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The Moment You Realize It's Not Working the Way it Could Be Working!
You're sitting in yet another partnership kickoff meeting. The MOU has beautiful language about collaboration. The org chart shows all the logos lined up nicely. Everyone's nodding.
But you already know how this ends.
Within six months, communication will become challenging. Partners will disengage or struggle to stay connected. The partnership will consume more energy than it returns. We all have played a role in this movie before.
Here's what nobody talks about: The problem isn't the partners. It's that most partnerships get designed at the wrong layer at the start, without recognizing that multiple layers of partnership facilitation exist simultaneously.
We have to think beyond the partnership activities and how they relate to a layered partnership infrastructure. This has to be one of the focuses of early partnership exploration and design meetings.
Figure 1 - LPDesign. Unlike the iceberg metaphor that treats infrastructure as hidden support, Layered Partnership Design (LPDesign) visualizes Partnership Foundations, Partnership Offerings, and Partnership Pathways as three simultaneous, interoperable layers. It illustrates how foundational resources actively energize program terrain and individual journeys concurrently.
The Iceberg Metaphor Fails, it’s too Passive
You've seen the diagram a hundred times: the visible tip of the iceberg above water, the massive infrastructure lurking below. The message: "There's more than meets the eye!"
I use this analogy often. It's not wrong. But it's misplaced in partnership design.
The iceberg metaphor treats hidden layers as support structure; less important than what's visible, existing only to hold up the tip. It's static, passive, and worst of all, it suggests "infrastructure" is someone else's job. I’d venture to say that nobody in the “invisible iceberg” support model wants to be acknowledged as hidden yet essential.
Here's a different way to see it.
There's a children's picture book called Zoom by Istvan Banyai. No words, just images. (Banyai authored two versions of Zoom, I like them both but prefer the original). Each page pulls back to reveal that the previous picture exists within an entirely new context. A rooster becomes a magazine cover becomes an image in a child's hands becomes a scene on a TV screen. Each "zoom" doesn't just reveal supporting structure. It reveals a complete world. This is the essential element. Finding continuity among activities, allocations, programs, personnel and events helps to build a more practical view of how the partnership might operated across organizations. Thinking and designing this way can change the discussions at the partnership kickoff meeting that will help the partnership to be successful.
Introducing Layered Partnership Design (LPDesign)
What if we designed partnerships this way, recognizing multiple complete layers that work together?
LPDesign is a framework built on three interconnected layers (Figure 1):
Layer 1: Partnership Foundations Purpose, Capacity & Resources
Zoom all the way out. This is what brings partners together and what they collectively enable.
Purpose is the gravitational force, the "why" that draws partners together before any structure is built. A workforce development partnership has different purpose than a public engagement partnership, and that shapes everything downstream. Each partnership brings its own strengths and “selfish” purpose to align with strengths and assets of the other partners.
Capacity is what partners can do collectively; combined expertise, relationships, reach.
Resources are the tangible assets; funding, facilities, staff, systems.
Key Question: What brings us together and what do we collectively enable?
Layer 2: Partnership Offerings Programs, Practices & Events
Zoom in. This is the menu of what can be accessed and created through the partnership.
Programs, practices, and events organized for different audiences (faculty, students, industry, community) but built collaboratively by partners.
The menu both serves audiences and represents the partnership's ongoing operations / work product.
Key Question: What can be accessed and needs to be created through this partnership?
Layer 3: Partnership Pathways Individual & Collaborative Journeys
Zoom in again. These are the unique journeys that both partners and their audiences navigate.
Partner pathways - how collaborating organizations work together over time. Audience pathways - how faculty, students, industry, and community members navigate through available offerings toward their goals.
Non-linear, choice-based, with visible alternatives showing that real choices existed.
Key Question: How do partners and audiences navigate toward their goals?
But Here's What the Zoom Metaphor Doesn't Fully Capture
Understanding the layers is one thing. Living in them is another.
In real partnership life, you don't visit these layers sequentially, zooming to one, doing work there, then zooming to another. You experience all three simultaneously, like transparency overlays stacked on top of each other.
Think of it this way:
You're navigating a Pathway (making choices, working toward goals)
Through available Offerings (accessing and creating programs, facilitating and participating in events)
Enabled by Partnership Foundations (the purpose, capacity, and resources that make it all possible)
One journey. Three layers. Simultaneous.
This is why partnership work feels complex. It is multi-layered and always inter-connecting (or not). Layered Partnership Design gives you language for what you're navigating.
The Three Questions
At any moment in partnership work, you can orient yourself by asking:
Layer | Question | What You're Examining |
|---|---|---|
Partnership Foundations | What brings us together and what do we collectively enable? | Purpose, capacity, resources - the ecosystem |
Partnership Offerings | What can be accessed and created through this partnership? | Programs, practices, events - the menu |
Partnership Pathways | How do partners and audiences navigate toward their goals? | Individual and collaborative journeys - the experience(s) |
Most people only think about one or two of these. The most effective partnership designers consider all three simultaneously.
What Changes when you See and Design for all Three Layers
Instead of: "Let me tell you about our ecosystem-level workforce initiative"
Try: "Let me show you how early career faculty’s pathway connects through our faculty development program to our regional workforce partnership foundations"
Instead of: Designing a program and hoping individuals show up
Try: Starting with pathway needs and building collaborative offerings that serve them, enabled by the foundations aligned to that purpose
Instead of: Measuring and evaluating success only at an individual layer
Try: Tracking transformation stories at each layer and seeing how they connect and interrelate
The most effective partnerships I've seen, across more than 94 funded projects and hundreds of faculty, are ones where people can clearly articulate their story at each layer:
"Here's our shared purpose and what we collectively enable" (Foundations)
"Here's what we've created and what's available" (Offerings)
"Here's how we navigate and how our audiences navigate" (Pathways)
When any of these is fuzzy, partnerships drift and you will have the struggles discussed at the start, early momentum with partnership challenges predictably on the horizon.
Your Three-Layer Check
Before your next partnership meeting, ask yourself:
Foundations Check: Can you articulate the shared purpose? Do you know what capacity and resources each partner contributes and what you collectively enable?
Offerings Check: Can you map the programs, practices, and events available? Do you know how they connect and who they serve?
Pathways Check: Can you describe how you're navigating as partners? Can you map how your target audiences navigate through your offerings?
If you can only answer one or two of these clearly, you've found where your partnership design needs work. This is a positive. Identifying the areas that need more collective development helps to strengthen the partnership and create infrastructure to help support durability.
The Transparency Overlay Exercise
Here's a practical way to apply Layered Partnership Design:
Imagine your partnership as three transparent sheets stacked together, You could create this as a slide deck with transparent background for each slide/sheet. I have a post later in this series with examples of these.
Slide 1 / Sheet 1 (back): Draw the Partnership Foundations - shared purpose, what each partner brings, collective capacity and resources. This is your ecosystem.
Slide 2 / Sheet 2 (middle): Draw the Partnership Offerings - programs, practices, events available, organized by audience. This is your menu.
Slide 3 / Sheet 3 (front): Draw the Partnership Pathways - how partners work together, how audiences navigate, with branching choices visible. This is the experience.
Now stack them. Can you see how pathways navigate through offerings enabled by foundations?
If any sheet is blank or difficult to determine what to represent, that's where design work is needed.
Trail Marker
The Question to Sit With:
Which layer is most comfortable for you - Foundations, Offerings, or Pathways? This is likely aligned to assets your partnership might offer.
Which one do you tend to skip over? That's usually where partnerships stall if none of the partnership entities can address these components.
What's Coming
Next issue: Story at Every Later - How “story elements” work at Foundations, Offerings, and Pathways layers. These story elements can also be core embedded evaluation metrics. Recognizing the consistency of story element patterns across the layers changes everything about how you design partnerships.
The Partnership Designer is a newsletter from STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC. This issue is part of a purchasable team guide package designed for use by faculty community and industry partners with connections to partner-infused programs such as the Regional Engines program, NSF CAREER award, NSF ExLENT, NSF EPIIC, and developing/ongoing research impacts partnerships across the continuum. We help partners design STEM collaborations that have sums greater than their parts - efficiently implemented, meaningfully assessed, systematically sustained.
One thing you can do right now: Forward this to a colleague who's working with partnerships and is likely balancing a few too many items on their plate. We are here to help. Sometimes the first step is just naming the layers they're navigating.