2nd opinion: You and me, me and you

Around this time of year we may be thinking about partnerships. Should we go ahead and say what we feel, or do we hold back our true thoughts for the sake of an easy life? No, I'm not talking about the Valentine's Day type of partnership, I'm talking about the work type.

What actually defines a partnership between organisations? Common goals and shared values? The pot of money the organisations are all vying for? Or perhaps a partnership merely forms when a group of people clutching the same bundle of unread agendas and minutes enter the same room. Of course, before this fundamental question is raised in any partnership, several others always surface first. How often should we meet? Who exactly should "we" be? What extra money is there? Do we get travel expenses? Somehow getting the answers to these questions never improves the functionality of the group, but we always ask them.

What, then, does it take to make a partnership work?

When I gave a talk to a health and safety group recently, a discussion about communication revealed that one person there had made a small but significant discovery: he'd noticed that even though his family got on with each other very well, conversation had been stolen from his home by television. Eventually he decided to introduce a rule that the TV be turned off for at least two hours each evening. There was no agenda for how the family used the time instead; they just allowed themselves to be. He was astonished at the results.

He and his family found that petty arguments and misunderstandings that might have arisen previously all but vanished after the rule was brought in. Their shared discovery has since led them to find more ways of strengthening the partnership of their family.

Clearly, turning the TV off and all eating at the same table is not an option that might help, say, a community safety partnership, but I do think there is something to be learned here.

While we continue to struggle to work out what a partnership between organisations should look like, we need to be reminded that there are countless examples of an infinite variety of pragmatic partnerships that have evolved through human interactions across the ages.

Partners are brought together by need, so some sort of assessment of common ground and trust needs to be agreed. From these fundamental values a vision should be nurtured and explored. Then you need to decide what needs to be done to achieve that vision. It is only at this point that a decision can be honestly reached about who should be doing what. And only then can you work out if you have the resources.

OK, so that's nothing new and a long way from being the definitive text on the subject. But how many meetings have you been to where none of that has been done properly, and you all get sidetracked instead by notions of equal representation and arguments about resources?

With equality nearly always measured in pounds and pence these days, we seem to have robbed ourselves of the ability to reckon relative values in the same way we used to when you could buy a donkey for five chickens.

But then, as at least some of you will have just thought to yourselves "that's a cheap donkey!", perhaps we haven't entirely lost this skill. Perhaps we should think again about what we expect from a partnership and what it needs to keep it going. Happy Valentine's Day.