Knowing and Doing: The Capability the Collaboration Deficit Doesn't Name

by Howard Betts

6 August 2026

The Collaboration Deficit¹ set out the diagnosis. The McKinsey data² confirmed what four decades of practice had already shown: organisations rarely fail to collaborate because they lack the desire. They fail because the gap between what they espouse and what they actually do, under pressure, remains open. ISO 44001 gives that gap an architecture. What it cannot give it is a reason to close.

That is the question this piece picks up. If the behavioural gap is real, and Argyris and Schön³ were right that it persists for decades because organisations are structurally poor at surfacing it, what is the specific capability that closes it? Not the framework. Not the standard. The capability in the individual leader, in the room, at the moment the relationship is tested.

The Capability Most Frameworks Assume

Most collaborative working models, ISO 44001 included, assume a baseline competence they rarely name explicitly: the willingness to change one's own behaviour when the relationship requires it. Not understanding that change is required. Being prepared to do it.

This distinction matters more than it first appears. Emotional Intelligence Quotient, EQ, has rightly attracted enormous attention in collaborative working because it governs perception: the ability to read another party's position, sense where trust is fragile, and calibrate one's communication accordingly. A leader with strong EQ can walk into a stalled partnership and diagnose precisely what has gone wrong and what the other party needs.

What EQ does not guarantee is what happens next. Diagnosis is not adaptation. A leader can see exactly what the relationship requires, understand it with complete clarity, and still default to self-protection, contractual compliance, and the quiet burial of the commitment, the exact pattern The Collaboration Deficit described. That is not a failure of perception. It is a failure of a different capability entirely: Adaptability Quotient, AQ, the willingness to actually change how one behaves, structurally and personally, when the situation demands it.

Why This Is the Sharper Diagnosis

It would be easy to present AQ as simply another quotient to add to the pile, sitting alongside EQ as a parallel concern. That would understate what is actually happening.

AQ does not operate alongside EQ. It operates downstream of it, as a gate. Below a certain threshold of willingness to adapt, EQ's value collapses toward something close to zero. A leader who reads a partnership accurately and then does not move is not a milder version of the problem; in practice, they are often a more expensive one, because the organisation now has clear evidence that the failure was not ignorance. Above that threshold, EQ becomes the precision instrument that determines how well the adaptation is executed, where to flex, how much, and when. Neither capability substitutes for the other. But only one of them is binary, and it is the one almost nobody measures.

This reframes the McKinsey finding usefully. Their data shows that fewer than 5% of formally evaluated corporate-scale-up partnerships in Europe ever reach commercial scale⁴. The instinctive read is that this is a structural or process failure: poor governance, weak evaluation criteria, insufficient capital follow-through. Some of that is true. But sitting underneath the process failure, in the moments McKinsey's report cannot see into, is a more specific one: corporates that understood exactly what the partnership needed and chose, when their existing structures and incentives made adaptation costly, not to provide it.

Where This Sits Against Theory-in-Use

This is the same gap Argyris and Schön named, viewed from a different angle. Espoused theory is what an organisation says it will do when the partnership is launched. Theory-in-use is what it actually does when a shared commitment collides with an internal interest. EQ operates almost entirely in the espoused layer; it shapes the language of intent, the relationship-building, the early diagnosis. AQ is what determines whether theory-in-use ever moves to meet it.

Put plainly: an organisation can have outstanding EQ and an entirely static theory-in-use. The two are not in tension with each other. They can coexist indefinitely, which is precisely why the gap persists for decades rather than resolving itself once it is identified.

What This Means in Practice

None of this argues against the structural work. ISO 44001's governance disciplines, joint planning processes, and escalation protocols remain necessary; they contain and channel behaviour, and without them there is nothing for adaptive behaviour to operate inside. But structure was never going to close the gap on its own, and it has had decades to try.

What changes the equation is treating AQ as a developable capability rather than a fixed trait. It is not simply a matter of selecting more adaptable leaders, although that has its place. It is a matter of building, deliberately, the conditions under which leaders recognise the moment adaptation is required and have both the permission and the practised capability to act on it, rather than defaulting to the self-protective pattern that is usually easier in the short term and that the data shows is far more costly in the long run.

That is leadership development work, not governance work. And it is a different kind of investment to the one most organisations have made so far.

The Conversation Continues

The Collaboration Deficit asked whether organisations were prepared to collaborate properly. This piece narrows that question. Properly depends less on what leaders understand than on what they are willing to do differently when understanding alone is not enough.

If this raises questions worth exploring for your own organisation, I would be glad to continue the conversation: howard.betts@icw.uk.com.

Howard Betts is an Associate Director at the Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW) and heads up the new ICW 'Advanced Collaborative Leader Programme'. Find out more about this two-day programme.

¹Betts, H J (2026) The Collaboration Deficit: What the Research Reveals, and What Still Needs Saying, www.instituteforcollaborativeworking.com

²Fernando Figueiredo, Kayla Miele, Ruben Schaubroeck, and Tobias Henz (2026) 'How corporate–scale-up partnering can boost Europe's tech competitiveness', McKinsey & Company, Insights 10th of June 2026

³Argyris, C and Schön, D.A. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco; Argyris, C and Schön, D.A. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA; Argyris, C (1990) Overcoming Organizational Defences: Facilitating Organizational Learning, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Argyris, C (1991) Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1991