a gap between the stated intention (encouraging cross-functionality, innovation and agility) and the reality on the ground (a redistribution of tasks without any real transformation of cooperative practices). A research-based contribution makes it possible to put forward a more accurate diagnosis: to name precisely the organizational culture being aimed at, to distinguish what stems from the technological tools from what stems from managerial practices, and to identify the necessary steps (from coordination to collaboration, and then from collaboration to cooperation).

By sharing a documented real-world experience rather than a theoretical model, the intervention allowed the territorial administrators present to leave with an analytical framework transferable to their own contexts, and with the conviction that a cooperative culture cannot be decreed but takes hold gradually, step by step and by example.