**1. Introduction**

Health and social care integration has been underway across Scotland for the past 3 years. It involves a wide range of large and small, public sector and voluntary organizations working together in ways which are completely new for them and throws up a wide range of interorganizational dynamics. The authors are partners in a small business (Animate) specializing in supporting interorganizational and intraorganizational work. In this article we have chosen to focus on a large contract supporting health and social care integration across Scotland. We start by exploring the context, then describe our overall approach, focusing in detail on how we worked in one area as illustrative of our practice across the whole. Finally we clarify our learning about six practices, which we have found to be at the heart of developing the kind of interorganizational relationships which enable organizations to truly collaborate. We know that collaborating is not easy; by exploring the learning from our own practice, we hope to support other collaborations to achieve their potential more easily.
