What I appreciate about my work is that I get to team with various consultants on various projects in various sectors. We, and our clients, are all in an evolving conversation and experiment about how to work in networked ways to create social change. Whether the context is energy efficiency, local food, transportation, or education,… Read more
Tag: Collaboration
Expanding the Benefits of Networked Work
“What makes a network alive is that there is collective learning happening. That’s the glue and the relationships are in support of that. If our goal is to collectively learn something, those are the networks or the communities that keep on going.” – Ria Baeck, on the Living Love Podcast What allows groups to co-create and… Read more
Conversations that Seed Collaboration in a Community
In most communities, there are dozens of non-profit and other organizations, each working on a discrete set of goals, yet operating in the same place and systems as others. “We need to collaborate to be more effective and have a bigger impact” is the frequent refrain. The question is how and where do we start? In… Read more
Boston Schoolyard Initiative: An 18-year Success Story of Collaborative Structures that Support Transformative Change
“The story of the Boston Schoolyards Initiative is one that needs to be shared and spread!” This was my thought after hearing a keynote speech by Kristin Metz share her story at a conference. Kristin graciously accepted my invitation to interview her for this blog. I first wrote it in 2015 and am reposting it,… Read more
Why Blog?
Another blogger I admire, Chris Corrigan, just wrote a blog called How to Blog stating his intention of trying to “single handedly trying to lift a near dead art form up from a seven year slumber.” He noted that a lot of people stopped blogging around 2015. Chris, I appreciate your impulse and will lend… Read more
Time to Rethink Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a classic method for getting a group to generate ideas. A topic is suggested, people speak up with their ideas and suggestions, and someone writes them down. The technique is so commonly used and assumed to work, I was surprised to learn that research shows this technique is actually not that effective. Keith… Read more
Three Leadership Behaviors that Undermine Collaboration
I sometimes think about how many kitchens are filled with the sounds of people who come home from their job and rant about how frustrated they are with people at work and organizational dysfunction. I grew up hearing this in our kitchen many nights when my dad got home from his office. Perhaps that’s part of… Read more
From rugged individualism to self-organized connected communities
In American culture, we tend to prize individual leadership, as illustrated by these examples: the self-made man, the hopes we put in one candidate to solve our problems, the entrepreneur with a new technology or solution, and the non-profit that comes into a community with an innovative project. In reality, any person who comes up with… Read more
Wearing Two Hats
One of the challenges to collaborative cross-sector work is that people show up to it oriented to advancing their organizational agenda and aren’t used to focusing on the broader community or systemic agenda. Particularly in the early stages of developing a collaborative initiative, we find it helpful to point out the need to focus on… Read more
Working at the Roots: Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences
In the state of Washington and elsewhere, communities have reduced rates of a host of health and social problems simultaneously, by focusing on the underlying roots of the problems. Groundbreaking scientific research is pointing to some common roots of many health and social well-being issues facing our families and communities. A landmark study by the CDC and… Read more