What makes for successful landscape scale partnership working?

Fingle Woods Restoration Project: leading and collaborating to inspire future landscape scale working

David Rickwood, Fingle Woods Project Manager was recently invited to a cross-organisational workshop on ‘Developing Behaviours and Skills to Work Successfully at a Landscape Scale’ in Oxenholme, Cumbria. Fingle has become an established partnership that organisations feel has “delivered” on the ground and there is a keenness on behalf of landscape-owning NGOs to understand what makes a successful landscape partnership.The workshop was designed to help identify collaborative leadership behaviours that help deliver truly transformative landscape scale change. This workshop was developed by The NGO Landscape Partnership (read an introduction to the Partnership here) and the National Nature Reserves Partnership, both of whom are exploring ways in which collaboration may lead to enhanced landscape scale delivery. To help support this, we were invited along with selection of multi-disciplinary practitioners to share their experiences and ideas to help inform a skills framework that will be used for future programmes, training and events. The workshop has also provided attendees with the opportunity to reflect on their own practice and hear from other experienced practitioners from across the sector.Representing the National Trust and Woodland Trust partnership that is Fingle Wood, David shared and learnt in equal measure at the workshop. So what is the secret to a successful landscape scale partnership? There’s no silver bullet answer we're afraid! Working together towards the vision of making more landscapes bigger, better and more joined up definitely helps define the direction. This inspiring direction was laid out by Professor Sir John Lawton, and you can read more about his report and inspiration for the Fingle project here. When reflecting later on, David highlights other key elements of such successful partnership work are “leaving your hat and badge at the door”, as well as having the right people in the room (or in the wood!). Another of the workshop attendees reflects:“It felt really positive to identify what we do as a set of key skills that can be shared and are vital to delivering strong partnership work – could these be applied across any partnership/industry? Largely they centre around people (understanding, influencing, negotiating) and project management skills but some of our work is so heavily reliant on core values it was hard to tease out into defined skills when some of it felt so inherent to character – can it all be learnt?”Well we hope so. The workshop helped us all to define a set of behaviours that projects like Fingle can nurture, by supporting the skills needed to encourage them. For us, this extends further out than the Fingle project team and into our volunteers, contractors and out to all stakeholders."If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far go together" says the famous proverb. While at Fingle we find this to be very true, we also try to ensure that going together doesn't also mean going too slowly.Eleanor Lewis, Fingle Woods Community Engagement Officer shares some of her key partnership learnings; "I feel honoured to work as part of the Fingle Woods partnership. Bringing together the Woodland Trust and the National Trust has created a dynamic and effective team with skills and experience that extend beyond not just our team members but out into the organisations that we represent. While we are well aware that delivering the Lawton vision is not possible in isolation, the differences between partners can and do bring challenges. But we can't let those differences stop us moving forward - nature didn't get training on our IT or procurement systems, it isn't bothered about our organisations' brands and how they sit together nor has it picked up on any slight differences in organisational values. Restoring natural systems needs urgent action, and we can't let possible hiccups or the "what ifs" stop us from acting now."So what next? At Fingle we relish opportunities to share our partnership experience and learn from others. And we know that we always have things to work on ourselves, both individually and at a partnership level. Watch this space to find out more about the skills framework we’re co-developing.If you’re interested in finding out more about how the Fingle Woods project is managed and delivered, and how the partnership works, please contact David at finglewoods@woodlandtrust.org.uk.By Emma Fancett