Yet in the face of this warning I have faith. I have faith that the need for us living beings to connect and to belong will ensure that we will work together to take the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere.

What evidence do I have for this faith? I offer a couple of pictures.

The first picture is a scene I see most days as I drive past this sheep and horse duo. They seem to symbolize what is so powerful about relationship and belonging. On first glance you would wonder what they have in common, yet their connection persists day after day, week after week and to my passerby knowledge, year after year.

The second picture is of a Sri Lankan woman, her husband and a Queenstown local. After eight years in New Zealand, Dinesha Amarasinghe, her husband and her three sons have been told they will be deported back to Sri Lanka because Dinesha has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Queenstown locals took to the streets this week to protest this threatened deportation. Several hundred people marched through the centre saying the family was a valuable part of the community and urged authorities to re-think their stance.   Dinesha’s reaction was to say“It means so much to me. Now I know we are not alone.”

That is the crux of it all I think.  We are not alone.  We living beings have each other and we have the possibility and opportunity of working with each other to navigate the mess we humans have made.  This will take pursuit of relationships.

By relationship I mean the three layers of relationship:

1. Relationship with self
2. Relationship with others
3. Relationship with the world around

How fortunate we are to have these options. We are not locked alone in a bare room rather we are operating in a landscape rich with possibilities to connect and work with others.

Take heart and take action today at all three layers of relationship.

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Some commentators are predicting a government term that will be a mess with the coalition partners being unable to agree on decisions. This blog suggests that the diversity of the three partners provides a valuable opportunity to do politics in a different way.   I am heartened by a comment of incoming Prime Minister Jacinda Adern where she says:

“I am not willing to do politics as usual. I do bring a different approach.

I favour being able to collaborate where I can.”

With such a strong intention to collaborate from the leader of our country it is useful that there are plenty of collaborative tools and frameworks that our politicians can call on to guide their actions. I have written before about the many strategies for change and how important it is to focus on thinking differently, working together and behaving differently.

As I was waiting for Winston Peter’s announcement, I found myself doodling the shape of some of the frameworks that I use to support collaborative practice. The resulting picture below (that happens to employ the colours of our new coalition government!) does look like a scribbled mess. Yet to me, this is a more accurate representation of change than the oft-depicted linear process.

Let us briefly look at the frameworks depicted in this scribble:

The black diamonds represent the double diamond model of design thinking[1]. Here you have two phases of divergent to convergent thinking, one to confirm the problem definition and one to create the solution. Using both phases enables possibilities to be explored in creating desirable outcomes for the end user.

The green curve represents the U of the U Lab[2]. This is a framework that focuses on cultivating the interior conditions for creating profound economic and societal change. In other words, changing the world should be connected with changing your self.

The red loops represent the five steps of the Power of Co[3] from collaboration specialists Twyfords. This is a pathway that inspires, supports and reminds collaborators to use rigorous process and appreciative mindsets.

All of these frameworks:

• Value the crucial role that people with lived experience have in understanding the problems and co-creating solutions.
• Emphasise the need to iterate as much as possible making time to do this.
• Encourage going slow to go fast so that problems are commonly understood before solutions can be quickly generated and tested.

Dealing to our societal problems is not linear. It is disordered and requires a combination of rigorous process and appreciative mindsets to be successful. I am hopeful that the new coalition Government will bring such process and mindsets to their first term.

So, bring it on Labour, NZ First and the Greens. Bring your different ways of thinking and doing to the table. Iterate iterate iterate. Keep the core purpose of a better life for Aotearoa’s people and environment as the beaming light while ensuring a strong economy fuels that light. Stand in the mess and make sure kindness, empathy and hope infuse every part of your collaborative practice along the way.

[1] There are many websites on Design, one being www.designcouncil.org.uk

[2] www.presencing.org

[3] www.twyfords.com.au

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I look forward to an equally useful jog for us to mind our p’s when we collaborate. By p’s I mean Perspective, Power, Privilege and Pain.

Taking part in a collaborative process without minding these p’s is possible, yet it is a little like swimming across the surface of a coral reef. You will be oblivious to the diverse underwater ecosystem that can be experienced by diving a little deeper.

Perspective
We all see and experience the world through our own lens. For effective collaboration we need to bring a range of lenses from a diversity of people. This enables the necessary perspectives, knowledge and values for solution building.

The p to be minded is the profound belief that the different perspectives are needed and valued.

Power
Power is about the ability to affect change. There are many ways of understanding power. A collaborative process challenges some of the more traditional ‘power over’ concepts that arise through authority or knowledge.

Instead collaborative processes value ‘shared power’ where all collaborators have power to affect change.

The p to be minded is to be honest about existing power dynamics and to pursue an intention to share power with all collaborators.

Privilege
A privilege is a special right or advantage granted or available only to a particular person or group. Brenē Brown describes it as “what we get that we haven’t earned.” She posits that it is crucial to own our stories, including our privileges, in order to write a different story of equity.

The p to be minded is to be honest about your own privilege and how this privilege contributes to existing dilemmas and may contribute to desired futures.

Pain
By acknowledging our privilege we acknowledge others’ pain. It is that pain that is often the prompt for people to gather and collaborate as a means of alleviating the pain.

The p to be minded is that those with lived experience of pain must be a fundamental part of collaborative processes to build futures without the pain.

The p’s will always be present when humans come together. They are hot spots and tackling them can be a confronting activity. This blog is not advocating tackling the p’s as the first step in your collaborative process. Rather I am advocating that all collaborators be mindful of their p’s as a necessary and ultimately fruitful path to tread when collaborating.

In this way, bit-by-bit we will experience deeply rewarding collaborations and collectively create desirable outcomes for our society.

PS. This blog was inspired in part by the amazing Brené Brown’s livestream on Facebook where she talks about Charlottesville in August 2017.

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1. Peaks and valleys

2. Emergence

3. Dealing with fear and risk

4. Self responsibility

5. Having fun

Peaks and valleys
Lambing this season has been a journey of peaks and valleys. There have been peaks of thriving twins and triplets with attentive mothers. There have been valleys of worrying about feed and dealing with bad weather and there has been the odd ravine of ewe and lamb loss through accident and sickness.

Much of collaborating is valley-like where you work to understand each other and the dilemma you collectively face. Then you have the peaks where you reach common ground and agree on some solutions to trial. The ultimate peaks come when the original dilemma subsides and outcomes are achieved.

Being mindful that there are peaks and valleys encourages all collaborators to find cadence as they work together. This cadence prevents burn out and enables celebration of the peaks along the way.

Emergence

As I sat down to write this blog a neighbour with whom we share a driveway phoned to say: “Your lambs are in the drive.” So out I went and somehow managed to guide 3 random variables, otherwise known as lambs, back into the paddock.

When collaborating in complexity, you never know what is coming next so you need to have structures and resources in place to be ready for anything. In my case, that meant a trusting relationship with the ewes enabled me to call them towards the gap in the gate, they called the lambs through and then I could block that gap…..for now.

Fear and risk assessment
With all these unknowns you can be fearful as to what might happen and you have to take risks with your decisions. We are low on feed so needed to shift paddocks. The neighbour was keen for the sheep to go into her paddock but as a relatively ungrazed pasture it was full of toxic weeds and had hazards like a hidden creek and loose fencing. I feared for lamb death and liver damage to the ewes. After identifying the weeds, I took advice from 3 livestock experts and then made the decision to use the neighbour’s paddock.

When collaborating in complexity, you need to take on as much information as you can and then weigh the risks to make a decision. You must tackle fear with courage and accept responsibility for the outcomes.

Self-responsibility
Even though collaboration is about working with others and the collective, it is also ultimately about you as an individual. It is about you stepping up and taking action even when it is hard.

For me that meant helping a ewe with a prolapsed uterus birth her dead twins. Reaching deep to get those dead lambs out was a stretch for my courage. Even though the outcome was sad with both ewe and lambs not making it, I was proud that I had acted.

Fun

I challenge anyone to watch lambs at their ‘popcorn’ hour of dusk and not smile. The lambs are simply joy in action. They pop, they jump, and they run; they smash into each other and basically have a whole lot of fun.

Collaboration can also be hugely fun and it is the humorous moments that ease the travel. The lesson from the lambs is to look for the fun and enjoy it fully.

I hope you have enjoyed this narrative from the paddock and like our lambs who are growing, you and your fellow collaborators too are growing in capacity as you work together.

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“We’re all losers at something and we are all winners at something. But you only lose if you don’t learn.

You either win or you learn.”

Now I am generally not a fan of language like losers and winners but I found this sentence reassuring as I came to a decision last week.  I have been promoting some public workshops to build collaborative fitness in the urban development sector.  The aim was to run the workshops in September and November but here I was in late August and the registration numbers just weren’t stacking up.

As I spoke with various stakeholders in the diverse world of urban development, I heard many things.  I heard that the need for collaborative fitness is accepted, that the interest in building skills and mindsets to collaborate well is high and that there is a willingness to get a collaboration specialist like me to help out.

What was not so evident was the necessary space (time, mindset and resources) for clients to leave their immediate work systems and participate in a public workshop.

So I have learned. I am going TO my clients more rather than expecting they can come out and learn in a public setting.  I have taken on a mix of projects that combine facilitation, training and coaching with most of them being run in-house.  I have cancelled my two public workshops.

Has this experience been a loss?  I think not as I have learned (and re-learned) a number of things, not the least being the importance of holding strategic and tactical thinking at the same time.

When working in complexity it is crucial to keep the overall strategic purpose firm whilst being nimble and flexible with your tactics.

My overall purpose is to support the build of collaborative fitness in all sectors so that desirable and sustainable outcomes can be cultivated for New Zealand.  The tactics I take to achieve this purpose will move with the energy of my clients.

Many a trainer has had to cancel an event and I have not given up on the medium of public workshops where a diversity of stakeholders can learn and practice their collaborative fitness.  Right now however I understand the importance of supporting clients where they are at in their systems.

I am sure there will be more wins and more learning ahead. Having the ‘win or learn’ frame has helped me make the most of my recent experience.  I wonder how it might help you?

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Amidst this mess, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and impotent. After all what can you do to navigate this complexity? Two of the simplest yet most magical tools I have observed that anyone and everyone can do are to Listen and Appreciate. I will muse more on the art of listening in another article, for today I want to comment on what it is to appreciate.

The Oxford Dictionary defines appreciation as “the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something.” Another definition is the “recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of people and things.”

Bringing appreciation into your daily life is a profound practice that enables you to operate at your best. Bringing appreciation into collaborative processes takes that further and can unleash the combined experience, knowledge and wisdom of the collaborators.

Doug Avery, New Zealand author of The Resilient Farmer, says, “when you wake up every morning and you are grateful for what you have got, you have got the door already open to have a better day.”

I love his phrasing of having “the door already open” as isn’t this exactly what we are aiming for when we take part in collaborative processes? We are getting together in HOPE (Help Other Possibilities Emerge) for some innovation, for some better solutions to the challenges we face.

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This blog is dedicated to the memory of Trevor Hapi Howse, a dear friend and mentor who passed away on May 12th 2017.
         Haere, haere, haere. Haere ki te wa kainga.

Trevor used to say to me, “Trust in the process girl, the process will work it out.”  This would challenge my 20 something year old self who would cry “but it is the people who need to work it out!”

This blog focuses on just how important that process is for providing a container within which people can work together.

Last week my family of five participated in an escape room called the Great Escape. This is an interactive puzzle game where participants are locked inside a theme room to unravel the mystery of the room and engineer an escape within 60 minutes.

The five of us stood in the room with our diverse experiences and perspectives and proceeded to work together to unravel the clues.  The process was not linear at all.  There was no set of instructions to follow that was tidy and instantly understandable.  Instead there were circular and iterative processes in play, moving around the room and into another room (opened by a lock from a clue) and back again.

We had to be adaptive. We had to listen to each other and be open to noticing things around us. We had to let go of our preconceptions of what clues could and should be. The clues could be anything in the room from pictures to objects to smells; we just had to work it out, together.

At three minutes under the hour, we had done it.  We had collaborated to find the solution of getting out of the room.

It was a truly satisfying experience that supports my belief that “Collaboration can be liberating.”

What I was reminded of doing this Great Escape was how much you need to ‘let go’ when you collaborate with others. You don’t know the final solution, nor do they, but the combined wisdom of your diverse knowledge and perspectives will in time bring you all to a desirable solution.  As Trevor said, “Trust in the process.”

The lesson from this blog is to check that the conditions of your collaborative process are as enabling as possible. Perhaps get a facilitator experienced in collaboration to help out.  Also, see if there is an escape room game near you where you and some of the people in your collaborative process can get some practice in.  Have fun.

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I understand the power, indeed sacredness of circles and by calling my housework ‘circle work’ I therefore feel I am contributing to a bigger whole with my part of the work. Weird as it may sound, there is a peace to be found as you hang clothes and iron lovely smooth patches in cloth. We know that circles have no start and end and the household tasks similarly keep being generated with the ‘circle work’ perspective enabling me to find celebration in the process.

Collaborative processes work really effectively when ‘circle work’ of a different kind is embraced. This is the practice of gathering to collaborate in physical circles. Ditch those rows and rows of chairs passively facing the front of the room and turn the chairs into circles. Where possible, also ditch the big table that is often found in the middle of a circle of chairs and let the space in the circle be filled with possibility and common ground. Using a circle enables the basic act of turning to one another and provides a space for collective intelligence to be built.

Humans have used circles as a shape for gatherings for hundreds of thousands of years yet we seem to have slipped into a non-circular format for our meetings that interrupts how we listen, speak and understand the complexity facing us all. When we gather in a circle we are encouraged to listen deeply, to speak with intention and to notice the whole situation being discussed.

Of course ‘circle work’ involves more than the simple physical act of sitting in a circle. If you bring in linear meeting behaviours like one person setting and running the agenda and many passive participants, then the circle structure is being under-utilised.

Some principles to aim for with your circle work include

• Equity of leadership from each person in the circle
• Careful and deep listening
• Intentional and thoughtful speaking
• Consideration for the wellbeing of the whole circle

Gathering in a circle is not a one-time fix for whatever challenge that inspired you to gather in the first place. It is an ongoing practice, much like my housework. Continuing to gather in circles as you collaborate does inspire action that in turn enables lasting change to occur.

So next time you meet with others to collaborate on a challenge, check how you can get yourselves into a circle and do some ‘circle work’.

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In response we are driven to collaborate more than we have before as we acknowledge that flexible interventions around emergent properties are probably our best bet at getting desirable outcomes. However collaboration as a process itself is also beset by uncertainty.

So much is unknown and uncertain when you enter a collaborative process. Just a few of the questions that can swirl in people’s minds are:

Will it work?
Who are these other people I am working with?
What do they think?
What do I think?
Will we be able to influence decisions?
and so on….

The Power of Co framework, depicted below, offers a slice of certainty amidst this noise. Sometimes I refer to the Power of Co as a handrail that keeps you on track regardless of the terrain you cover. When everyone in the collaborative process knows where they are at with the five iterating phases of the Power of Co, people can focus their considerable energy on building wise solutions.

Just last week I was reminded of the calmness that the Power of Co can bestow on what is a messy space of human interaction. I had opened a meeting of a multi-stakeholder group, with whom I have been working for 10 months, with a prayer. The first two verses of this well known prayer written by Reinhold Niebur around 1926 go like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

The group had been building their collective wisdom over the preceding months and had reached collective decisions on several areas and was about to share their recommendations with the penultimate decision makers. Judgement time. Has this collaborative process worked?

Rather than feeling a build of tension from the group as a binary logic was applied to their collaboration of WORKED/DIDN’T WORK, the group was calm. They had the Power of Co framework in their DNA and knew that there had been outputs all along the way of their 10 months of collaborating. ‘It’ was working and would continue to work as the group iterated and influenced and innovated.

The Power of Co framework enables you to have a common language for the “wisdom to know the difference” between things that can be changed and things that cannot. It also provides a space of certainty that contributes to people doing their best thinking.

Call Twyfords today if you want to explore bringing some certainty to your complex situation.

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In my pre-parenting days I used to participate in all sorts of events from mountain biking to swimming and kayaking. I would assess my fitness level based on how I handled the rigors of the event and most importantly how I recovered from an event and got inspired for another event. Over time and with practice my fitness levels increased so that I became more confident and could take on more events.

It is this kind of confidence and willingness to take on more complex challenges that I look for as my clients build their collaborative fitness. We humans need a high level of collaborative fitness so we can tackle the complexity that surrounds us from poverty to obesity to environmental degradation and more.

As a recap on a blog I wrote in May 2015, my definition of collaborative fitness is the combination of mindset and practice that best addresses complexity. Like physical fitness, there is no one ideal of collaborative fitness but there are commonly held features that characterize a collaboratively fit group of people. These include the quality of listening and generative dialogue and a willingness to co-define problems, co-design processes, co-create solutions and implement the solutions together.

I was part of an event the other day that proved to be a test of the collaborative fitness of a multi-stakeholder group with whom I have been working for over six months. The ‘event’ took place when two guests attended a group meeting in proxy for two regular group members. These guests operated in a way that wasn’t congruent with collaborative principles and the meeting became tense and difficult to navigate.

The real indicators of the group’s collaborative fitness were revealed in the aftermath of the meeting. The multi-stakeholder group has an online forum where conversations can continue between meetings. A rich conversation took place that revealed an awareness by the group of how far they had come with regards to trust and working relationships.

The group’s recovery from this uncomfortable event was swift and healthy. The group demonstrated self-awareness of their collaborative fitness that will really assist them as they take on the next phase of their collaborative process.
One test down, bring on some more!

The post Taking a collaborative fitness test appeared first on FOLKUS.

It also became clear that the participants had their own perspectives on what they understood collaboration to mean and these perspectives could vary quite significantly from the meaning others held for the same term. The resulting discussion at the workshop was wide-ranging and at times ambiguous.

My background in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) helped me to reflect that part of what was going on at this workshop was the nominalisation of the term collaboration. Nominalisations are verbs or process words that have been frozen in time and become nouns. We turn the actions or processes into things or objects.

The very title of the workshop illustrates the action of collaborating being nominalised into Collaboration: How to do it.  It can be useful to nominalise as it enables complex aspects of our experience to be expressed in a single word. This provides a focal point around which interested people can gather, such as at this workshop.

However, it can also severely limit our ability to communicate the richness of our experience to other people by deleting useful information. An interesting effect of nominalisation is that people are removed from the processes and instead are replaced with things to which responsibility can be assigned. We can rid ourselves of any responsibility by blaming the process.

It seemed to me that this was happening at the workshop where collaboration was being discussed as if IT is a tool outside of us that will result in outcomes. The following quote from is a useful reminder about the relationship of people and processes: “It is people not processes that are responsible for outcomes and people can change their behaviours and modify the processes until they get the outcomes they desire.”

So how do we people involved in collaborative processes change our behaviour and modify the processes until we get the outcomes we desire? We keep up conversations like the workshop mentioned and we pay attention to the preciseness of our language. We invest the time to question each other and fully understand what the other person is saying to us. We ‘let go’ more and build trust, relationships and shared accountability with our conversations.

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Instead of searching for the non-existent silver bullet for our complex challenges, why don’t we do a better job at using something we already have packaged for free in every single one of us – the golden fuel of listening? Golden fuel is a term used by suppliers of straight vegetable oil technology whose job it is to convert diesel vehicles to run on 100% free waste vegetable oil. The outcome of using golden fuel is reduced environmental impact and less cost.

I am wondering whether the quantity and quality of our listening is collaboration’s golden fuel that can convert our business as usual processes to ones that deliver enduring solutions and like the vegetable oil, at less cost. Listening may indeed be the golden fuel that drives our collaborations to success.

However if you were to examine most meetings that take place all around the world every day, you might think that the power of listening is the biggest secret on the planet. We know that listening is important but how often and how well do we really do it?

Taking part in the Theory U learning process back in early 2015 gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to listen. Theory U talks about 4 levels of listening:

Level 1: Downloading where we reconfirm old opinions and judgments

Level 2: Factual listening where we notice differences

Level 3: Empathic listening where we see through another’s eyes

Level 4: Generative listening where we connect to an emerging future

You can track your listening quality by noticing the level to which you are listening each day. I was stunned to realize just how much Level 1 listening and how little Level 4 listening I was doing.

For collaborative processes to really shift into spaces that generate innovative and desirable outcomes, we as collaborators need to do a lot more Level 3 and 4 listening. Although this means changing some habits and making more time available, I truly believe it can be that golden fuel we are looking for.

So, whatever vehicle you choose to drive on your collaborative process, be it a Collective Impact, Social Labs, Power of Co, Results Based Accountability or a custom build by your community – make sure it is powered by that golden fuel of listening. Ensure that your vehicle is built with ample time and opportunity for deep listening between all participants. With this golden fuel your process will keep moving and who knows where you will drive yourselves? Chances are it will be to outcomes that serve and are desired by a diversity of interests.

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When faced with this pressure it is understandable that people feel they have to act, make decisions and find solutions fast. The irony is that the rush to make decisions and identify solutions can intensify the pressure with undesirable consequences. The following quote by Dr Glen Robertshaw who specialises in environmental decision-making illustrates this well.

 “Trying to steam-roll through the decision-making process only succeeds in putting people’s backs up, creates political      resistance and makes the process take even longer.”

The alternative is to nest the collaborative action into a structure that specifies at a high level the steps everyone will take as they work together. The Power of Co is one such structure that operates at a meta level. It provides guidance on HOW people can interact but doesn’t specify the content of the interaction. Such a deliberative process enables stakeholders both action and reflection.

Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord of the Future Search Network have an entire chapter in their latest book, Lead more control less. 8 advanced leadership skills that overturn convention devoted to controlling structure and not people. They say that with the right structures, people will learn more, teach one another and exercise a level of control you cannot impose. They go on to say that you should

                    “Control what is controllable”

This is such a relevant quote, as we know that when you work with complexity you have to use emergent practice. There is no way of knowing how all the variables in a complex situation are going to play out so you have to identify those variables you can control.

In my experience collaboration that is undertaken within an overarching structure can be a liberating experience. Everyone is given permission to listen and learn before acting. People know that it is better to not decide too soon. This lowers defensive positions that come from protecting your preferred solution and removes much of the stress of having to fix the problem.

Mira Kirvesmaki and Rasmus from the Mirum Lean Innovation Lab in Copenhagen believe that:

“The key to fostering innovation is getting the right balance between structure and flexibility.”

I support this belief and suggest that having a well understood and agreed structure in place enables the collaborators to be flexible with how they get to solutions.

Conclusion
If you are feeling undue stress – check what structure you and your collaborators have co-designed for your collaborative process. Is the structure clear and does it have commitment? Making changes to the collaborative structure can pave the way to innovative collaborative practice.

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One of the things I love about the Twyfords’ Power of Co framework is its relative simplicity of language and form. People easily grasp the five iterating steps and are comfortable with the terms used in the framework. There is one term we use however that I have noticed can make people pause, lead to wrinkling of brows, and on occasion prompt questions as to what it means. This term isdilemma.

We refer to this term in step two of the Power of Co framework that is all about co-defining the dilemma. This is the time you devote to really understanding the situation that has brought people together. There are three quotes of Albert Einstein that highlight the importance of this co-definition step:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.”

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Einstein’s quotes describe a mindset that is conducive to collaboration. This mindset understands that the bulk of a collaborative process rests in understanding the diversity and fullness of a situation. It understands that we need to go slow to go fast. It understands that outcomes will only be found if we do things differently to the way we behaved at the outset.

When we participate in a collaborative process, we could use the term ‘problem’ instead of ‘dilemma’ and if you are applying the kind of mindset referred to in Einstein’s quotes, then this will work well. If however you find some slippage to a less collaborative mindset, one that is solution-hungry, then using the term ‘dilemma’ may be useful.

The Collins English dictionary defines ‘dilemma’ as –

1) a situation necessitating a choice between two equal alternatives

2) a problem that seems incapable of a solution

Collins goes on to define the horns of a dilemma as being faced with a choice between two alternatives that are equally undesirable.

Our use of the term ‘dilemma’ is more loosely applied to mean the situation of complexity being considered. We like the way the term ‘dilemma’ acknowledges that the situations are awkward, seem incapable of solutions and choices will need to be made.

We think it is useful that the term ‘dilemma’ is not commonly used. That pause you experience when you first hear the term might enable some thinking time. Perhaps it will help us experience the problems differently; as opportunities for a new approach, rather than things to be overcome. We might value them more as opportunities for challenge, encouraging us to learn, to grow and to innovate together.

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Wikipedia defines misinformation as being “false or incorrect information, spread intentionally or unintentionally.”

The apparent misinformation on their various projects was making collaboration challenging, slowing it down and in some cases blocking momentum. The reaction of the people I talked with, ranged from a commitment to get the ‘right information out there’ to an unwillingness to participate in public forums with those doing the misinforming.

I then reflected that a number of other people in the same collaborative processes have been referring to poor information flow or lack of transparency. They are experiencing a similar level of frustration as those concerned about misinformation yet for different reasons.

These concerns highlight the very important role that INFORMATION plays in collaborative processes. Information isn’t something magical and sacred. It is data generated by some individuals and processed by others to give it meaning. An important step with collaborative processes is to share data with many people so it is processed and interpreted in diverse ways with the aim of reaching new levels of understanding. With this new and shared understanding comes the possibility of solutions to previously unsolvable dilemmas.

Information is not a neutral ground however. Information becomes FACT when people interpret and take ownership of it and can be vigorously defended when challenged. Experts have a vested interest in their information and can be threatened when their information is re-interpreted and then combined with the information of others.

Information can equal power and it is therefore important to explore what is going on in a collaborative process when concerns about information or misinformation are expressed. Perhaps misinformation is a cry to converse more? Perhaps people who appear to be misinforming are saying “I can’t process your data until you have heard my perspective.”

In conclusion, next time we hear the use of the term ‘misinformation’ – how about we pause and consider how we might listen and process data more effectively ourselves. Instead of being frustrated, should we regard the ‘misinforming’ behaviour as a useful flag to converse more? Remember that the most effective conversations mostly involve asking questions and doing excellent listening!

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Calls to Twyfords for specialist advice on collaboration come from a variety of places and spaces on the collaborative journey.

Some people call because they have been told that they have to collaborate to get funding, others call because their work has hit a rough spot of conflict, frustration or slowed progress, and others call because they can see those rough spots ahead and would like a better way to go about working together.

The Collins English dictionary defines ‘beginning’ as to start something and ‘a beginning’ as the first part or earliest stage of something.

The five loops of the Power of Co reflect that people do come to collaboration at different places. The Power of Co is an iterative framework that supports people to identify where they are at in the journey and loop back if they need to in order to move forward.

The first three loops are the foundational steps for ensuring the momentum of a collaborative process towards solutions that stick. We sometimes refer to them as preconditions. Doing the work to check off these three stages before co-creating solutions delivers dividends to a smoother and solution-generating process.

Yet it is a common experience to be working with clients who began their work at loop 4 of solution making. This can quickly lead to polarization, frustration and conflict. In working with these clients to understand what is going on, we have found that they appreciate being able to place their experience within a big picture of what is going on.

The challenges they are experiencing are not insurmountable and can be addressed with iteration with the first three loops.

This means you can ‘begin’ again and again, each time deepening the connections between stakeholders and raising the odds of co-creating innovative solutions. Over time there is a build of trust and relationships and willingness for shared accountability.

The Power of Co reminds us that there is no magic beginning point; rather there are iterations to travel as people become more willing to collaborate. The following could be described as indicators of people’s willingness. How do you rate yourself on these?

When I collaborate I am willing to:

• Trust people with my problem even though I’m not sure I trust them
• Invite them in when I am least sure about what to do
• Resist the urge to do things FOR them
• Reveal information that might highlight mistakes I’ve made
• Share decision making with those on the other side of an ideological divide
• Seek a mutual gain with competitors
• Acknowledge that ‘they’ have information that I don’t and that I really need their help
• Accept a solution that is different to the one I want

The post When does collaboration begin? appeared first on FOLKUS.

“ Collaboration is not about gluing together existing egos. It’s about the ideas that never existed until after everyone entered the room.”

Unfortunately I don’t have the source of this quote, as I would like to credit them with putting together some words that triggered me to think. I experienced all sorts of senses on reading these words. I see ramshackle buildings made of cardboard; I see smoke and mirrors; I hear dominant voices and missing voices. I feel a sense of relief when ‘everyone’ enters the room and jointly find some new ideas.

My reaction to this quote is unlimited. I am not being told what to think or feel or imagine. It is up to me. Such is the power of language that is metaphorical.

Gareth Morgan, Canadian organisational theorist and management consultant is a leading advocate of using metaphors to assist understanding of organisations. He regards metaphors as more than devices for embellishing discourse. Metaphors assist in challenging assumptions, to create profound insights and to help develop new ways of thinking.

‘Meta’ taken from the Greek means to go higher or beyond. When you have a diversity of people and experience working together on a common dilemma, it is crucial that folks are able to go beyond themselves.

I have observed on many occasions the power of a story to defuse tension in a fraught situation. The tension can be between people or inside an individual. When people are tense, they are limited in their abilities to collaborate. It is crucial therefore to interrupt this tension.

Stories can be the device to defuse tension and to enable travel from a limited understanding to a wider perspective. The purpose of a metaphor is to transfer meanings and understandings from one situation to another. Metaphors are powerful ways to communicate to someone’s unconscious.

Telling a story is a soft way to share perspectives. It is “just a story” right? People can hear messages that they may otherwise block if delivered in a less metaphorical and confronting way.

In previous blogs I have talked about increasing our collaborative fitness to best ensure success when we collaborate.

The fitness tip in this blog is to be generous with your stories and to listen well to others. In order for us to effectively participate in collaborative processes, we all need to go beyond ourselves. Telling and listening to stories is part of treading that path.

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This got me thinking about the powerful impact the mind also has in collaborative processes. Albert Einstein said it succinctly that “the world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

We at Twyfords observe the impact that thinking has on the way people work together. We believe mindsets are so powerful that they massively influence the success of a collaborative process. We therefore focus a fair bit on examining mindsets with our clients. This involves a raft of activities from posing questions that may challenge people’s beliefs to facilitating periods of mindfulness.

The idea that our mind and body are interconnected is far from new, yet I think we can take some fresh lessons from research into the role the mind has with healing that will benefit our collaborative practice. Collaboration could be described as a healing process. Most if not all collaborative efforts come about as a response to a dilemma or problem that people want to cure or fix.

A couple of pertinent quotes from some of this research include that of Arthur Kleinman M.D who said:
“It’s important for the doctor to listen to the story of illness, to first solicit it, get it, hear it, permit it to be said and then to understand it, to appreciate it, to make sense of it.”

The lesson for me with this quote is the importance of really listening to the perspectives of all the voices connected to the dilemma. Take the time to get the voices, hear the voices, understand them and then co-define the common ground.

Then there is the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Phd. from the University of Massachussets who describes the role mindfulness can play:

“Mindfulness provides a simple but powerful route for getting ourselves unstuck and back in touch with our own wisdom and vitality. When we are on automatic pilot, trying to get someplace else all the time without being attentive to where we already are, we can leave a wake of disaster behind us…. Mindfulness – paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally – immediately restores us to our wholeness.”

The phrase unstuck resonates for me with recognition of the stuck place people can be in a complex situation. If mindfulness can provide a route out of that stuck place, then shouldn’t we take it?

In conclusion, collaborative processes can be fatiguing and frustrating and they can be exhilarating and rewarding. What I find so inspiring about working with collaborative processes is observing the magical power of not just one mind but many minds together.

So next time you are feeling weary with your collaboration efforts, remember you have the power – in your mind!

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The wonderful I AM film affirms this belief. Tom Shadyac, Director of blockbusters like Ace Ventura and Bruce Almighty, goes around the world and poses two questions to notable thought leaders – what’s wrong with our world, and what can we do to make it better? The answers challenge our preconceptions about human behaviour while simultaneously celebrating the indomitable human spirit.

Unfortunately you do not need to look far to find many examples of non-collaborative behaviour. Examples where insufficient or no time is given to understand different perspectives around a dilemma. Examples where information about a dilemma is not shared and in some cases actively hidden. Examples where solutions are proposed before the problems are fully understood. This inevitably leads to polarised positions and conflict.

In-depth coverage of such examples is reported in the regional magazine Bay Buzz. The magazine explores how folks in Hawkes Bay have considered two complex dilemmas in their region, one of water storage and the other of local governance. Solutions were identified early on, polarised positions were taken and community tension grew.

Despite or perhaps because of the intense emotions raised with these dilemmas, the call from many people in the community in the aftermath of a vote on one of the dilemmas is to collaborate. There is a recognition that the only way to address such complexity is to work together.

This blog asks what gets in the way of our predisposition to work together? Put simply, I think it is our mindsets and habits of operating. Mindsets are lenses through which we view the world and are formed by our life experience.

A challenge of working with complexity is accepting that our individual mindsets are not enough. We need to understand the dilemmas from many perspectives. We need to build positive relationships and trust with the multiple views and together form habits of operating that will generate desirable outcomes.

A heartening story that demonstrates expanding mindsets comes with response to the recently released Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s reportPreparing NZ for rising seas: Certainty and Uncertainty. Dunedin’s mayor, Dave Cull, says “the Council cannot say here’s the problem, here’s the solution, the Council will do it. Instead there must soon be a whole-of-city conversation about what to do.”

That is a strong beginning for collaboration.

The post We are wired to collaborate…..so what gets in the way? appeared first on FOLKUS.

Holly Snape, a Chief Executive in the New Zealand Social Service Sector, had this to say in a recent newspaper article.

“Changes in the funding structure across the sector have been an issue. There has been a move for greater collaboration, which is excellent but it’s really hard because there has also been a shift towards contestable funding models. What you have is a request to be working together but sharing of resources becomes difficult and we are pitted against each other. Contestable funding isn’t conducive to the collaboration we’re talking about.”

Her summary statement goes to the heart of the challenge. How can you collaborate when the environment is focused on competing and contestability? How is it possible to operate these two modes at the same time?

It is useful to clarify just what is meant by the two terms:

Collaboration means to ‘work together’ and has been proven to be a highly effective way of operating for complex situations. By harnessing the collective wisdom of diverse interests, innovative and desirable outcomes can be achieved.

Contestability encourages people to adopt a commercial mindset and encourages competition that will in turn encourage innovation and improved performance.

The desired outcome of both modes of operating is the same. That is, innovation and better outcomes. Yet the behaviours associated with the modes can be very different. Indeed these ways of operating are placed at opposite ends of the Tamarack continuum with contestability hanging out in the Turf end and collaboration happening in the Trust end.

Although an entire PhD could be devoted to this topic, this short blog suggests that the two modes can be used together. They are both useful when employed at the right time and with the right mindsets.

I believe that contestability is a useful mode AFTER the collaborative frame is set. It is essential to collaboratively co-define the dilemma at hand, to co-design an agreed process of working together and co-create solutions. These are the foundations for ensuring people have a shared understanding of what they are working on and working towards.

It is at the phase of delivering actions that contestability comes into its strength. Without doubt competition improves individual motivation and in turn performance. Having contestability at the phase of implementation can definitely interrupt complacency, improve performance and inspire innovation.

This role of contesting was evidenced in my swim fitness squad this morning. There was a new swimmer in the lane with me and I was inspired to swim harder than usual. The result was my personal best swim this year. I would not have achieved this result without the environment of contestability.

In conclusion, I believe that you can collaborate within contestable environments as long as the contestability is done with and not done to. This means that all the stakeholders in a dilemma (including any funders) jointly set the collaborative framework. They can then challenge each other to innovate in finding solutions that stick. This will improve motivation and overall performance so that the most desirable outcomes are achieved.

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