Notes from session convened at Design for Resilience event Berkeley HUB 4/10/10

Collaboration, Leadership, Emergence, and Resilience

What do you want to get from this time and conversation?

• working on the choice between using a volunteer or hiring someone
• helping move conversation to action and implementation
• working in a non-hierarchical orgniazation
• swamp skepticism with enthusiastic emergence and results that matter
• (and how leadership can look like in that situation)
• consider if a leader is a facilitator or a decider

We can say lots of things about what collaboration is not... like not a hierarchy.

Decision making is the currency of collaboration.

Some ways of decision making:

• silent assent - the negative poll (ask people if they disagree)
• voting to discern before voting to decide (takes some of the charge out of the issue at hand)
• find what is different in your commonalities then common in your differences.
• create fall back agreements first (if we can't agree, then this happens)
• dynamic alignment

Collaborations require high quality relationships and clarity

Together, map the current state of your reality, pull in multiple perspectives

Uncertainty in the context... when you hit resistence, break it down. (No, not the resistence, break down the tasks at hand)

Focus on agreement building - what is it that we all agree on - go meta if you have to

Question for your group:

• Are we interdependent?
• To what prupose are we working?
• Do you care? Are you committed to a decision?
• Are you willing to be in conflict? Willing to be wrong?

Being empahtic to needs of others and the group as a whole.

Side bar:

How committed is the group and its members to:

• what the outcome is
• making a decision
• liking each other afterwards
• supporting whatever decision is made
• being open to being wrong/piloting a project and changing minds later
• staying involved/time commitments - ie keeping busy people involved
• empowering people to act
• action rather than discussion

Note, at the end of the session a participant came up and said to me, "you didn't assert how to do collaborative leadership... you just modeled it." Wish I could get them to write down what they meant by that.

I suspect it is about:

- asking people what they want to accomplish or inviting them to accomplish something with you

- that thing is a time-based thing that they feel they have capacity to do

- that thing is chunked in a way that makes it manageable

- people feel heard and seen

- there isn't a strong push for consensus

- leadership is facilitation... not decision-making

  --Jean Nurture Girl Russell.....Tue Apr 20 14:45:27 -0700 2010

The rest of the Design 4 Resilience open space notes are here:

http://shareable.net/blog/design-4-resilience-event-notes

  --Neal Gorenflo (Not signed in).....Tue Apr 20 15:58:04 -0700 2010

Thanks Jean!

  --Neal Gorenflo (Not signed in).....Tue Apr 20 15:58:33 -0700 2010

Thank you Neal. Off to read the other notes! Thanks for sharing the link.

  --Jean Nurture Girl Russell.....Tue Apr 20 18:59:15 -0700 2010