DSTO — Enhance Organisation Collaboration

Client: Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Australian Government
Period: 2008
Focus: Organisational collaboration, knowledge sharing, organisational learning and systems change

IGOR was brought back into DSTO in 2008 to support the Enhance Organisation Collaboration project, building on the understanding developed through the earlier 2006 DSTO Renewal work. The project focused on understanding and improving the behaviours and organisational conditions that enabled — or constrained — collaboration, knowledge sharing and organisational learning across the scientific research organisation.

The project recognised that improving collaboration in a scientific organisation could not be achieved simply by instructing people to “collaborate more”. DSTO’s disciplinary structures, professional identities, expertise and established ways of working all influenced how knowledge moved through the organisation and how people chose to work with colleagues outside their immediate areas of expertise.

IGOR therefore applied its earlier understanding of DSTO’s organisational culture to examine the practical mechanisms through which collaboration and knowledge sharing occurred. The work explored the behaviours, relationships and organisational conditions that supported effective collaboration, while identifying barriers that could prevent knowledge and expertise from moving across disciplinary and organisational boundaries.

A range of workshops, simulated games and facilitated activities was used to explore and develop collaborative behaviours in practice. These interventions also provided opportunities to observe how people responded to different organisational situations and to gather evidence about the factors influencing collaboration and learning.

The project incorporated an iterative evaluation approach. IGOR captured observations and learning throughout the work, evaluated the emerging effects of the interventions, prepared reports and presented findings to DSTO stakeholders. This enabled the organisation to learn from the interventions as they occurred rather than treating evaluation as something undertaken only at the end.

The project consequently linked organisational learning with organisational change: using practical interventions to explore new ways of working, evaluating what happened, and feeding those findings back into the organisation’s understanding of how collaboration could be improved and sustained.

The project extended IGOR’s earlier cultural work at DSTO into practical systems intervention — using facilitated experimentation, observation and evaluation to understand and improve the organisational behaviours and conditions that enable collaboration, knowledge sharing and learning.