'Total Tourism' and How to Collaborate

I was at the Tourism Northern Ireland Conference in Belfast last week.  I take lots of notes at any conference I go to. This time, the last two things I wrote down for myself were: ‘this was a masterclass in messaging’ and ‘they’ve made collaboration operational’. 

Collaboration gets a good nod at most events. Nothing new on that front. However, this moved way past nodding to collaboration as an ambition or a worth principle. Instead, it presented it as the operating system through which the ambition for tourism in Northern Ireland can be delivered. 

Total Tourism 

Laura McCorry, CEO of Tourism NI, introduced me to the phrase Total Tourism and, through an engaging use of story and metaphor, ensured that everyone in the room that day would easily recall what it meant for themselves and the destination. 

Total Tourism drew on the Total Football approach pioneered in the 1970s in the Netherlands and went on to change the face of football (according to lots of sources, not just me). I won’t do it justice, but it boils down to every player needing to understand their own position but also understand the whole pitch. The ambition in tourism is to tangibly connect individual businesses, experiences and places so that the strength of one creates opportunity for others and, collectively, they become something bigger. 

What I particularly admired was that the conference itself seemed to be curated around this concept. 

Trust in the Team 

I found it highly symbolic that Mark Rodgers of Landmark Luxury Travel and Dalriada Kingdom Tours, was the conference host – surprisingly innovative, when you think about it, to trust a professional experience provider to provide an event experience. The default choice for conferences is to recruit an MC from the outside. There was a confidence in that choice that I really liked and it stood for trust in the system, the team and the place itself. 

Rather than importing a stage full of outside examples of best practice, the conference largely took its lead from the people, businesses and place itself. Nearly all of the speakers came from within the Northern Ireland tourism system. Businesses spoke about what collaboration looks like on the ground. Tourism NI's own team carried a remarkably consistent message from different parts of the organisation. 

There was only one external keynote speaker. Her job, appropriately enough, was to talk about how collaboration actually works. This external perspective came from Dr. Kate Simpson of Wasafiri, who works in systems change and has supported collaborations in many different settings around the globe. 

Much of what Kate said resonated strongly with things I have learned through years of working with tourism networks, partnerships and destinations. 

Three Key Insights for Collaboration

Three points in particular advanced my own thinking. They have been top of my mind so I felt it would be good to make them to subject of this month’s article. 

1. Collaboration needs a point of common purpose 

Kate talked about the importance of ‘a shared story of becoming’ as a foundation stone of collaboration.  Her point was that people do not turn up to collaborate because somebody has produced a plan, or somebody invited them to collaborate. They participate because they can see a future they want, recognise that it is relevant to them and understand that they cannot create it alone. 

While I have used different language for this over the years, the principle is very familiar. In tourism, I believe that shared story has to begin with place. The people involved in a destination will rarely have identical objectives. For example, a hotel wants to run a profitable hotel, a local authority has statutory responsibilities, a tourism authority has targets and policy commitments, a community organisation may be focused on quality of life, a cultural or environmental organisation may see the future of the place through a very different lens again. 

We do not need to flatten those differences before collaboration can begin. What we can do is recognise that the one thing everybody has in common is the place. They may want different things for it. They may disagree about aspects of its future. They may even hold very different views about tourism. They still have a stake in what that place becomes and, usually, they share the desire to want the best for it. 

This is why I keep returning to one of the central ideas within The Place Paradigm: 

If we want everyone on the same page, place is that page. 

A genuinely shared vision for the future of a place creates a much stronger starting point for collaboration than asking everybody to align around somebody else's tourism plan. If I’m really pushed on it, I think a commitment to place is the only real starting point for collaboration in tourism. Interests may differ, but the place will remain the point of common purpose. 

2.  We don’t need to break down the silos 

“The opposite of collaboration is not competition. It is silos”. 

Kate made this point and the framing really gave me a new perspective. She went on to elaborate how useful silos actually are – they’re mainly a good thing. They give us accountability, belonging, focus and allow groups of people to move at pace. There are good reasons why organisations, departments and teams develop them. 

I found myself reconsidering a phrase we hear plenty of times: breaking down silos. 

Perhaps we don't actually need to break them down. I’ve always believed in stakeholders taking ownership for the parts they can take ownership for and relieve themselves of wider burdens that they cannot control. A tourism authority should be very good at being a tourism authority. A business should concentrate on running a strong business. A council department needs clarity around its own remit and responsibilities. 

So silos in themselves are not a bad thing. What we need to develop is our ability to see beyond them when and where we can. This linked right back to Laura's Total Tourism analogy: 

Play your position and understand the whole pitch. 

The more I have thought about it, the more I think that is also a very good description of Strategic Stewardship. Strategic Stewardship asks leaders to do two things at the same time: do their own job well and also understand how their decisions connect to the wider system and the long-term vitality of the place they serve. 

3.  Collaboration doesn’t cancel out competition.  

Kate also challenged another assumption: that competition and collaboration somehow cancel one another out. She argued that they don’t and encouraged the room to be honest about where organisations need to collaborate and where they will continue to compete. 

This rings very true from my own experience in tourism. Tourism businesses can work closely together to build a destination and still compete for customers. Neighbouring towns can collaborate on an overall proposition and still want visitors to spend more time in their own town. Agencies can share an ambition for a place while retaining very different mandates, budgets and priorities. 

Communities themselves can hold strongly differing opinions. 

It would be a mistake to consider this a failure in collaboration. In fact, I increasingly think Radical Collaboration, the kind needed to take a stewardship approach, begins with accepting difference rather than trying to engineer it away. It means being clear about where we need to work together and where we can legitimately pursue our own interests.  

This is a much more grown-up idea of collaboration: not everyone agreeing, not everybody doing everything together, not endless meetings in pursuit of alignment. Rather, and much more simply, a clear understanding of our interdependence – what I can do alone, what you can do alone and what we can only do together. 

Collaboration is how stewardship gets done 

The Place Paradigm asks us to think about tourism success through the long-term vitality of place: its economy, community, culture, nature and identity. No tourism organisation can steward all of those things. Neither can a local authority, a business network, a community organisation or a government department. The outcome crosses all of their boundaries. 

So the more seriously we take the stewardship of place, the more seriously we have to take collaboration.  

Radical Collaboration requires a strong shared point of common purpose. It requires strong organisations and clear roles, alongside the ability to see beyond them. It allows for disagreement, difference and competition while being very clear about the things that require collective effort. 

Know your position. See the pitch.  Play your part. 

Want to go deeper? 

Collaboration is the operating system of Strategic Stewardship. This is one of the central arguments behind The Place Paradigm: A New Lens For Tourism Leadership, my strategic leadership paper on rethinking tourism success around the long-term vitality of place. 

It explores what changes when we move from sector thinking to systems thinking, from destination promotion to destination stewardship, and from asking “How do we grow tourism?” to asking “how do we grow the places that make tourism possible?” 

Download The Place Paradigm here: