Boundary spanning is the process of individuals or teams connecting with people from different departments, organisations, or even countries to share knowledge, resources, and ideas.

‘You are a magnet for arrows when you cross boundaries‘

We live in an age where ‘collaboration’ is lauded as the ultimate organisational virtue. Perhaps not the ultimate, but it’s up there with ‘innovation’ and ‘customers being at the heart of what we do’.

Everyone says they love collaboration.

Workspaces , both physical and virtual, are designed to encourage it, and we actively recruit for people who possess a collaborative nature.

(If there’s not an interview question along the lines of ‘Tell us when you last worked with others to solve a problem’ is it really an interview at all? )

Also, policy rhetoric universally champions cross-sectoral collaboration as the primary engine for developing new services and tackling wicked, intractable problems like coordinating health, housing, and justice outcomes.

Yet, despite this rhetoric, organisations frequently default to isolation and silos. Why?

The failure to achieve sustained, effective collaboration is not rooted in a lack of will, but rather results from powerful, self-reinforcing systemic barriers—structural, financial, legal, and psychological—that actively reward internal optimisation.

If you are struggling to make collaboration work, the problem might not be your people; it might be your structure and system.

The Structure Is Designed for Isolation, Not Integration

The silo is not an accident; it is the logical consequence of structural mandates and governance design. The deep inertia against collaboration is primarily embedded in the public sector’s legislative, financial, and organisational designs, which inherently reward institutional isolation.

The fundamental conflict arises because the traditional bureaucratic model is designed to manage compliance with separate funding and accountability streams, which directly collides with the fluid network dynamics required for complex collaboration.

This fragmentation forces the adoption of separate departmental or directorate budgets and, critically, conflicting Key Performance Indicators. These are then structured and measured to optimise solely for their own specific metrics. This hyper-focus on narrow optimisation makes organisations protective of their resources, inevitably leading to defensive resource hoarding and internal competition.

Furthermore, the public service’s hierarchical systems actively disincentivise boundary-spanning behaviour. Colleagues who dedicate significant time to cross-agency collaborative efforts often find their career progression stunted compared to peers who remain focused on maximising efficiency within the traditional structure. HR systems typically maintain an assumption that rewards adherence to defined roles and established statuses.

This creates a system where individuals are rationally incentivised to play it safe, avoid high-risk ventures, and protecting turf.

Don’t cross the boundary, you’ll just attract arrows.

Cultural Clashes and the Myth of Instant Innovation

Beyond structure and system, collaboration fails because it demands specialised skills and resources that most organisations simply do not cultivate.

Professional culture clashes are common barriers when combining sectors (e.g Housing, Health, Education) because coordination obstacles often stem from fundamental differences in professional motivation and operational approaches. Furthermore, team members often suffer from knowledge deficits, lacking a basic understanding of the specialised jargon or practices of their peers in other disciplines.

In addition, true collaboration requires confronting cognitive biases: we are psychologically wired ‘to hear what we want to hear’ and often fail to appreciate the merit in unfamiliar or potentially threatening ideas.

Finally, we must stop conflating collaboration with innovation.

Collaboration may be the mechanism through which innovation is driven, but putting a few random people together in a hackathon or corporate away day, expecting a eureka moment, is often naive. Innovation is almost never a single event; it is an ongoing process that requires problem definition, research, creativity, and copious testing. If collaboration is promoted chiefly for its powerful symbolic qualities rather than its ability to achieve specific outcomes, organisations will engage superficially.

Rewiring for True Collaboration

The systemic barriers to collaboration—conflicting budgets, targets and the self-preserving logic of the bureaucracy—are formidable. They tell us that isolation is the default, and effective boundary spanning is an unnatural act. Yet, recognising that the failure to collaborate is structural, rather than by choice, is the first step toward a practical and hopeful path forward.

The barrier is inertia, and this inertia requires coordinated, multi-level intervention that targets structural reform, cultural change, and incentive realignment simultaneously. If we don’t teach, measure, encourage, or reward collaboration, it simply won’t happen.

This starts with leadership establishing a common identity and defining success not by narrow departmental KPIs, but by collective mission outcomes.

Organisations must formally reward and institutionalise the role of a boundary spanner or central connector—individuals specifically empowered to translate differences between agencies, consolidate common ground, and accelerate joint leadership. These roles counteract the historical bureaucratic trend of rewarding adherence to defined roles and established statuses.

Our system fights against collaboration, but like any system it can be changed if enough people work together to bring it about.

We must make collaboration the most rational choice, not just the idealistic one.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash