For much of the 1980s, the Swedish Navy hunted a ghost. After a Soviet submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base in 1981, they started to hear strange sounds in coastal waters that seemed to signal more intruders. The Navy pursued them for 15 years, sometimes for weeks at a time, heightening tensions with Moscow.

After years of searching, the Navy turned to civilian scientists for help, including biologists and acousticians. Biologist Magnus Wahlberg said the sound was more like frying bacon. What they thought was an intruder was in fact bubbles released when startled herring vent gas from their swim bladders. In enormous schools, the fish could sound remarkably like a submarine. The enemy that the Navy had been chasing across the Baltic was, a good deal of the time, their dinner. That discovery helped ease an international crisis.

It would be easy to file this story under the category of “Cold War farce.” (The herring research later earned an Ig Nobel Prize, the award for work that makes you laugh, then think.) But the deeper lesson is that solving the problem required collaboration across lines of expertise most would never have thought to cross.

We think this lesson has real importance and resonance for the K-12 community. American public education is under real strain: persistent gaps in learning, chronic absenteeism that no school can solve by itself, a workforce stretched thin, and public conversations that too often generate more heat than light. The problems in front of us do not respect the tidy boundaries of any single organization, discipline, or sector. Solving them will require us to work across lines of difference, and across sectors, more seriously than we ever have. That is not a comfortable task, but it is the one this moment demands.

At FullScale, collective action is not a slogan we hang on the wall. It is the reason we exist. Our organization was born of a radical act of collaboration: to stop being two organizations and become one. Mergers are hard in any sector, but choosing to unify rather than simply cooperate was a bet that we could do more together than either of us could alone. We still believe that bet was right, even as we keep earning it. 

We also know, from the inside and from many external collaborative endeavors with partners, how much work it takes. On its face, “radical collaboration” is easy to applaud. Almost everyone nods along. But the commitment to collaborate is not the same as the act of collaborating. The hard part is actually figuring out how to work together well. 

In our experience, good intentions fizzle before they reach impact for three reasons. The first is a failure of imagination: we picture collaboration too thinly. The second is a failure of curiosity: even at a full table, we don’t genuinely honor the expertise sitting next to us, or stay hungry to learn from it. Third, we fail to recognize that collaboration is an investment, with real cost in service of better solutions.

Let’s start with imagination. Collaboration is often pictured in one of two ways. In the first, it means consensus: everyone in the room of the same mind, agreeable, smoothing over difference until what remains is a lowest-common-denominator idea no one objects to. In the second, it means deference, gathering a lot of people, but one expert, one funder, one authority ultimately decides, and the rest are along for the ride. The first mistakes politeness for progress; the second mistakes a bigger table for a shared one. 

There is also a third picture: collaboration as avoidance. A table can be convened precisely so that no one has to decide, act, or be held  accountable. Motion is mistaken for progress. Sometimes the failure isn’t doing the work badly. It’s hiding inside the collaboration instead of doing the work at all. 

Radical collaboration lives somewhere harder and more productive. It looks like a naval commander handing his most baffling recording to a biologist and asking, what am I actually hearing? It requires genuine friction: different expertise, different needs, different stakes, all held in the room at once. It is slower than deciding alone, but committed to identifying solutions that can resolve gnarly challenges. It surfaces disagreement instead of burying it, asking each of us to give up a measure of control we would rather keep. 

Which brings us to the second failure, the one that persists even when our imagination is rich: whether we genuinely honor the expertise already in the room, and stay curious about it. This requires a real willingness and hunger to learn across the table, the funder as eager to understand the classroom as the teacher is to understand the budget. We also have to honor differences in language and domains of expertise. We do this to educators often. Technical language gets dismissed as jargon, hard-won judgments get reclassified as anecdotes. Their expertise is invited into the conversation as color, rather than counted as knowledge. 

The same is also true for students. The students living the experience we are trying to improve hold knowledge about it that no adult in the building can supply—what actually helps them learn, what gets in the way, what a lesson feels like from the inside. Too often we treat learners as the audience for the work, or its subject, when they are among its most important experts. Honoring the expertise in the room means counting theirs, too, and building the work with them rather than for them.

Finally, there is a third failure, and it is the most practical of the three: we treat collaboration as though it were free. It is not. Doing it well costs real time and real people, including hours in rooms, roles whose whole job is to hold the seams together, the patience to let friction resolve into something better than any of us would reach alone. Too often we want the fruits of collaboration without funding the labor of it, and then act surprised when the work starves. That cost is not overhead to be trimmed. It is the investment itself, the price of solutions that are better, swifter, and bigger than anything we could build apart. If we are serious about solving big problems together, we have to resource collaboration like we mean it.

Put together, collaboration is not a milestone you reach and then check off. Rather, it is a practice you keep choosing, on the hard days especially. We are still learning how to do it well, and we get it wrong as often as we get it right. But we are convinced that the biggest problems in public education will be solved this way or not at all.

This is the conversation we want to have out loud, and it is how we will open our Symposium in a couple weeks.  FullScale Board member Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed, will moderate a mainstage panel on radical collaboration that brings together perspectives from philanthropy, policy, technology, and the classroom. Four vantage points on one problem, none of them sufficient alone. We hope to have your voice and expertise in the room this October.