This article was first published in our Cocooners N° 17
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This is the story of an international organisation that works to guarantee for children, especially those in the most vulnerable situations, the right to health, education, protection, and a better future. It has decided to invest in the people who work every day to achieve its mission. It’s done so by involving the system in a process of development in the area of cross-collaboration.
CROSS-COLLABORATION
Save the Children operates as a fast-moving, multi-country organisation where field reality, programme design, fundraising, and operations intersect daily under real pressure. One major internal challenge they are facing today is to evolve cross-collaboration, adopting virtuous and effective behaviours and habits that help individuals, teams, and departments interact in an optimal way. To truly evolve cross-collaboration, we cannot stop at improving tools and processes; we must also include people, on a relational and cultural level. For this reason, they have chosen to apply our socio-technical approach.
WHOLE-SCALE CHANGE
To ensure that the system participates in the evolutionary process, we have once again decided to adopt the Whole-Scale Change methodology. It convenes a critical mass of the whole system in one action-learning conversation, aligning strategy, structure, and culture simultaneously—unlocking the organisation’s collective wisdom.WSC has generated shared understanding, sense of belonging, and widespread responsibility. It has accelerated the cycle time of change and deepened commitment, converting alignment into sustained implementation.The impact of WSC has been powerful: the entire system moved together, welcoming resistance and increasing energy towards change.
DESIGN PHASE
After an initial workshop with the team in charge of co-creating the path with us and leading it within the organization, we quickly shifted into build mode for the next step: to organize a workshop in which we involved tens of managers representing various dimensions of the organization. Feverish, intense, and lively activities characterised this phase. An action group conducted internal research on cross-collaboration and gathered insights on what happens in other contexts; a narrative crew shaped and told stories from the path so the whole organization could see itself in the journey; an operations team orchestrated logistics of the workshop end-to-end.
EXPERIMENTS
Everything is ready: people enter the room, everyone takes their place, voices lower, and the Large Group Intervention (LGI) begins. Complex organisations can’t change and improve one silo at a time. The LGI brings a representative slice of the whole system into one focused conversation so people see the big picture, name what matters, and agree on concrete next steps. Enthusiasm, competence, and a desire to actively participate united all participants. At the end of the working day, they crafted and selected some experiments to be implemented in the months following the workshop.
SOCIO-TECHNICAL CHANGE
By implementing the experiments, they began learning from reality what cross-collaboration means. Facing successes, problems, and constraints, they turned the intention to strengthen collaboration into something people act on every day. Working across operational, behavioural, and psychological layers, technical change fused with social change, producing habits that anchor better collaboration and continuous learning. A shared language and sense of ownership made the shift concrete, visible, and sustainable across the system. In this organization, collaboration is no longer a competence — it’s a living capacity.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Change lasts when structure and behaviour evolve together. When tools, processes, culture, and people are perceived as flows of the same river. Involving people wasn’t consensus-seeking; it was capability-building—ownership, clarity, proportionate decisions. Being part of a path like this allows people to support what they help create. The process you use to get to the future definitely is the future you get.
This article was first published in our Cocooners N° 17
If you would like to receive updates on this and other topics related to the evolution of the world of work, subscribe to our newsletter here: https://cocoon-pro.com/#subscribe
If you want to know more, or engage your organization with this approach, please get in touch, here: https://cocoon-pro.com/get-in-touch/