Getting 61 organizations to row together

Notes on coalition-building.

At National VOAD I worked within a coalition of sixty-one disaster organizations, household names and tiny faith-based groups side by side. Coalitions do not run on org charts. Nobody reports to you. Authority, in the corporate sense, simply does not exist, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to be ignored.

What they run on instead is trust, reciprocity, and a shared sense that the mission is bigger than any single logo. Those are not soft nice-to-haves in coalition work. They are the entire operating system. When they are present, things move. When they are absent, no amount of process compensates.

Your real job in that environment is counterintuitive. It is to lower the cost of cooperating and raise the cost of going it alone. Make it easy to share information, easy to coordinate, easy to show up. The moment cooperation becomes more annoying than working solo, your coalition is one in name only.

It is slower than command-and-control, and that frustrates people who come from hierarchies. You cannot just decide; you have to bring people along. But for problems too large for any single organization, and disaster is the definition of that, the slow consensus is not a bug. It is the only thing that actually holds when tested.

I represented that coalition at the federal level, and the thing I carried into every room was that I spoke for sixty-one organizations that had chosen to coordinate, not one that had been told to. That distinction is the whole strength of the model. It is voluntary, which makes it fragile, which is exactly why it is worth tending carefully.