The Relational Coordination Research Collaborative (RCRC) was founded in 2011 at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management by Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell to help organizations build relational coordination for high performance. The RCRC was co-founded by highly committed PhD students including Saleema Moore, who pioneered the RC Survey support process (later spun off as Relational Coordination Analytics in 2013), and Lynn Garvin who led our branding and marketing efforts. Heller leaders Stan Wallack, Connie Horgan and Ron Etlinger were essential for the RCRC's successful launch.
The idea for the RCRC was inspired by colleagues Tony Suchman (Relationship Centered Health Care), Ken Milne and Nancy Whitelaw (Salus Global Corporation), Dale Collins Vidal (Dartmouth-Hitchcock), Margie Godfrey (Dartmouth Institute), Thomas Huber (Kaiser Permanente), Gene Beyt (Indiana University Health), Kathryn McDonald (Stanford Health Policy), Deborah Ancona (MIT Leadership Center), John Carroll (MIT Lean Advancement Initiative), Edgar Schein (MIT Sloan School of Management) and others who championed the potential for relational coordination to serve the needs of practitioners as well as researchers.
In 2020, the RCRC was renamed the RCC to clearly signal its inclusion of both researchers and practitioners. It moved to the University of New Hampshire for two years under the leadership of Margie Godfrey. During this period of time, the RCC continued to offer partnerships, RC Cafes, newsletters and other partnership benefits. The Roundtable was offered virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022 the RCC returned to its original home at Brandeis University's Heller School under the governance of the Institute on Healthcare Systems led by Jennifer Perloff, and served by the RCC Board of Advisors.
At the same time, the Board redesigned the RCC to serve as the hub of a distributed global network of researchers and practitioners who work together to build relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect across differences. The new RCC offers an inclusive membership model and connects its members through Cafes and Roundtables, as well as Innovation Labs and a new Resource Directory with a wide array of resources offered by members of the RCC. This open innovation model reflects the fact that the RCC has become a globally diverse community applying relational coordination principles in 73 sectors and 36 countries around the world, often in ways that were not envisioned at the start.