Abstract
Projects typically involve multiple partners coming together to form a temporary project organization that manages project execution. Partners begin their relationship with soaring aspirations to collaborate but as they move through the project’s various phases and they experience friction, especially those related to cultural clashes, their noble aspirations succumb to creeping, if not full blown, crisis. This, in turn, creates lost relationality and compromised execution. Thus, the question: How can project partners manage the integration of differing corporate cultures and work processes to produce the most effective and efficient outcomes? Using the mega project of the Panama Canal Expansion Program, the authors explore how a multicultural project organization moved from dysfunctional relationality to synergistic, self-reinforcing, collaboration. A “Collabyrinth” (Smits, 2013) model explores how participants learned to collaborate in a holding environment saturated with layers of complex cultural difference. The Collabyrinth is composed of six comingling elements: (1) Conflicting Conditions, (2) Submarining, (3) Seeking Consent, (4) Storytelling, (5) Crafting Reciprocal Relations, (6) Synergizing. Certain aspects of crisis management are employed to explain intra-collabyrinth dynamics. Those aspects are: (1) Coming of the Forerunners, (2) Acuteness in the Now, (3) Resolution Seeking, and (4) Constructing Relationality. Specific examples of the collabyrinth journey are provided and recommendations are made to harness the positive power of cross-corporate culture collaboration.
Highlights
The project organization of the Panama Canal Expansion Program was a maze of different cultures
Trust is essential to the collabyrinth journey and is dependent on situational and affective factors that influence how actors commit to their organizations and to each other (GITTELL, 2005, 2016)
The Collabyrinth journey mints the social and political capital necessary to achieve results that are shaped by a unifying theme that builds faith and hope in actions that build a better future
Summary
Our philosophical grounding for this study fits within the constructionist ontological and interpretive epistemological traditions. The constructionist-interpretive methodology informs the various methods through which data for this study was gathered. Central to this approach is that field researchers are ‘up close and personal’ to better understand the actors’ lived experiences (i.e., phenomenology). The first author conducted an ethnographic study of the Panama Canal Expansion Program. From June 2006 to May 2007, the second author conducted interviews, focus groups, and surveys to research how dysfunctional collaboration and functional difference contributed to crisis and its resolution. The focus here is on collaboration in the Expansion Program supported by the underlying influence of crisis
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