Exit Strategies in Interorganizational Collaboration: Setting the Stage for Re-Entry

IOC as a Negotiated Temporary System (NTS)

Given the perpetual conceptual variance found in the collaboration literature, Barley and Weickum (2017) urge researchers to operationalize which phenomenon is under consideration clearly so that the parallel streams of research can be better identified and integrated. In this article, I adopt the BFGCM (Stohl & Walker, 2002) to examine IOCs as a group-level phenomenon in which a diverse set of individuals, who represent interdependent organizations, engages in a project that requires their joint work (see also Heath & Frey, 2004; Keyton, Ford, & Smith, 2008). Within this conceptualization, the main actors of an IOC are the individual collaborative partners who are committed to the project and recognized members of the collaborating group, but their communication simultaneously represents complex interorganizational-level dynamics due to their overlapping memberships with their home organizations and other affiliations, and the permeable boundary around the collaborating group. Thus, the BFGCM suggests that understanding what happens “inside” an IOC requires understanding what happens “outside” of it, and the relationships between the two spaces.

The BFGCM involves three key elements. First, it conceptualizes communication as what constitutes and enables collaboration. That is, to enact and manage the collaborative process, the various participants must negotiate their relational boundaries, tasks, and roles through their interactions. Second, organizational representatives come together for a collaboration if/when there is a mutually recognized need. Stohl and Walker (2002) call such collaborative impetus environmental exigencies to which organizations must respond collectively. The third and the most central element of the BFGCM is an NTS. An NTS is the finite system enacted by collaborative partners through their communication “specifically for the completion of a collaborative project and is the collaborating group” (p. 243). In the BFGCM, an NTS is synonymous with an IOC as conceptualized in a number of past studies (e.g., Hardy et al., 2003; Koschmann, 2013; Lewis et al., 2010), but a distinguishing feature of the NTS is that the group is created to accomplish a project under specific time constraints. Thus, “from the very beginning of the project, collaborative partners in the NTS are keenly aware of its ending” (Walker & Stohl, 2012, p. 452).

Although the BFGCM offers a useful theoretical framework for unpacking the complexity of IOCs as temporary systems, I identify three areas that require further development and clarification. The first such area is the power dynamics of an NTS. The BFGCM suggests that collaborative partners have little to no status difference, but through their interactions, they develop informal hierarchy over time based on their levels of involvement in activities both within and outside of the NTS (Stohl & Walker, 2002). What is unclear in this model is, then, who put the time constraints on the collaborative project in the absence of an initial structure and/or hierarchy. As stated earlier, the BFGCM sets a clear temporal boundary around the NTS and emphasizes its finite nature. This predetermined timeline of an NTS implies actor(s) who not only enact an environmental exigency but also provide some structural guidance (or mandates) for the collaborative project. In the IOC literature, scholars have consistently shown that conveners play important roles because they bring together relevant stakeholder groups and initiate the collaborative process (see Cooper & Shumate, 2012; Heath & Isbell, 2017; Woo, 2019). Conveners may or may not be a part of the collaborating group or NTS, and they do not necessarily have task-related decision-making power or control, but they have what Gray (1989) calls “convening power” to engage in organizing practices (e.g., bringing stakeholders, gathering their inputs, or distributing resources) that can shape the relational and structural dynamics of the collaborative process. Thus, I argue that considering the role and influence of conveners is important to better understand how an NTS is enacted and managed within the framework of the BFGCM.

A second area of the BFGCM that needs clarification is the NTS’s environment. The model offers insights about the embeddedness of collaborative partners in multiple contexts outside of the NTS and how it complicates their collaboration; yet, it is not clear in which primary context the NTS itself gets enacted and situated. The model indicates that the process of enacting and sustaining an NTS occurs within a communicative context (Stohl & Walker, 2002), but it does not offer sufficient explanations to understand an NTS’s relationships with other systems that may be embedded and/or compete in the same context. In their seminal article, Wood and Gray (1991) explain that collaborations are organized within a problem domain, which “may be as narrow and specific as a local rush-hour traffic snarl, or as broad and unwieldy as balancing economic and ecological interests in national public policy” (p. 148). Given the multifaceted nature of such problems, organizations with interests in the domain’s future enact various IOCs to tackle different aspects of the problem with varying scope of activities, decisions, and timelines. That is, a problem domain involves multiple NTSs, which may operate independently from one another and in different forms, but share related goals to advance the problem domain. For example, Cooper and Shumate (2012) identified two distinct IOCs (grassroots and donor-driven coalitions) among gender-based violence nonprofits. Despite the two coalitions’ contrasting internal communication dynamics, they operated within the same problem domain (i.e., gender-based violence). Recognizing that an NTS is situated within a problem domain consisting of multiple NTSs will help researchers identify a collaborative context in which to examine how the NTSs (and individuals involved in them) may be related to and/or influence one another.

A third area of the BFGCM that requires further development is the exit process of the NTS. The model theorizes well about when and how an NTS gets enacted initially (i.e., the emergence of environmental exigencies that demand responses), as well as how it is maintained through collaborative partners’ negotiations of commitment, power, trust, and resources (Stohl & Walker, 2002). At the same time, the model clearly indicates an expected ending point of the NTS. What is missing from the model is how the NTS comes to an end or how collaborative partners navigate the predetermined exit when they accomplish their goals. Based on the BFGCM, it is not difficult to expect that the exit process would involve the very same dynamics that complicate the processes of initiating and sustaining an NTS (i.e., multiple, overlapping memberships, and permeable boundaries)—if not more complex due to collaborative partners’ potentially differing views on the outcomes of the NTS (Heath & Frey, 2004). To theorize this least understood aspect of the BFGCM, I propose a negotiated open process view of exit and compare it with the traditional view of exit as a closed or terminal process. Then, I pose research questions aimed at extending the BFGCM through an empirical investigation of an NTS’s exit process in relation to its problem domain and the role of conveners.

Exit as a Negotiated Open Process in IOC

Similar to conceptualization of collaboration as a process that develops over time and involves changes of communicative activities (Lewis, 2006), exit has also been studied as a process in past organizational research rather than a simple departure from a given context. An exit process occurs as involved parties (individual members, work groups, or organizations) acknowledge their “coming apart,” loosen their communication links, and separate themselves from their role-based identities developed within their work environment (Ashforth, 2001; Kramer, 1993). Across the literatures, researchers have largely adopted a closed process view, which suggests that exit signifies a permanent closure of relationships or membership, and explored how exit is enacted as a response to dissatisfaction with employers or business partners (Giller & Matear, 2001; Hom & Kinicki, 2001); an inevitable choice due to unfortunate organizational circumstances such as site closure and bankruptcy (Harris & Sutton, 1986); or a rite of passage when members fulfill their time-constrained membership (Davis & Myers, 2012). In these studies, the closed view treats exit as a process of crossing a rigid organizational boundary which requires an explicit communicative marking of its closure, such as announcing employee dismissals (Cox & Kramer, 1995) or organizational “death” (Sutton, 1987).

Applying the closed view of exit to an NTS would mean that the collaborative process ultimately leads to a dismantling of the NTS after collaborative partners complete their project (see Figure 1). While this view allows for exploring communicative dynamics leading up to the dissolution of the NTS—such as how collaborative partners accomplish remaining tasks, how they make sense of their communicative accomplishments, or how they de-identify with the NTS’s collective identity (see Koschmann, 2013, 2016)—it does not consider whether and how collaborative partners may negotiate or make decisions about their post-exit activities. The BFGCM suggests that an NTS gets enacted in response to an environmental exigency, but it does not assure that the NTS can address or satisfy the demand completely after the collaboration, or that the same (or similar) impetus would never emerge again in the future. Thus, to gain a fuller understanding of the dynamics involved in the exit process of an NTS, we need to consider how collaborative partners might recognize and negotiate the potential for them to re-engage after they achieve the NTS’s specific goals. Given the relationships and familiarity they developed through their collaboration, it seems reasonable to expect their recognition of the relational assets and desire to continue and/or strengthen their partnerships (Madhok & Tallman, 1998).

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Figure 1.

Exit from a closed process view.

As an alternative to the closed view of exit, I propose a negotiated open process view (see Figure 2) which acknowledges the negotiability of the boundary around an NTS. This view makes several assumptions about the exit process that parallel the BFGCM framework. First, collaborative partners negotiate the exit process primarily through communication, instead of formal mechanisms or structural mandates, which shapes not only how the NTS comes to an end but also the future of the NTS. Similar to group dynamics common in the beginning and middle of the collaborative process, issues of commitment, power, trust, and/or resources (Stohl & Walker, 2002) will be voluntarily negotiated among collaborative partners during the exit process to determine their post-exit relational boundaries. Second, whether and how collaborative partners engage in the exit negotiations will impact and be impacted by external dynamics of the NTS through its permeable boundary, including the goals and demands of their home organizations, alliances, or the problem domain. Third, collaborative partners’ successful exit negotiations in and outside of the NTS will offer them various opportunities to prepare for their re-entry into a future collaboration, while those who fail or do not wish to negotiate will prepare to leave the NTS with some potential to reconnect in the future.

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Figure 2.

Exit from a negotiated open process view: a project-based collaboration as an NTS within a problem domain.

The negotiated open process view offers a framework to theorize about exit in ways that cannot be captured by the closed process view. The most notable difference is its recognition of collaborative partners’ communicative agency in shaping the future of the NTS and enacting the need for their continued collaboration—as opposed to accepting the dismantling of the NTS as their fate. That is, from the open process view, collaborative partners’ engagements are not limited by the time constraints put on the project and exit is situated within a trajectory of ongoing partnerships, unlike the closed view that treats exit as a context in which to manage closures of the collaborative project and relationships. Thus, we can conceptualize exit as an anticipatory phase of a future NTS, in which collaborative partners develop expectations about and prepare for future collaborative activities through their strategic communication in and outside of the NTS. To guide an empirical investigation of an NTS’s (or IOC’s) exit process from this view, I organize the rest of this article around the question, “How do collaborative partners communicatively negotiate and set the stage for re-entry into a future collaboration during the IOC’s exit process?” More specifically, this study aims to extend the BFGCM based on the earlier discussions on conveners and problem domain by exploring the following:

Research Context: IOCs for Long-Range Regional Planning Projects

This study was a part of a larger project examining the life cycle of IOCs in a regional planning context. In the United States, every metropolitan area with more than 50,000 residents is federally mandated to establish an agency called Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) responsible for coordinating the development of a long-term regional plan. Since the plan must reflect the region’s collective vision for the future developments, regional planners working at MPOs act as conveners who bring together stakeholder organizations with relevant expertise and help to move the planning efforts in the proper direction via IOC. Thus, the regional planners have some formal authority to initiate and guide the IOC process to meet the federal guidelines, but their convening practices rely largely on informal processes of (a) creating and managing a network of local entities that are willing to work together without formal rewards or control and (b) organizing activities to facilitate fair and voluntary exchanges of ideas and resources among the collaborative partners. Having designated conveners in this context allows for examining how their role may be implicated in the IOC’s exit process.

An important reason that makes this an ideal context for the present study is that the IOC convened by regional planners can be conceptualized as an NTS due to its predetermined 4-year time constraint. The time limit is a part of the federal mandate that gets implemented by the conveners. Thus, the IOC is a finite system that comes to an end after 4 years of collaborative activities, and the conveners submit the long-range plan to the board for approval. In addition, the IOC offers collaborative partners an opportunity to negotiate their re-entry into a future IOC because the conveners are expected to update the long-range plan every 4 years to reflect new priorities and changes that happened in recent years. In other words, in this context, the collaborative impetus does not arise as a one-time event but a recurrent need that requires continued attention and involvement of stakeholders.

In general, collaborative partners of the IOC in this context are representatives of organizations that wish to influence the long-range plan to be aligned with their organizational goals (e.g., to accelerate or stop urban growth) but also have a sense of civic responsibility to contribute their resources to the region’s future development. Although conveners welcome inputs from any members of the public, to become collaborative partners of the IOC, organizational representatives need to demonstrate their relevance and commitment so that the conveners recognize their inputs as both valid and valuable. Once they become involved in the IOC, their demonstrated legitimacy and established relationships can facilitate their potential re-entry into a future IOC; yet, as stated above, the future IOC will likely shift its focus to different priorities based on the evolving regional trends, and the same collaborative partners’ expertise can become less relevant or important over time. Thus, collaborative partners who wish to re-enter the IOC will have to make communicative efforts to negotiate the need for their continued involvement while the ongoing IOC process comes to an end.

In this context, the IOC is clearly situated within regional planning—a problem domain that encompasses various urban issues such as transportation, environment, and health. MPOs are centrally positioned in this problem domain due to their legitimacy (federal support) and expertise. Thus, regional planners at MPOs are charged with managing a number of projects to address different regional issues, for which they organize collaborating groups in varying sizes and forms (e.g., public bicycle advisory committee, traffic analysis group). Among those groups, the IOC organized for the long-range planning project is the largest in terms of its comprehensiveness, the range of stakeholder organizations involved, and the amount of time and resources required. For the purpose of this study, regional planning can be understood as a problem domain consisting of multiple NTSs, with the IOC organized for the long-range planning project being the primary NTS. This offers an ideal context in which to explore the primary IOC’s exit process and examine whether/how the collaborative partners might interact with other systems within the same problem domain during their exit negotiations.

Data Collection

This study’s primary data were collected via interviews during my year-long field study. The inductive field research method was appropriate for this study as it allowed for (a) gaining an in-depth knowledge of the research context (i.e., regional planning), which was inseparable from understanding the complex IOC’s exit process, as well as for (b) capturing naturally occurring communicative and relational dynamics from the perspective of those who were directly involved in the IOC, which are difficult to replicate in controlled settings (Doerfel & Gibbs, 2014).

The field study took place in three regions in the United States that shared similar timelines for their collaborative long-range planning projects. Since each region’s IOC involved representatives from different types of organizations, conducting the study in multiple regions helped to increase the diversity of my sample. Furthermore, being able to capture similar patterns across the three IOCs’ exit processes allowed for generating a more robust set of findings than examining a single case of IOC.

I entered the sites during the last year of the three regions’ 4-year IOC process, which I will refer to as Project 2040 (pseudonym) in this article. My data collection continued through the first 6 months into the next 4-year IOC cycle, which I will refer to as Project 2045 (see Figure 3 for a visualized data collection schedule). This schedule allowed me to understand the ways in which the collaborative partners were engaging in exit negotiations during the last 6 months of Project 2040 and whether and how they were able to re-enter the IOC during the early phase of Project 2045.

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Figure 3.

Data collection timeline.

To identify collaborative partners of Project 2040, I consulted with lead conveners (regional planners) from the three regions’ MPOs at the beginning of the fourth (last) year of their IOC process. Among the organizations discussed by the conveners, I contacted those whose representatives (a) participated in Project 2040 until the end and (b) were not expected by conveners to re-enter the future IOC (Project 2045). Considering the first criterion meant that collaborative partners who left the IOC before its final year were out of this study’s scope. I considered the second criterion because those who were not selected by conveners as future collaborative partners for Project 2045 could offer insights for how they negotiated the need for their continued involvement during the Project 2040’s exit process.

Once I identified 11 organizations that met both criteria, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with two to five representatives from each organization (n = 33) as well as with conveners at the three regions’ MPOs (n = 40), all of whom were directly involved in the IOCs. My interviews occurred in two phases. The first phase happened during the final 6 months of Project 2040, where I asked all interviewees to describe the status of Project 2040, what they were doing both in and outside of Project 2040, and how they were preparing for Project 2045, if any. Each interview lasted 55 minutes on average. I also attended two IOC meetings and three collaborative partner organizations’ internal meetings (20 hours in total) when the opportunities emerged, which allowed me to observe participants’ interactions in situ and corroborate emergent findings from the individual interviews.

The second phase of interviews occurred during the first 6 months of Project 2045’s 4-year process. I returned to the three sites and met with the same collaborative partners (one representative from each of the 11 organizations) and two to three lead conveners from each region, for a total of 19 follow-up interviews. I asked collaborative partners to discuss their relationships with the conveners and other collaborators since Project 2040 ended, how they believed their interactions or activities during the exit phase of Project 2040 helped them prepare for Project 2045, and to what extent they have been involved in Project 2045. I asked conveners which collaborative partners have or would become actively involved in Project 2045 as it progressed, and why. All interviews from both phases were audio-recorded upon participants’ permissions and transcribed verbatim for analysis.

Data Analysis

The data analysis involved iterative processes of going back and forth between inductive and deductive approaches to the interview data (see Figure 4 for the steps involved). My analysis began by identifying collaborative partners who successfully re-entered Project 2045 based on the interviews I conducted during the second phase of data collection. Comparing reports from both organizational representatives and conveners, I found that seven out of the 11 organizations in my sample successfully re-entered Project 2045, even though their participation was initially not viewed by conveners as necessary during the first phase of the interviews (see Table 1 for each organization’s re-entry status).

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Figure 4.

Iterative processes used to analyze the interview data.

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Table 1.

Participant Profile and Re-Entry Status.

No.	Organization sector	Type	Re-entry (Y/N)	Region
1	Community Health Clinic	Public	Y	Valley
2	Congestion Management	Public	Y	Mountain
3	County Health Department	Public	Y	Valley
4	Environmental Coalition	Nonprofit coalition	Y	Ocean
5	Environment Conservation	Nonprofit	Y	Ocean
6	Municipal Government	Public	Y	Mountain
7	Social Justice Coalition	Nonprofit coalition	Y	Ocean
8	Civic Engagement	Nonprofit	N	Mountain
9	Neighborhood Association	Nonprofit	N	Mountain
10	Public Safety Education	Public	N	Valley
11	Public Transit Agency	Public	N	Ocean

With the goal of systematically analyzing exit negotiation strategies enacted by those who successfully re-entered the IOC and generating a model for the negotiated open process of exit, I engaged in grounded theory analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). First, through open coding, I captured the activities and interactions in which collaborative partners reported to have engaged during the exit phase of Project 2040. Then, through axial coding, I examined the relations between the open codes and consolidated them into three distinct categories: (a) participating in collaborative planning groups outside of Project 2040, (b) initiating a side collaboration with regional planners, and (c) prolonging alliances that were formed for Project 2040. During axial coding, I consulted relevant literatures to refine the emerging categories and connect them with existing theoretical concepts (e.g., the BFGCM). After confirming the three categories, I turned them into theoretical themes based on the knowledge gained from the literature: (a) joining an ongoing NTS in the problem domain, (b) creating a new NTS with conveners, and (c) extending an NTS nested within the primary NTS.

Next, I returned to the data and engaged in selective coding to understand the communicative mechanisms by which the three categories of activities enabled collaborative partners’ re-entry into Project 2045—that is, how the activities constituted “exit negotiation strategies.” To do so, I isolated interviewees’ accounts of the three categories and coded their motivations for engaging in those activities as well as their reflections on how those activities helped them set the stage for their involvement in Project 2045. For instance, I coded their descriptions of how joining a collaborating group outside Project 2040 (the first theme) afforded information about key aims of Project 2045. The focus here was not on the fact that they obtained the information but on whether and how they used the information to prepare for their organization’s participation in Project 2045 in strategic ways. Hence, the codes generated in this stage reflected individual collaborative partners’ organizational-level practices in and outside the IOC. As a result, I generated grounded explanations for the three themes, which I used to create a visualized model of how an open process of exit is negotiated (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

A visual illustration of findings: How an open process of exit is negotiated in a problem domain (i.e., regional planning) consisting of multiple NTSs.

Lastly, I conducted a negative case analysis of the interviews with the four organizations that did not successfully re-enter Project 2045. The purpose was to understand whether the data would support or contradict the exit negotiation patterns suggested by the grounded model (e.g., if the unsuccessful cases did or did not involve the same negotiation strategies; if they did, were they executed differently, how and why?). While reading the interviews, I used open coding to capture the four collaborative partners’ activities and motivations during the exit phase of Project 2040 while simultaneously creating analytic memos comparing the emergent codes with the model. I found that the four organizations did engage in a similar activity as the first theme identified from successful cases, but their motivations and approaches were indeed very different; they did not engage in activities involved in the second and third themes. Thus, I confirmed the successful exit negotiation processes theorized in the grounded model as the unsuccessful cases did not involve the same communicative patterns.

Joining an Ongoing NTS Within the Problem Domain

Participating in Project 2040 offered collaborative partners opportunities to learn about various collaborative planning processes outside of the IOC, such as task force groups and committees, which operated independently to focus on different regional issues. Throughout Project 2040, conveners would share reports from those external groups, and sometimes, members of the groups attended the IOC meetings to share their inputs. Although all collaborative partners became aware of the various NTSs embedded in regional planning, only those who successfully entered the next IOC (Project 2045) joined them as a way to set the stage for their future collaborative involvement.

To illustrate, Corey, a director of a county traffic congestion management agency (“traffic agency”), joined Project 2040 in hopes to improve the disconnect in the transportation data sets used by different organizations in the region, which had made it difficult for them to produce coherent future growth projections. Conveners agreed to Corey’s involvement because his agency had extensive traffic data from its county which could inform the IOC process. During his participation in Project 2040, Corey learned about an informal workgroup organized by conveners, which was “an autonomous group that discusses any issues related to advanced transportation analysis” (Aiden, convener). Aiden started this group a few years ago when traffic modeling became a controversial topic following the introduction of a new technology that challenged the existing analytic frameworks. Because the IOC relied on big data analysis to identify transportation patterns and make long-term plans, members of the workgroup acted as technical advisors for Project 2040 when their inputs were needed.

After learning about the collaborating workgroup which had similar goals and expertise as his agency’s (i.e., transportation modeling), Corey had his employee (Tim) join the group while Project 2040 was reaching its final phase. Tim explained that the collaborating group met monthly based on “voluntary participation of representatives from city and county agencies all over the region.” Tim further described his experience in the workgroup as follows:

[Participating in this group helps us] be aware of what others are doing from a technical perspective . . . we try to keep up. If others are doing something innovative, the group would ask them to present about that, so that we are not behind. In a recent meeting, automated vehicles came up. It made us think, “Are we even considering those [in our analysis]?” and start discussing how we should model them in the context of long-range planning.

Having Tim involved in this workgroup was helpful not only for the agency’s learning of best practices in the problem domain but also for preparing their work to fit the long-range planning framework in anticipation of the upcoming IOC. As Tim’s quote indicates, he learned the importance of self-driving cars from the group meeting and then reported it back to his agency. During the early phase of Project 2045, Tim reported that his team was “developing guidelines [for analyzing automated vehicles] so if they (conveners) call upon us, we will have the resource ready for them to look at.” In this way, Tim’s voluntary participation in the side collaboration enabled his agency’s exit and re-entry negotiation by offering him a preview of the goals to be pursued in the next IOC as well as increasing visibility of his agency’s expertise, which helped to garner the conveners’ attention as they geared up for Project 2045.

In addition, having their organizational members join an ongoing NTS outside Project 2040 (i.e., the primary NTS) helped collaborative partners enact the negotiated exit process by mobilizing their stakeholders’ support for their future participation in Project 2045 early on. For example, Michael, the executive director of an environmental nonprofit, had one of the directors from his nonprofit, Becky, “sit on a public advisory committee [organized by conveners]” before Project 2040 ended, which was “not something we were invited to do but just a proactive way we try to insert ourselves into the process.” Becky’s participation in the advisory committee allowed her to “talk with commissioners and find out about a government funding cycle that was coming up.” Becky used the information to enhance not only her nonprofit’s chances of receiving the fund but also legitimacy of the nonprofit’s agenda by asking its external stakeholders to “send emails to commissioners and say that they would like to see the conservation program funds increased.” Although the funding outcome was not available yet during this study, Becky reported in a follow-up interview that her nonprofit had gained numerous local agencies’ buy-in for the conservation program expansion as a result of her stakeholders’ pressures on the decision makers. When the conveners learned about this nonprofit’s move, they asked Becky’s team to help make the region’s conservation efforts more robust while they were gearing up for Project 2045. This example illustrates how participating in an outside NTS could provide collaborative partners with relevant information about the problem domain for strategizing their timely exit negotiations—not only with conveners and their internal members but also with external stakeholders who play an important role for their success in the main IOC—and increasing visibility of their continuing efforts.

From the conveners’ perspective, the various NTSs around Project 2040 offered them efficiency in organizing for Project 2045 because the workgroups and committees already involved organizational representatives with relevant expertise and familiarity with the regional trends. Mary, a convener who led a workgroup focusing on land-use development, said, “It was helpful that representatives from a lot of different agencies already got together and were talking about the issues.” Similarly, a convener who organized a technical committee said, “[The committee members are] a technical resource [who have] devoted a lot of resource to it.” Thus, without having to search for brand-new experts, conveners could turn the workgroups into “focus groups” to prepare for the upcoming IOC and then into collaborative partners who could continue to offer their expert knowledge for Project 2045. One collaborator who re-entered Project 2045 in this way said, “We would have done other things to get involved [in the IOC] anyway, but the fact that we were already part of the workgroup and got plugged into the process was very helpful.”

Implied in the examples above was that simply joining an external NTS did not automatically lead to collaborative partners’ entry into Project 2045. They were committed to the goals of the NTS and regularly attended the collaboration meetings. Through their active internal and external engagements (with their home organization and stakeholders, and various domain experts), they identified key information with an eye toward the future IOC and worked to turn the information into their collaborative advantage. In doing so, as much as they gained important information to prepare for their re-entry, they also offered their own knowledge to both conveners and other members of the NTS. One convener, who recognized the value of the inputs shared by the members of the collaborating workgroups, stated his desire to reciprocate them: “I make sure whatever we are talking about [in the workgroup] also has value to them because I don’t want to waste their time.” It was through such reciprocity that collaborative partners’ participation in ongoing NTSs outside of Project 2040 became an effective exit negotiation strategy that offered valuable resources to prepare for Project 2045.

By contrast, collaborative partners who failed to re-enter Project 2045 acted somewhat opportunistically as they approached collaborating groups outside of Project 2040. Instead of joining an NTS as regular members, they attended meetings only if and when they seemed beneficial to their organization. For instance, Carol, a director of a civic engagement organization, emphasized that her organization’s main motivation for getting involved in Project 2040 was to increase her organization’s visibility. During the exit phase of the IOC, Carol said that she made efforts to attend external committee meetings “if there are big ones that might have some topic relating to our community.” She continued, “It’s good for me to go to those meetings because it makes a good impression to other people.” Similarly, Wesley, a manager of a public transit agency, explained how he attended a few committee meetings when he knew important state-wide funding issues would be discussed, because “that helps us know what other cities are asking for what, and how much money I can get for my projects.” Reports such as these indicated that the collaborative partners’ participation in the NTS outside of Project 2040 was based more on their self-oriented interests to achieve their individual organizational goals than their desire to stay involved in and contribute to the problem domain as invested partners. Thus, their sporadic attendance at collaborative meetings outside of Project 2040 did not constitute “exit strategies” for setting the stage for their re-entry into Project 2045.

Creating a New NTS Within the Problem Domain With Conveners

A second way in which collaborative partners set the stage for their re-entry was initiating a side collaboration (or a new NTS) with conveners during the exit phase of Project 2040, which would continue through the next IOC (Project 2045). As discussed earlier, conveners play an important role of shaping the direction of each project; thus, solidifying relationships with conveners offered direct opportunities for collaborative partners to negotiate the open process of exit and stay involved in the problem domain. Specifically, initiating and sustaining a side collaboration with conveners happened through an informal or formal process, each of which will be illustrated with an example below.

Pete, a health promotion director from a nonprofit community health center (“the center”), was involved in Project 2040 because his team had the expertise to conduct a health impact assessment for a roadway project led by the region’s conveners. When Project 2040 neared the end, Pete needed to turn his attention to a different project addressing rural communities’ health struggles. When Pete was organizing a field trip for the project to visit agricultural communities in the region, he recalled the time during Project 2040 when he was surprised by the conveners’ lack of understanding about how the long-range regional plan was implicated in public health issues. Pete decided to invite one of the lead conveners of Project 2040, Jin, to a field trip, believing that enlightening Jin about the seriousness of the region’s health issues could lead to the convener’s recognition of his center as an important long-term partner. Pete said, “Jin has little expertise in community health and didn’t know why I invited him . . . I just told him that he will learn a lot.” Jin accepted the informal invitation from Pete, whom he knew fairly well from Project 2040. Pete described field trip experience with Jin as follows:

We visited rural community centers and listened to their stories of how they were getting clean water . . . after a long day, we were back at the hotel, and I said to Jin, “I bet your head is about ready to explode” [laugh]. And he was sitting there going, “Yeah, I learned a lot today.” And I said, “Do you know why I brought you out here now?” Jin goes, “I do public health, don’t I?”

Pete’s narrative above illustrates how his initiative enhanced solidarity between him and the convener based on their shared sense of responsibility for the region’s public health. Jin’s realization of the inseparable relation between regional planning and public health led to a continued dialogue with Pete’s health center about possible collaborative activities to be organized during the transitional period between Project 2040 and 2045, such as an informal workshop to “find more opportunities to improve people’s lifestyles to be healthier and safer” among health and planning experts in the region. Another convener who worked closely with Jin said, “Having a relationship with them [the center] and knowing their needs and missions assist us in understanding how we might help people receive transportation or housing services in the long run.” Pete explained how the conveners’ increased familiarity with his center’s work facilitated his entry into the next IOC:

When I call them, I am not just a guy from X anymore. They’ve seen me involved and put in time and energy . . . it’s not that they give me millions of dollars or anything, but they think of me when they see opportunities that I may be interested.

The example above showed how collaborative partners created a loosely structured NTS with conveners outside of Project 2040 to enhance their solidarity and familiarity, which became the social and communicative mechanisms enabling their negotiation of re-entry into a future IOC. The next example shows how collaborative partners engaged in a similar exit negotiation strategy via a formalized side collaboration project with conveners. Sandy, a program specialist from a county health department, participated in Project 2040 after learning that the region’s planners (conveners) had been concerned about how “the two fields [planning and health] had become so siloed over time.” Being involved in Project 2040 helped her realize that there was much more interdependence between their work and the conveners’ than she initially expected, which led her to request a meeting with the conveners toward the end of Project 2040. In the meeting, Sandy suggested, “It would be great to exchange resources and make more education happen bilaterally . . . we can have you connect with our health analysts, and you can have our data.” A staff member from Sandy’s team explained their motivation: “if we can help the planners understand what is occurring in the communities as a result of public health policy, we can help to mitigate some of the harms through their long-range plans.”

After the initial meeting, the conveners and the health department staff continued to discuss ways to stabilize their collaborative efforts. One idea suggested by a convener was to “make one of the health department staff a member of our advisory committee” (Adam), which reflected the first theme of joining an ongoing NTS outside of Project 2040. However, Sandy’s team was dissatisfied with this idea as they did not believe that sitting through the “long and boring committee meetings” would be helpful for achieving their mutual goals; rather, they hoped to “find a clean project we can do right away and stabilize the partnership” (Omar, a director of the health department). The idea proposed by Omar, after his extensive research on possible collaborative opportunities, was to apply for funding to support their data integration initiative. Once the conveners agreed to this idea, Sandy and Omar led a series of workshop to develop a joint funding application.

In a follow-up interview during the early phase of Project 2045, Omar reported that the funding had been approved (by a national funding agency) and that their collaboration project was in progress. Adam, the convener who was part of this NTS, said, “Given the efforts we have made to integrate our existing data and our plan to collect some new data together . . . [we expect] systematic changes in the region.” Considering the impact this project would have on the regional planning process, the health department staff’s involvement in Project 2045 was naturally expected. In this case, I observed less interpersonal dynamics between the collaborative partners and conveners compared with the earlier case of an informal collaboration, but the formalized side collaboration afforded the health department staff similar communicative mechanisms of demonstrating their continued relevance and commitment to the conveners through their ongoing engagements outside of Project 2040. Most importantly, Omar and Sandy’s proactive initiative to identify and negotiate a project in which they could become equal, long-term partners with the conveners were crucial for enacting this strategy and stabilizing their presence in the problem domain.

Unlike collaborative partners who recognized the important role of regional planners as conveners and created a side collaboration with them, those who did not re-enter Project 2045 minimized regional planners’ convening power as well as their own power in enacting collaborative initiatives. For example, Hunter, a representative of a local public transit agency, did not believe that working with conveners would bring any collaborative advantage: “[During Project 2040] they were attentive to our ideas, but they do not have any power because the project is driven by politics to a great degree . . . the few powerful elected officials dominate the process.” Accordingly, Hunter had a passive outlook on his agency’s re-entry into Project 2045: “If the political leaders happen to be progressive, it can be a great thing for us, but if not . . . [re-entry is unlikely].” Similarly, Vince, a neighborhood association representative, assumed that conveners’ work outside of Project 2040 would not have much impact on a future IOC: “I don’t know how many people actually attend [the external workgroups and committees] . . . they [conveners] don’t seem to be doing much, only to satisfy their public participation requirements.” Based on this belief, Vince disconnected his ties with conveners after Project 2040 and reported having had no engagement with the conveners during the second interview. Although both Hunter and Vince could reconnect with the conveners at a later point during Project 2045, they would have to make greater efforts to fill the relational and information gap between the IOCs compared with those who solidified collaborative relationships with the conveners through proactive exit negotiations.

Extending an NTS (Coalition) Nested in the Primary NTS

A third way in which collaborative partners set the stage for their entry into a future IOC was extending the alliances they formed specifically to enter the IOC the first time. Two collaborative partners of Project 2040 in my sample were nonprofit coalitions, which I conceptualize as NTS nested in the primary NTS to indicate that they were collaborating groups existed and operated within the context of the larger collaboration project (Project 2040). A coalition is “an organization of organizations working together for a common purpose” (Himmelman, 2001, p. 277) and shares similar characteristics as an NTS described by Stohl and Walker (2002) including temporariness and overlapping memberships. The two coalitions were organized separately and voluntarily by small local nonprofits that wished to influence the regional planning process. One focused on addressing social justice issues (20 nonprofits) and the other on environmental issues (eight nonprofits). Initially, the nonprofits came together and agreed to participate in Project 2040 as a single entity through an informal process, but over the course of the 4-year IOC process, they developed structures around task distributions and decision making. The coalition membership period was not formally and explicitly stated when they were formed, but it was implied that the nonprofits would be committed to their joint efforts for (at least) the duration of the IOC project which was 4 years.

Working as coalitions offered the nonprofits collaborative opportunities they would not have had if they participated in the IOC as individual entities, including the fact that they were able to join Project 2040 in the first place. However, over time, issues of power imbalances emerged within the coalitions, primarily because the nonprofits with most resources (e.g., time, money, and expertise) became informal leaders and began to appear to some as though they dominated the coalition’s voice. For example, Yana, a director of a community youth organization (a member of the social justice coalition), said,

We rely on the leading organizations because we can’t sit through the [Project 2040] meeting and understand what’s happening . . . As a coalition, we pick and choose what we get involved in, and they are not always interesting to my organization.

At the same time, the leading members also reported their struggles with the power imbalances. Mark, a director of a nonprofit who led the environmental coalition, explained how “playing the translation role [between the coalition members and the conveners] is a very difficult and time-consuming task.” Furthermore, Meg, a director of a human rights nonprofit who helped to lead the social justice coalition, described having to share credit for the coalition’s success with many other nonprofits:

When we accomplished our goals [through our participation in Project 2040], an agency that funded some of our member nonprofits took the credit, even though the funding didn’t benefit the coalition as a whole . . . When you have all these groups working together, it is a very complicated story, like academics dealing with the author order in a big project.

Given the coalition members’ frustration with the internal power imbalance issues, dissolving the coalitions after Project 2040 was a possible option to consider, especially for the leading nonprofits who felt that they had the capacity to enter the future IOC (Project 2045) without the smaller nonprofits’ involvement. For example, Zach, a director of a nonprofit that led the social justice coalition, described that he approached the conveners when Project 2040 was reaching its end to negotiate his organization’s involvement in Project 2045 as an independent entity. He proposed his nonprofit’s ideas and vision for the next long-range regional plan, but the conveners’ response was not supportive as “they refused to evaluate our proposed plan against their existing draft plan.” After this failed attempt at re-entry negotiation, Zach realized that “targets like the MPO [the conveners’ organization] is really big and slippery, and hard to get your hands around” referring to the fact that conveners worked with numerous large stakeholder organizations in the region and that bringing their agenda to the conveners’ attention would be challenging without a large body of advocates. Considering that his coalition joined Project 2040 the first time as a result of pressuring the conveners with the help of various nonprofits, such an unwelcoming response from the conveners to his single nonprofit’s suggestion was not very surprising to Zach, but it was a reminder of the coalition members’ interdependence in their continued success and accomplishment of their shared goals.

Consequently, Zach’s organization held a meeting with the coalition member nonprofits and called for their support in targeting the conveners, including “writing letters, analyses [of their proposed plan], and mobilizing community members to show up at meetings.” Also, the leading members made conscious efforts to disperse power across the coalition members, such as identifying opportunities for smaller nonprofits to get directly involved in decision making or workgroups organized by conveners outside of Project 2040 based on the nonprofits’ existing capacities. For example, Yana explained how she joined a committee chaired by the conveners during the second phase interview; normally, “opportunities like this [working closely with the conveners] do not present themselves to us as a small nonprofit” but she found the opportunity because “the leading members [of the coalition] met with the conveners recently and told them ‘you need to meet with our coalition members’” when the topic of their conversation became relevant to Yana’s nonprofit’s expertise (youth community organizing). Yana’s participation in the committee helped the coalition learn about the key priorities of Project 2045, which informed how they might reframe their agenda to be more appealing to the conveners.

The above example represents how the coalitions’ exit strategies focused on renegotiating their member nonprofits’ interdependence, power structures, and commitment in/outside of the coalitions so as to extend their alliances beyond Project 2040. Zach’s (and other leading members of the coalition) efforts to disperse power helped to convince the smaller nonprofits that extending the partnerships would be beneficial for their individual organizations and their mutual goals, and members of the smaller nonprofits who had the opportunities to join collaborating groups outside of Project 2040, like Yana, brought information back to the coalition to help strategize exit negotiations with the conveners (similar to the first theme). These active efforts to extend their alliances and signal the legitimacy of their agenda eventually garnered the conveners’ attention. A convener who witnessed the social justice coalition’s work throughout the exit process of Project 2040 described how the coalition’s social capital and collective voice became increasingly powerful, which led him to believe that their continued involvement in Project 2045 might be necessary: “They are this one big community working together . . . they had hundreds of people involved in the process, and there were letters in support of their proposed plan signed by dozens of other advocacy groups.” While their exit negotiation and entry into Project 2045 were successful, their continued negotiation of internal dynamics is expected as the IOC may require different structures than those developed in the context of the previous IOC (Project 2040).

Among the collaborative partners who did not re-enter Project 2045 in my sample, there was no other nonprofit coalition similar to the examples discussed above. Thus, I was unable to make direct comparisons to examine how extending an NTS nested in the primary NTS (Project 2040) could fail to negotiate the open process of exit. However, I identified one case which Evan, a representative of a public safety education organization, faced a similar situation as the coalition members; during his participation in Project 2040, he realized that his organization was “operating at a much smaller, local level” compared with the conveners. Realizing that the chances of getting involved and making impacts in Project 2045 would be low (“I personally don’t see that there’s something I could do about that gap between those powerful organizations and mine”), Evan completely re-directed his attention after Project 2040 to other local-level projects which would be easier to target instead of seeking to enhance his organization’s capacity to prepare for Project 2045 through, for example, forming alliances or mobilizing stakeholders’ support. Consistent with other cases of unsuccessful exit negotiations, Evan’s case exemplifies how the open process of exit only gets enacted insofar as the collaborative partners treat it as open and engage in strategic behaviors regardless of which approach they decide to take.

Theoretical Implications

The central contribution of this article is the development of a negotiated open process view based on the BFGCM (Stohl & Walker, 2002) to conceptualize organizational exit from project-driven IOCs as the process of navigating the complex collaborative environment and negotiating opportunities for future collaboration beyond the temporary projects. In the past, research on exit often adopted a closed process view and examined contexts in which organizational or relational boundaries are rigid (e.g., Davis & Myers, 2012; Giller & Matear, 2001; Harris & Sutton, 1986); in such contexts, once individuals cross the boundaries to exit the organizations, projects, or relationships, the possibility for them to retract the exit process is unlikely. In one of the studies, Giller and Matear (2001) did suggest that, if organizations imagine a possibility of the partnership being re-initiated, they should use “others-oriented” strategy and communicate in ways that make their partners perceive the termination of the partnership favorably. Yet, the study does not describe what those strategies might look like or the mechanisms by which the strategies can actually enable a re-initiation of the terminated partnerships. The present study aimed to explore such exit strategies and mechanisms in IOCs empirically from a negotiated open process view, which allowed for understanding the boundaries around project-driven IOCs as open, permeable, and negotiable (Stohl & Walker, 2002) and collaborative partners’ continued collaboration (i.e., long-term relationships) as outcomes of successful boundary negotiations during the exit process. This study offers a number of implications for extending the BFGCM and IOC research.

First, this study’s findings showed that collaborative partners’ overlapping memberships and embeddedness in multiple communicative contexts are not just constraining factors that complicate ongoing IOC processes—as assumed by the BFGCM (Stohl & Walker, 2002)—but can enable their involvement in future IOCs. As demonstrated in the findings, collaborative partners actively put themselves in multiple, relevant collaborative contexts as they neared the end of the IOC (i.e., joining, creating, or extending various NTSs in the problem domain) and then used their overlapping memberships to inform and strategize their exit negotiation of a future collaboration opportunity. This finding highlights collaborative partners’ agency in managing their engagements with various NTSs in the problem domain with an eye toward a future collaboration such that their overlapping memberships and networks can complement one another rather than constrain their collaborative activities.

Accordingly, the negotiated open process view directs researchers’ attention to collaborative partners’ future-oriented communicative strategies in and outside of their IOC during the exit process. In a recent study, Barley (2015) coined the term anticipatory work based on his finding that individuals’ anticipation to facilitate their future interactions with collaborators outside of their expertise area shapes their routine practices within their home organization or domain, such that they produce easily transferrable knowledge before the cross-boundary interactions occur. The present study extends Barley’s work by showing how anticipatory work can be motivated not only by collaborators’ need to support their ongoing project and its success but also by their desire to prepare for a project that has not yet commenced. Collaborative partners of the IOCs examined in this study engaged in such anticipatory practices to be seen as valuable potential long-term collaborators for a future IOC, such as increasing visibility of their expertise by joining additional collaborating groups organized by the IOC conveners. Also, this study suggests that anticipatory work may be most active during the exit phase of an IOC due to its temporal proximity to a future IOC and the inactiveness of collaborative work.

Conceptualizing the exit process of an IOC as a simultaneous anticipatory phase of a future IOC helps us rethink social processes in temporary collaborations. In a study of a project-driven IOC, Walker and Stohl (2012) associated the temporariness of the project with the collaborative partners’ heightened concern for their tasks over their communicative relationships (i.e., they treated each other as depersonalized roles rather than social links). Granted, the length of the NTS in their study was much shorter than the present study (10 weeks versus a 4-year process), which may explain why the collaborative process in their study was influenced more by the demands of the project at hand than the participants’ social dynamics. Regardless of the actual amount of time spent, if the collaborative partners’ communication in Walker and Stohl’s (2012) study was examined from a negotiated open process view as practices aimed at enacting (or preventing) a future collaboration opportunity, the researchers might have found that the lack of social engagements was possibly due, in part, to the collaborators’ disinterest in or failure to identify the potential for their continued partnership. As the present study showed, collaborative partners who recognize the possibility and benefit of a continued collaborative engagement will likely treat individuals around the IOC (i.e., conveners, other collaborators, and domain experts) as important sources of information and try to strengthen relationships with them. That is, the social and communicative dynamics in and around NTS may be shaped not necessarily by the time constraint put on the collaboration project but by collaborative partners’ anticipation of their post-exit activities and/or relationships.

Second, this study extends the BFGCM and the IOC literature by providing insights about the important role of conveners in the negotiated open process of exit. As discussed earlier in this article, the BFGCM emphasizes the temporary and nonhierarchical structure of project-driven collaborations, but it does not explain who has the organizing power to impose and manage the time constraints on the collaborative project. Consistent with previous IOC research (Cooper & Shumate, 2012; Heath & Isbell, 2017; Woo, 2018), this study highlighted conveners who are positioned to bring various stakeholders together and initiate IOCs in response to environmental exigencies (i.e., regional planners who activated and oversaw a 4-year long-range regional planning project in response to the federal mandate). The study findings add to the literature by showing that not all IOC participants recognize conveners’ power, but those who do recognize it can have opportunities to enhance their capacity to secure future collaborative engagements through their continued engagements with the conveners.

All three exit strategies discussed in the findings involved collaborative partners’ targeted interactions with conveners, which offered them direct and indirect opportunities to stay involved in the problem domain and prepare for a future collaboration, whereas those who failed to re-enter the IOC denied the conveners’ power and minimized their interactions during the exit process. While some collaborative partners’ perception that the problem domain is largely driven by its political contexts may be true, maintaining ties with conveners during/after their exit from the IOC can still be beneficial for their organizational success. As conveners (regional planners) shared during my fieldwork, they generally do not have decision-making authority, but their power and credibility come from the fact that they are connected to numerous entities in their region from the past and ongoing collaborating groups they convened. That is, collaborative partners can expect that their ties with conveners can help them increase their communication network capacities rather than bring direct influences on the IOC processes or outcomes. At the same time, given their extensive connections, conveners are likely to have an upper limit on the number of collaborative partners with whom they can sustain meaningful engagements (Palazzolo, Serb, She, Su, & Contractor, 2006), in which case they may consider collaborative partners who share stronger ties with them (e.g., high solidarity, reciprocity, and trust) for collaborative opportunities more than their weak ties. Thus, collaborative partners may consider not only maintaining their ties with conveners via their exit negotiations but also strengthening and stabilizing the relationships as shown in the second theme of creating a new NTS in the findings. Future research can further explicate the interdependence and relational dynamics between conveners and IOC participants (e.g., development, maintenance, and termination) and their impacts on IOCs.

Lastly, this study conceptualized problem domain as the communicative environment in which IOCs are embedded, showing how it relates to collaborators’ negotiations of continued partnerships during their IOC’s exit process. In a study of IOC networks’ evolution, Shumate, Fulk, and Monge (2005) expected similarities in organizational type (i.e., homophily), among others, to influence organizations’ decision to retain alliances. But the researchers did not find support for the hypothesis and called for research identifying more comprehensive indicators of homophily to predict partner retention. The present study is unable to draw conclusions about the effects of IOC participants’ backgrounds due to the limited sample size; however, a grounded analysis of their exit strategies revealed that those who successfully secured involvement in a future IOC (which involves partner retentions) shared interest in and commitment to the problem domain, which was evident in their voluntary participation in various NTSs around Project 2040. By contrast, those who did not engage authentically in various collaborative systems in the problem domain, or view themselves as important players of the domain, were unable to negotiate their (re)entry into the IOC. This may suggest that collaborative partners’ similarity in their ability to engage in “domain-level thinking”—a skill necessary to adapt to and be prepared for a complex, interconnected environment (Gray, 1985)—can be an indicator of homophily and a potential predictor of partner retention. To better understand how long-term collaborative relationships are implicated in a problem domain, future research can explicate what constitutes or affords IOC partners “domain-level thinking” capacity and explore whether/how the organizations’ similarities in such capacity affect their long-term partnerships.

Pragmatic Implications

This article offers insights about how organizations might approach and prepare for their exit from IOCs based on their goals, resources, and capacities. Among the three exit strategies identified in this study, the first one of joining an ongoing NTS in the problem domain is most suitable for organizations with relevant expertise they can contribute to the IOC’s problem domain and/or wish to expand their collaborative networks beyond the IOC partners and conveners. As illustrated in the findings, organizations can increase efficiency in managing multiple memberships and communication links by placing knowledge brokers (Meyer, 2010) in various collaborating groups outside the IOC, who bring the learned knowledge back to their home organization. Even if this approach does not lead to their immediate participation in a new collaboration project, their exposure to various NTSs in the problem domain will help them keep abreast of other stakeholder organizations’ best practices and expertise which, in turn, will increase their organizational capacity to make informed decisions about future collaborative involvement and partner selections.

The second strategy of initiating a side collaboration with conveners (creating a new NTS) would be beneficial to organizations that have concrete ideas and resources to strengthen their targeted partnership with the convening organization. This approach requires organizations more energy and time commitment than joining a pre-existing collaborating group because their members have to take on the responsibility of activating and sustaining the new NTS. While the cost of utilizing this approach is high, creating overlapping projects and shared memberships with conveners outside of the IOC will solidify their collaborative relationships, through which they can receive rich insights and resources tailored to their organization. Also, they will have opportunities to increase visibility and legitimacy of their organization by being closely associated with conveners who are centrally positioned in the problem domain.

The third approach to exit negotiation identified in this study (i.e., extending alliances formed specifically for participating in the IOC) applies to organizations that do not have sufficient capacity to (re)enter large-scale collaborative projects without the support of their alliances. This approach requires collaborative partners’ understanding that, by (re)entering an IOC as a collection of organizations, their collaborative accomplishments will necessarily occur at the coalition-level. Thus, they need to develop appreciative skills and practices to recognize their communicative assets as a collective, such as shared identity and collective agency (Heath & Isbell, 2017; Koschmann, 2016) throughout their participation in the IOC. Furthermore, coalition members should reflect on and renegotiate their interdependence, relationships, and power structures in anticipation of their future before the IOC ends, such as whether and how they might be able to utilize and adapt their collective assets for which post-exit activities.