A new narrative is emerging; one which believes in collaboration but we have six months to prove the case. Can it be done?

With each week that passes, more and more people are noting that they believe that business has genuinely changed. No longer do they want to see the divisions which so often created tensions in the pre-covid world; they hope that the old highly controlled approaches will change to both enable young talent but also create genuine, open, collaborative partnerships where companies – and people – work together in a far better way.

It could lead to a far more exciting landscape where companies do work together to achieve common goals. Of course, the cynic will say that this requires many to act with better behaviours and place stronger levels in their partners, a level of behaviour which was rarely seen re-covid.

A fair counter but for two points:

· The world has changed in the last fourteen months. People do want far better. They have reflected and they will not accept the many of the poor standards which plagued everyone in the past.

· As one expert noted “it is a strange fact but children understand far better than adults that working in collaboration is a better way forward than not. Why? We have spent a generation teaching managers to control and not to trust and then we wonder why we end up with partners and suppliers showing bad behaviours. Will this change? It will because the pandemic has shown that you feel very much alone when things go extremely wrong.”

Again many are arguing that in six months, all will back to normal and will see the same old behaviours re-emerge.

This maybe be true but then we have six months to ensure that things do improve, to show that collaboration does work, that many of the problems so often talked about pre-covid can be reversed.

If children understand it, then it is as parents teach their children, so it should not be so hard to ensure that we can improve on what went before.