From WDI and The Partnership Lab: “Partnering by Design, Not Default,” is a practical methodology for deciding when partnership is actually necessary and how to build one that works.
Organizations increasingly treat partnership as the default response to complexity, jumping straight to “who should we partner with?” before answering foundational questions such as “what specifically requires collaboration in the first place?” In addition to their many advantages, partnerships can bring coordination costs, slower decisions, and organizational complexity, so the case for building one should be deliberate, not assumed.
Drawing on a review of nearly 50 sources and practitioner interviews, WDI and The Partnership Lab built a five-stage methodology: Decide, Choose, Select, Design, and Adapt, with continuous measurement running through all five stages. It’s a methodology for testing whether collaboration is truly needed, what form it should take, who belongs at the table, how to design around power imbalances and when to adapt or exit.
