Summary: Partnerships that address major societal challenges need to adapt over time. Yet change is difficult when multiple organizations must move forward together. In a recent article published in the Journal of Management Studies, we examined a humanitarian logistics partnership spanning nearly two decades and found that adaptation happened through a series of small, collaborative steps. These steps were supported by a careful balance between stability and change, as well as ongoing efforts to align partners’ interests, practices, and commitments. While the adaptation process remained fragile, the accumulation of these steps created a resilient pattern of change. This enabled partners to respond to changing needs while preserving the relationships and stability that held the partnership together.
Why Change Is Hard in Collaborations
Humanitarian crises, public health challenges, sustainability transitions – many of today’s biggest societal problems require organizations to work together across sectors. Yet these challenges are constantly evolving. A partnership that worked well in the past may no longer fit today’s realities.
The obvious answer is adaptation. But changing an established collaboration is much harder than it sounds. Unlike a single organization, partnerships involve multiple actors with different priorities, policies, and ways of operating. Every significant adjustment requires collective agreement. Move too quickly, and partners may withdraw. Change the collaborative focus too far, and the partners may lose the alignment that made the collaboration possible in the first place. This creates a dilemma: how can partners adapt their collaboration to remain relevant while preserving the stability needed to hold them together?
Zooming into Collaborative Change: The Paradox of Change and Stability
To answer this question, we conducted a longitudinal study of a humanitarian logistics partnership that brought together four global logistics companies and humanitarian organizations. The collaboration was formed after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to support natural disasters. Over time, however, the humanitarian environment changed significantly. Urgent needs related to large-scale natural disasters became less frequent, while complex crises where natural disasters intersect with conflict, displacement, and political instability became increasingly important. These developments raised questions of whether the existing collaboration model was still generating sufficient impact. They called for change. Yet the very mechanisms that made the partnership effective also constrained its ability to adapt.
One of our key findings is that collaborative change is shaped by a fundamental paradox. Partnerships need change to stay relevant. But they also need stability to maintain trust, commitment, and alignment among partners. In our case, any change had to align with all partners’ priorities and policies, which narrowed the potential scope for change. For example, humanitarian organizations increasingly needed support for complex emergencies. Yet some corporate partners had funding and security policies that prevented direct engagement in such contexts. At the same time, change had to be implemented collectively, while partners differed in their individual capacities to adapt at a given moment, slowing the pace of implementation. No organization worked on the partnership full-time, and even relatively small changes to agreements or procedures often required lengthy approval processes across multiple organizations. We therefore found that balancing change and stability was closely intertwined with balancing collective and individual needs. As a result, adaptation emerged as a complex endeavor rather than a straightforward process.
Three Practices That Made Change Possible
Despite these challenges, the partnership successfully adapted over time. We identified three practices that enabled this evolution.
1. Scoping and Stretching. Partners first explored where their interests overlapped and then gradually stretched those boundaries. Initially, new activities had to fit within existing agreements and priorities. Over time, however, growing trust and mutual understanding allowed partners to support initiatives that would have seemed unacceptable earlier.
2. Scouting Change. Instead of requiring every partner to commit immediately, small groups experimented with new ideas first. Successful pilots were then shared, refined, and gradually adopted by the wider partnership. This allowed to move forward with experimentation, but ensure related learning became collective.
3. Layering Change. Rather than replacing existing activities, the partners added new ones alongside them. Established activities provided continuity and confidence, while new initiatives created room for adaptation. By building on familiar structures and relationships, partners could evolve without disrupting the collaboration’s foundations.
The Power of Collaborative Small-Step Change
Together, these practices produced what we call collaborative small-step change. Changes may seem modest and progress can feel frustratingly slow. However, over time, the accumulation of carefully designed steps may create a resilient change fabric: a network of interconnected adjustments that strengthens the partnership and expands its ability to respond to new challenges. Interestingly, the process was fragile in the short term but resilient in the long term. Any individual step could stall. But because each step built trust, experience, and shared understanding, the partnership became increasingly capable of embracing larger forms of change.
These insights matter for managers and decision-makers in companies, NGOs, and public agencies involved in cross-sector partnerships. Building and maintaining such collaborations requires substantial investments of time, resources, and trust. If partnerships fail to adapt to changing environments, these investments risk becoming sunk costs. Our research shows that adaptation is difficult, yet possible. Practitioners can support adaptation by creating space for experimentation, gradually expanding areas of collaboration, and continuously aligning partners’ interests, practices, and commitments. Although our study examines a humanitarian logistics partnership, many cross-sector collaborations addressing societal needs face similar tensions. The key managerial task is therefore not only to build partnerships, but also to create the conditions that allow them to evolve. In an era of uncertainty, perhaps the most transformative strategy is not to move faster at all costs, but to keep moving forward together.
