About

There is a common misconception in higher education that opportunities are limited resources. Clearly, addressing each unmet need in isolation can be expensive, and distribution of limited funds necessarily becomes a zero-sum game. In reality, opportunities are not finite resources. Opportunities are created when people with complementary unmet needs come together to collaborate. Aggie Collaborate helps people create their own opportunities by coupling leadership programs and collaborative project teams. Those seeking leadership experience and help advancing their projects lead those seeking training and experience working on a collaborative project. Encouraging an entrepreneurial approach will allow universities to do more with less.

It is common in academia to treat individual differences as deficits that must be remediated. It is much more effective to treat differences as assets that individuals can bring to the table to solve complex, real-world problems that cannot be solved alone. Aggie Collaborate participants can quickly become productive when leaders choose team members with unique strengths who can best contribute to different parts of a collaborative project.

The ubiquitous 1-on-1 mentoring model in academia limits opportunities to learn from those with experience. It also decreases the productivity of mentors. This education model is virtually absent outside of academia, where people work in groups and learn from each other. Aggie Collaborate team leaders meet with their team members as a group to efficiently share their experience and get work done. As team members move on, new team members are recruited to replace them, organically leading to multilevel teams and near-peer mentoring.

A university’s central mission to teach (i.e., instill knowledge, skills, habits, and attitudes) can be confused with a mandate to compel alignment of divergent personal goals, career aspirations, and viewpoints. Outside of academia, people find ways to achieve their personal goals by working collaboratively despite their divergent career trajectories and viewpoints. Aggie Collaborate does not seek to impose specific learning objectives, privilege specific career trajectories, or seek to change anyone’s viewpoints. Instead, it cultivates mutually-beneficial collaborations so that common project goals become a stepping stone to achieve each participant’s individual goals.

Within academia, from precise delineation of administrative roles to precise delineation of course leaning objectives, best practices in management are applied to command and control behavior of individuals to constrain their agency. Aggie Collaborate does not seek to constrain agency of participants by managing team leaders nor promoting best practices in management of team members. Aggie Collaborate instead seeks to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships amongst voluntary participants by applying the principles of leadership. Team leaders share emerging practices that produce effective, productive, and resilient collaborative teams through influencing, motivating, and empowering their team members.

Classes are taught so that one day students might apply acquired knowledge and skills in out in the world. However, outside of academia, people “learn by doing” by working together in a community of practice. Aggie Collaborate not only enables students to apply what they learned in classes before graduating, but also cultivates communities of practice to maximize opportunities for students do projects, gain experience, earn a place in a productive community, and transform themselves.

Workshops for students, staff, and faculty tend to be short and highly focused. Although led by experts, they rarely engage participants long enough to transform participants. Civic engagement in the real world can become transformative with governance of, by, and for the people. Aggie Collaborate structures scalable, sustainable, and adaptable programs that transforms both participants and institutions because the participants are the ones who are really in charge. 

With a mandate to ensure accountability, public universities unintentionally reinforce administrative silos by requiring each administrative unit adopt its own narrow mission, impact its own narrow subset of stakeholders, and measure its own narrow key performance indicators. As a result, few mechanisms exist to leverage synergy from collaborations across disciplines, academic units, and categories of stakeholders. Aggie Collaborate is not constrained by such iron cages. It can support the divergent missions of multiple administrative units by cultivating collaborations across disciplines, academic units, and categories of stakeholders. Aggie Collaborate is effective because it fully integrates research, education, and service. As a dynamic strategic initiative accelerator, Aggie Collaborate is in the unique position to enhance the effectiveness of administrative units by fostering mutually-beneficial administrative partnerships.