Partnership Confessions: What Nobody Tells You Before You Partner
The lessons about partnership that rarely make it onto the conference stage.
UNGA is full of conversations about successful partnerships: what they achieved, who came together, what was mobilized, and what others can learn.
But some of the most useful lessons come from the partnerships that didn’t work or challenges encountered along the way.
Learn from the lessons that only emerge from actually doing the work — what experienced partnership builders wish they had known sooner, and where the conventional wisdom doesn’t quite hold up.
Partnership Confessions is a candid, interactive conversation about the unwritten rules of collaboration.
Are we too quick to assume partnership is the answer? Do partners really need to contribute equally? Is consensus always a good thing? Can partnerships be revenue-generating? Can knowing when to end or redesign a partnership be a sign of success? And how do you build something durable when the organizations around the table have different incentives, resources, and definitions of value?
Behind these questions is a bigger one: what are we willing to admit for partnerships to actually work?
What to expect
The conversation starts with one anonymous question:
What’s your partnership confession? The lesson you wish you’d known, the assumption you no longer believe, or the thing about partnership you think we need to say out loud.
The answers become the starting point for the session.
Alongside provocations from The Partnership Lab, participants will agree, disagree, compare experiences, and explore what happens when partnership principles meet real-world incentives, institutional constraints, power dynamics, personalities, and pressure to deliver.
The conversation will take place under the Chatham House Rule, with anonymous contributions encouraged so participants can speak from experience rather than on behalf of their organizations.
Together, we’ll begin building The Unwritten Rules of Partnership: a practical collection of confessions, lessons, and counterintuitive principles for making collaboration work in the real world.
Who this is for
People across philanthropy, business, government, development, finance, and civil society who build, fund, negotiate, or manage partnerships and are interested in a more candid conversation about what makes them work.
What you will get out of it
Candid lessons from people who have built and managed real partnerships
A chance to test conventional assumptions about what “good partnership” looks like
Practical insight into navigating unequal investment, competing incentives, consensus, conflict, and endings
Space to share lessons that rarely make it into formal partnership guidance
A contribution to The Unwritten Rules of Partnership, built from the accumulated experience in the room
Hosted by
The Partnership Lab - www.partnershiplab.io