A companion piece on moving from critique to construction
In my previous piece, “Why Cross-Sector Partnerships Still Aren’t Working in Global Health,” I focused on what breaks collaboration: misaligned incentives, unclear decision rights, underpowered operating structures, and partnerships optimized for safety and optics rather than delivery.
This piece is about the other side of that equation.
Because partnerships can work. The partnerships that deliver consistently share a set of design choices: ones that are deliberate, practical, and often underinvested in.
This is what effective cross-sector collaboration looks like when it’s designed for the real world.
1. Success is determined early
The strongest partnerships begin well before agreements are drafted or announcements are made. They start with a deliberate exploration phase, one that creates clarity before commitment.
This is the moment where organizations step back and ask:
- Is a partnership actually the right solution for this problem?
- What needs to be true internally for each organization to engage?
- What does near-term, mid-term, and long-term success actually look like for each partner?
Taking this time allows partners to understand how different sectors actually operate, i.e., their incentives, approval processes, constraints, and risk tolerance, and to align internal stakeholders before momentum builds around the wrong model.
When this work is done early, partnerships move faster. Decisions are clearer, expectations are grounded, and execution becomes more straightforward.
2. Speed is a condition for success
Long timelines are often treated as inevitable, even virtuous, in global health. Months or years of alignment, negotiation, and governance are accepted as the price of collaboration across public and private systems.
But in practice, time is not neutral.
Extended timelines dilute momentum, strain internal alignment, and increase the likelihood that priorities, leadership, or market conditions will shift before a partnership ever launches. By the time execution begins, the original problem, or opportunity, has often changed.
The partnerships that deliver treat speed not as haste, but as a design consideration.
They create moments of focused decision-making. They test assumptions before they formalize. They move key structural questions to the front of the process, rather than deferring them until after enthusiasm fades.
Speed, in this sense, is about concentrating effort, reducing uncertainty, and being comfortable with experimentation.
3. Partnership design doesn’t need to start from zero
Another reason partnerships move slowly is the belief that each one must be built entirely from scratch.
This leads to endless negotiation over structures that are already well understood (i.e., governance models, contracting approaches, financing flows) all reinvented slightly differently each time, at significant cost to time and momentum.
The partnerships that work take a different approach. They recognize that while context always matters, the fundamentals of how partnerships operate are often transferable.
There are established models that balance public accountability with private-sector execution. Templates that clarify decision rights without eroding trust. Financing structures that accommodate multiple sources of capital. Measurement approaches that support learning as well as accountability.
Effective partnership design starts with these known building blocks and adapts them, rather than treating every collaboration as an entirely bespoke scenario. This doesn’t reduce rigor. It increases it, by allowing partners to focus their energy on what needs to be tailored: the problem, the context, and the people involved.
4. Invest in formal structures for collaboration and communication
The partnerships that deliver treat operating structures as a core investment, not an administrative afterthought. They define decision rights early, establish governance forums with clear mandates, and create regular rhythms for communication and problem-solving. They build small, empowered teams that can move work forward between formal meetings, rather than relying solely on large, infrequent convenings.
These structures do not need to be complex. In fact, the most effective ones are often simple, but explicit: who decides what, how information flows, where issues get resolved, and how progress is advanced and tracked. When these mechanisms are in place, collaboration becomes anchored in systems that can endure as partners, priorities, and conditions evolve.
5. Effective partnerships are designed to evolve
The most resilient partnerships are not perfectly designed at the outset. They are designed to evolve.
Rather than waiting for the ideal model, they launch with sufficient structure to operate and sufficient flexibility to adapt.
Measurement supports decision-making and learning happens alongside delivery, not after it. Adjustments are expected and planned for.
This kind of adaptive design acknowledges the complexity of the systems partnerships operate within.
6. Sustainability is a design decision, not an outcome
Partnerships that last are explicit from the start about how value will be created and sustained, for public systems, communities, and private partners. Market logic and public value are not opposites. In many cases, they are what allow impact to persist once grant funding ends.
Increasingly, this requires financing structures that go beyond single-purpose grants or isolated business investments. Pooled and blended mechanisms allow partners to support integrated solutions and to fund multiple priorities in concert rather than in competition.
When sustainability is designed from the beginning, partnerships are more predictable, resilient, and more likely to scale.
What effective collaboration looks like in practice
The partnerships that deliver are intentional from the start.
They invest upfront in exploration and readiness.
They move with speed, without sacrificing legitimacy.
They reuse what works instead of reinventing it.
They pay attention to how the partnership will actually operate, not just what the partnership is meant to achieve.
And they design for evolution, scale, and sustainability from day one.
This is possible
Nothing described here requires new actors, perfect conditions, or radical reform of existing institutions.
What it requires is a different way of approaching partnership design – one that is deliberate, structured, and honest about how organizations actually behave.
These principles are what informed the methodology behind The Partnership Lab . Not as an abstract framework, but as a practical response to what I’ve seen work (and fail) across sectors.
The Lab was created to make these success factors the foundation of partnership design, so the partnerships work in the real-world.