It's in the Small Steps: Navigating Knotted Change‐Stability Tensions in Complex Collaborations

Addressing societal challenges requires collaborative arrangements that can adapt to changing environments while maintaining coherence. Existing research highlights collaborative responses to change, yet the processes through which such responses emerge remain poorly understood. Notably, collaborative change involves not only balancing change and stability but also navigating knotted collective‐individual tensions that arise in realigning interests, coordination structures, and operations. To advance understanding of these dynamics, we conduct an in‐depth longitudinal study of collaborative change in a cross‐sector disaster relief partnership. Across successive change stages, we identify stability drivers emerging from collective‐individual tensions that prompted the partners to adopt specific balancing practices. These practices enabled a change process that was incremental and fragile in progression, yet resilient in its cumulative pattern. We develop a process model that explains the dynamics of collaborative change and shows how balancing change and stability enables partners to progressively broaden and occasionally transcend collective‐individual alignment as trust and mutual understanding deepen. This study advances collaboration and paradox theory by exposing balancing practices tailored to collaborative settings that enable adaptation in dynamic environments and by proposing a gradual approach to navigating knotted paradoxes.