The situation

This partnership started as an informal network and had grown into a well-functioning collaboration with joint initiatives and shared funding over five years. On paper, things looked good. In practice, something kept going wrong.

The problem

Projects were stalling: partners would agree to participate in a new initiative, show genuine enthusiasm at the table, and then miss deadlines, deprioritize the work, and cause delays. The manager put this down to attitude: partners weren't committed enough, weren't taking their responsibilities seriously.

The real cause was elsewhere. The partnership operated with a shared pool of funding, and any new initiative required consensus approval from all 11 organizations before it could move forward. What this created, quietly and unintentionally, was a dynamic where organizations felt pressure to say yes to projects that didn't align with their own priorities. Blocking a colleague's initiative felt uncooperative, so they agreed — and then struggled to deliver on work that was never really theirs to begin with. The structure was creating the wrong incentives.

The approach

The assignment began with a structural analysis of how the partnership was set up — how decisions were made, how resources were allocated, and where the friction was actually coming from. Several aspects were examined, but the funding model turned out to be the root cause.

The solution was a redesign of that model. Instead of a single shared pool requiring full consensus, the budget was separated into two parts: a governance fund covering shared infrastructure — network coordination and administrative costs — and a project fund where only the organizations choosing to participate in a given initiative would contribute to and benefit from it. A project involving two or three of the eleven organizations could go ahead, funded by those two or three alone.

This required real upfront investment — the accounting and budgeting systems needed significant reworking. The implementation was supported through workshops over the first three months, working directly with the team as the new structure was introduced.

What changed

Organizations stopped agreeing to projects they didn't believe in. Those that joined an initiative were genuinely invested in delivering it. Projects became easier to manage because each project had a smaller, more committed group behind it.

There was an unexpected benefit too: external funders and donors responded positively. With the new system, the partnership could demonstrate clearly where every euro was going and show that project funding wasn't being absorbed into operational overhead. That transparency became an asset in grant applications.

As one partner put it: "It took investment at the beginning, but it really paid off in the long run. We took the politicking out of the discussion and could prioritize our organizational goals without harming the collaborative spirit."

What can we learn from this case?

When partners seem unmotivated or unreliable, it's worth asking what the system is rewarding. Here, the structure was quietly incentivizing partners to overcommit and underdeliver. The partnership didn't need a full overhaul — one targeted change to how resources were allocated was enough to shift the dynamic entirely.

This was part of a Partnership Redesign engagement — a structured process to identify what's holding a partnership back and make the changes needed to move forward. Depending on the situation, that can mean rethinking one specific aspect, or looking at the setup more broadly.

Not sure whether your partnership needs this kind of support? The free partnership scan is a good place to start.