room for a “we.” The other is a belief in “hero celebration”: we look for a hero in every successful group and give the credit to the hero alone. Who will collaborate if they think “we” will be stolen?
Clearly it will take some work and practice on our part to understand how collaboration works and how to achieve it.
STRUCTURE OF COLLABORATION
The problem-solving process for a messy problem has three main stages: design, collaboration, and follow-through (see the figure here). Collaboration is fostered through a facilitated workshop. Variations of this process appear in Appreciative Inquiry [ 1], Straus Method [ 9], and Charrettes [ 6]. The design stage identifies all the interested parties and fruitful questions for them to explore. The facilitated workshop leads the participants through a five-stage process, described below. During the follow-through, teams organized at the workshop do their parts to implement the solution. The five stages of collaboration are:
1. Declare: The group’s leader or organizer declares a question for the group to consider. The question emphasizes new possibilities rather than current deficits. Each group member declares acceptance of the need or desire to work together on the issue, and openness to the perspectives of the others. Without the buy-in of everyone in the group, egos can get in the way and hijack the process.
2. Connect: The members take
time to become present and engaged with each other. They explain what concerns bring them to the gathering. They state their aspirations, what is at stake for each of them, and why they see a need for collaboration. They look for and acknowledge connections such as mutual friends, business interests, or education.
3. Listen to and learn all perspectives: Now the group speaks and listens, as openly as possible, to the concerns motivating each member on the issue. The goal is to expose all the concerns and learn how and why each matters to some member. Members tell stories showing how concerns affect their worlds. For example, “Low-wattage light bulbs matter to me. My company replaced a thousand incandescent bulbs and saved $5,000 on our electric bill in the first year. That’s a lot of cash for our little company.” The listening must be open and inclusive—seeking to gather many different perspectives, and avoid any initial judgment that one is better than another. Conversation is for clarification—not justification or argument. Comments beginning “What if ...” and “I wish ...” fit, but not “That won’t work.” This stage is complete when no one has any further ideas to express; everyone appreciates that the group has multiple concerns to consider; many may see a common core of concerns the group can work with.
4. Allow a “we” to develop: Members of the group continue the conversation about what matters for as long as necessary until
they develop the experience of a “we.” The early sign of group identity and solidarity is members making tentative proposals that recognize, respect, and even own the interests and concerns of the other members. The later sign is reconfiguration of concerns—for example, someone concerned for authoritarian, protective, anti-ter-rorist government might reconfigure into a concern for strong, safe, resilient community. The facilitator keeps the proposals tentative and the mood exploratory. The conversation will evolve into a shared feeling that we are all in the same mess together, and by staying together we can resolve the mess. The mess may start to unravel as the members become aware of and take care of their interlocking concerns. Occasionally, the mess will evaporate in the light of the reconfigured concerns of “we.”
5. Create together: Now the group engages with the actual work of creating projects. Some will be variations of the tentative earlier proposals, others new. To win group support, projects must address multiple concerns. Members offer to lead projects; other interested parties join the project teams. The facilitator guides members with doubts about a proposed project to question in a “we” mood of exploration, clarifying objectives and exploring consequences. For example, instead of saying, “This project will be too expensive,” the member could ask, “How will we get the resources to do this? In my experience they will be considerable. Can we refor-
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