CHAPTER FOUR
Key Practices to Nourish Collaboration Facilitating dialogues, working with diversity and complexity, deep listening, horizontal learning, cultivating trust… the list goes on. A whole new language is growing!
In a way, yes. New ways of seeing and new practices do need new language. I like the feel of the words, less mechanistic and more organic, recognising that we are working with real lives and not engineering projects! But the real question is: What is the real work here, what is the practice?
“We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.” Wangari Maathai
Learning to breathe together Doug Reeler, Forus Leadership Development Programme Facilitator and Barefoot Guide Connection Conspire (v.) from Latin conspirare “to agree, unite, plot, to breathe together,” from com “with, together” + spirare “to breathe”. Source: Online Etymology Dictionary. I live in the Genadendal/Greyton Valley, 150 km east of Cape Town as part of a diverse community of about 17 000 people. Civil society organisations, municipal government and business have been trying to work together for years under the Greyton Council to jointly tackle a range of developmental issues. In August 2020, at the Greyton Council AGM, the members said that they wanted a simpler, more conversational space to think and act together. So, they did away with the post of Executive Chairperson, and I was asked to be the interim “facilitator chairperson”. The Executive Committee was replaced by the Admin Team responsible for organising meetings and communication. It’s an experiment to nurture a different culture and practice of collaboration. Looking for less confrontational ways of relating to each other, we
Chapter 4: Key Practices to Nourish Collaboration
chose our motif as: “How do we bring out the best in each other?” I shared a framework called “The Elements of Conspiring” (presented overleaf ) that I had developed with a national NGO learning network a few years ago. It sparked several productive conversations, especially around the need to work on communication and co-learning to prepare the soil for a more fruitful collaboration. I have noticed that in several following meetings members often referenced the framework to support a point. It is not a recipe or formula but a growth path for cultivating and nurturing the kind of relationships and capacities we need for deeper collaboration.
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