Experiment in Collaboration

Enrol Yourself Learning Marathon Showcase

An Experiment in Collaboration In this peer-led Learning Marathon we set out to test collaboration methods that we can each apply to our wider work. Using our different perspectives and individual talents, we aimed to come up with a unique response to the troubled times we find ourselves in. Together, we set our direction and focus, codesigned a curriculum and cocreated a response. We are curious about the ‘how’ of powerful collaboration - how we learn, decide, communicate, relate? Is collective action essential to the impact you want to create?

We set out on this journey, ready to work on a collaborative project, willing to lean into conflict and difference and see it as a source of creativity and change and, searching for more effective ways of working together that tap into the potential of everyone in the group. What set our group apart from other Enrol Yourself Learning Marathons was that, along with our individual Learning Questions we co-created a Group Learning Question and worked collaboratively for the last four months to answer it.

We set out to...

Learn collaborative methods and tools that you can take back to your professional work and/or activism

Upgrade your capacity for collaboration by connecting with a new peer group and pooling knowledge, network and skills

Co-design a response to the times we live in with a group of people with different perspectives, identities and skills

Our Group Question

How can we bring our whole selves to creating free-flowing collaboration, identifying and navigating difference and conflict skillfully, to create impact in the wider world?

Learning Marathon Class of 2021 Andrew Wilson

How can impact be effortless? Will it align us? (Learning mantra)

Benny Souto

How might I nurture and support a diverse, multi-disciplinary group to become more self-sustaining and self-organising?

Charlotte Bailey

Chloe Grahame

Daniel Ford

Ellie Westgarth-Flynn

How can I create a future vision for myself and what role does collaboration play in that?

How do we contribute to healthy culture at every level (I/We/World)?

Hannah Larn How can we build sustainable collaborative momentum?

Linda Gemmill

How can our grass roots campaign sustain momentum over several years while remaining inclusive, democratic, and successful in achieving our goals (to protect our communities, our unique ecology, and our heritage from the proposed Bradwell B)?

How can I create spaces for meaningful collaboration, and bring my whole self into them?

How can we deconstruct the hero of the learning journey? (And reward the outcome of a collaboration instead?)

Joe Morrisroe

How can we grow collaborative and systemic approaches in the Civil Service?

Stephanie Hall

What’s my work here? Enabling cultures for more, more sustainable impact

Our Group Principles

Show up however you can, no pressure

Whole selves, blurred and fuzzy lines

Respond to different ways of engaging and needs

Being authentic - it’s ok not to know

Checking in and being ok to check out (time off time)

Gentle with each other different things are hard for different people

Openness/ listening

Notice barriers

Get to know each other commitment to trust and be open

Celebrate each other

(speaking, writing, reading, small groups, big groups)

Andrew Wilson

hello@andywilsondesign.com LinkedIn: mrawilson

Question I leave with:

How can impact be effortless? Will it align us? (Learning mantra)

My lived experience of collaboration before our Learning Marathon was depleting, draining and effortful. This often led me to completely disengage with work I felt passionately about to avoid the experience of (emotionally) driving with the handbrake on. I joined this group with the expectation to explore and recalibrate how I relate to myself and others in a healthier way and proactively engage with the world again. My learning question ‘How can impact be effortless?’ encapsulated the experience I was seeking. My learning question and group activities led me to explore effortlessness expression in a collaboration. During this exploration I was excited to stumble upon initiatives such as Sarah Corbett’s ‘craftivism’ (thanks for recommending, Linda!) which involved creating thoughtful arts & crafts to playfully engage less vocal and extroverted persons in larger protest movements. Ellie and Michelle also brought a unique playful energy to our group dynamic to highlight novel forms of (non verbal) communication. I’ve never hugged a pillow on a zoom call to express comfort… Lots of ideas for expression!

effortful

effortﬂess

Among the skills and knowledge we shared in our group sessions, an exercise called ‘Circling’, introduced by Steph, made a profound impact on me. The simple act of noticing and sensing thoughts, sensations, and feelings in ourselves and each other and sharing them openly, as they are, with the group, seemed to break down barriers and instill a sense of trust between us. The ripple effects of this led me to hear parts of myself I’d disengaged with, gently reveal and allow me to unpack my own traumas, and feel safe enough to begin to communicate more authentically within the group and beyond, touching my professional life and job search. I stumbled across an article by Laurence McCahill about the olympic rowing team in Sydney 2000, framing daily decisions with a single question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’. The concept felt like a powerful means to embody my learning question so I utilised the concept to frame my day to day decisions with the question ‘will it align us?’ with the hypothesis it will help to get me / us closer to the things we feel are important. The marathon has led me to some interesting places I wouldn’t have explored on my own. I’ve ridden our emergent process, uncovered new parts of myself, but what I’m most humbled and grateful for is to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such a thoughtful and caring group of people that made the journey feel, for the most part, effortless.

Benny Souto

hello@bennysouto.com bennysouto.com

Question I leave with:

How might I nurture and support a diverse, multi-disciplinary group to become more self-sustaining and self-organising?

As a young professional, who’s started to dip her toes into the world of systems thinking and collaborative practices, it can sometimes feel difficult to find opportunities to flex your facilitation muscles. I joined the group in hopes of being able to do just that, with a practical question, related to a work project where I knew I would have lots of room to experiment different things.

In reality, I feel like my personal Learning Question ended up being at the bottom of my priority list throughout the whole journey. Not because it’s not a question I’m not passionate about (I am), and not because I didn’t do any work around it (I did, I promise!), but because it quickly became apparent to me that the really unique and valuable thing — the once in a lifetime opportunity I wanted to make the most of during the four months I had — was not in exploring my own learning question but in the group itself. I have gained so much from all the individual connections I have made withing the group and from the opportunities we’ve had to collaborate, as a whole group but also in smaller teams, around our prototype projects. I have learnt from the collaborations that seemed to flow effortlessly and from the ones where there was more tension and friction and which didn’t go as we expected. And through all this, almost without realising it, I was learning a lot to apply to my learning question. The 2 main things I can distill from all I explored, both with this group and outside of it, are these: purpose & process. These seem to me to be the two strongest elements that need to be present withing a group in order for it to maintain enough energy and motivation to sustain itself through the expected barriers (time, competing priorities, dips in momentum, ...) and the unexpected ones (big external events, tensions in the group, ...).

Purpose is what makes the group continuously come together (the why) - a shared vision, mission or goal that becomes the glue and unifying factor between all the individual differences and disagreements. Process is what makes it easy for the group to come together (the how) the less friction there is in organising and coming together, the more likely it is that other barriers won’t be enough to prevent it from happening. Having a strong, clear and simple process in place means everyone knows what to expect in how the group organises and can account for that alongside their personal needs. These seem to me very clearly to be the two key elements in maintaining energy within a group to keep it alive. The question I am now left with is - why do groups still sometimes ‘fail’, even with a strong purpose and a strong process? Beyond what I learned about my question, being a part of this group has been one of the most valuable experiences of my professional (and personal) life so far. It’s catalysed so much confidence and energy in me about the transformational power of collaboration and left me with more questions than when I started but with questions that I can’t wait to go out and explore! Because if there is one thing I learned is that there will never be one set answer about how to collaborate - the secret is in shwoing up open to the process and being dedicated to constantly re-evaluating the ways in which you come together so they serve the purpose of the collaboration.

Charlotte Bailey

LinkedIn: charlotte-bayley-6b375453/

Question I leave with:

How can I create a future vision for myself and what role does collaboration play in that?

Chloe Grahame

cfgrahame@gmail.com

Question I leave with:

How can I create spaces for meaningful collaboration, and bring my whole self into them? A project I lead at work involves senior managers seeks to introduce new ways of working across the organisation. Since the start it has been known as ‘my project’. As I was trying to get it off the ground I put time and energy into the sessions we had together, arranged 1:1s with participants, supported them to think through their elements of the different parts they are leading, chased for updates. And yet it was still ‘my project’ and struggling to gain momentum without me pushing it forwards. I started to lose my energy and momentum and stepped back, and as I did this others were able to step forwards. A space was made that

they started to fill, and the project started becoming theirs. I heard in different forums members of this group talking about the work that ‘we’ were doing. I heard my voice telling me - so there is no role for you anymore, I couldn’t get this going properly, why am I even here? Then another quieter voice - maybe this is the work- creating space, permission, community… I learned that by taking on the role of being the main source of energy, I was preventing others from stepping in and exhausting myself.

Daniel Ford

Twitter: @DanielGFord

Question I leave with:

How do we contribute to healthy culture at every level (I/We/World)? I’ve been exploring what healthy human culture looks and feels like. How can we create it? When does it go wrong? Why does it seem like so much of our culture is unhealthy and what might help us shift it towards health? A big part of my learning was immersing myself in the work of Sophy Banks (check out grief tending and her YouTube videos). Sophy developed a model for thinking about healthy culture, which massively influenced me as I was experiencing unhealthy dynamics at work: overstress, overwork, overwhelm; unhealthy ways of communicating and relating (and I’m not ignoring my own role in that!). It was through exploring Sophy’s concept of a ‘return path’ - a pathway back from stressstates towards a ground state of healthy rest and action - that inspired Joe’s return path

me to explore what this might look like at different levels. Individually, for example, I know for myself that going for a swim helps me return to a healthy state when I’m feeling anxious or stressed. But what are the return paths at an organisational level? In our families and communities? What are the return paths in our wider culture? So many of us are so anxious, stressed and burning out - what are the social and cultural technologies that move us back towards health? With others in the group, we realised that organisational psychology and culture was a recurring interest - the metacognition that needs to happen to realise you’re in an unhealthy pattern as an organisation, and the interventions you can design to shift your organisation back towards health. So together we designed a

diagnostic using Sophy’s work as a foundation - with feedback from the group and from Sophy - that could help people assess where the health / unhealth is in their culture, and design their own, context-specific interventions that we could then support people to implement. We’re testing some of these things at our showcase event and looking to get feedback from you - so let us know what you think! I have learnt SO much through the process of working with others in the group on this journey. Beyond the content of my learning, the experience itself has felt like a real experiment - with challenges and learnings throughout. Being with a group willing to experiment and work through it together has been such a gift.

Ellie Westgarth-Flynn Question I leave with:

www.jesterlearning.co LinkedIn: ewestgarthflynn

How can we deconstruct the hero of the learning journey? (And reward the outcome of a collaboration instead?)

I began my learning journey fully focused on my own creative collaborations. Working with a friend on two tracks I had made during lockdown, I used the opportunity we had to regularly work together on music to examine the ways communication, creativity and relating affected and evolved as the collaboration went along. Working on this with a lense of “how is this collaboration affecting the outcome of the work?” and “what am I doing to empower this creative relationship? What can I do better?” I starting to examine the ways building relationships and authentic care in working partnerships changes and benefits collaborations.

There is so much to be learned from just creating, And I’ve learned to advocate for this way of being within the group of divergent thinkers. I started to look at how my learning could impact my teaching practice. Creating opportunities for peerlead learning as a means for greater inclusivity in primary schools has been a preoccupation for a long time, and this is a large part of the reason I wanted to look at ways to shift mindsets around learning and reward of the individual. Away from “What do I need to do to do this right?” Towards “what can we do to explore this?”

But, the way this emerged was in a creative idea for training for the staff at Southwark Music Service. Using the mode of questioning I experienced through the circling workshops that were a part of this learning marathon, I collaborated with the diversity and inclusion team to create a research project. We posted cards with questions to every member of our team once a week asking a question that shifted the full focus from the teachers habits onto the experience of child in the room. Whether we got a response or not didn’t matter. What mattered was that these questions percolated in the minds of our teachers, perhaps bringing them to reflect on the habitual ways their teaching practice played out in the day to day. In September, the responses we did receive will form the research basis of our organisational shift program - ensuring we make the changes we need to in our curriculum content, and in our teaching practice, to ensure every child in our borough has a voice.

What does this have to do with collaboration? Well, we will achieve this together by workshopping together. We hope that everyone on the team feels they have equal voice and an equal part to play in creating an inclusive environment for the thousands of children who learn across Southwark Music’s offerings. I read a lot about neurology during this process (*David Eagleman), looking for answers about what happens in our brains when we achieve flow (forgetting the self) whilst working with others. It came as no surprise to me that the most productive collaboration I experienced from within this marathon came from the other artist in the group. We worked together to produce nine sound pieces for a virtual reality theatre experience, devised with young people in Wishbeech for the Princes Trust. Apart from learning a lot and developing my skills, this process shed a lot of light on tensions that existed in our group around discussion, debate versus productivity and output, and I feel there is a lot to learn for all of us around the power of stepping into action, creating, and working from the concrete before the abstract.

I am left with a lot of questions. We need diversity in our collaborative thinking to produce successful results (*Rebel Ideas - Matthew Syed), but who can we best collaborate with? Does the problem, skills gap, or experiment come first, or does the relationship? If we can only assimilate ideas and information we have already ingested, consciously or subconsciously, can we truly be creative on our own, and if not whose ideas can we really connect with? Can we really forget our own agendas and step out of our modus operandi, habitual ways of being?

My only conclusion is that making, creating, ideating, generating, is vital. Vitality became my north star during this journey. Our brains need to find new ways of solving problems continuously, or they start to die. That is enough of a reason for me to keep making, making, making, and learning about learning about learning solving problems along the way.

Hannah Larn

hannahlarn@hotmail.co.uk

Question I leave with:

How can we build sustainable collaborative momentum?

How many times have you been part of a project/programme/training where great ideas were shared, but once the organised element finished, found that the momentum fizzled out? What are the key ingredients needed to ensure that groups can build collaborative energy in a sustainable way, remaining active well after the formal elements of a project have come to an end? What impact will this have on communities where individuals feel empowered to carry on creating positive change? Through conversations with those who are getting it right, as well as those who are not, I have compiled a list of ‘top tips for creating sustainable collaborative momentum’. They continue to be a work in progress, and there’s no ‘one size fits all’. My hope is that this list can be adapted and added to along its journey, whilst supporting those who work with groups to have a wider, longer-lasting impact.

Top tips:

Framing: if the aim is to create a network/community/group that exists after a programme has finished, then ensure it is framed this way throughout

Recruitment: who do you want to join this network/community/ group? Sift applications to ensure everyone who joins is bringing something special to share. It could be skills, experience or passion. Recognise the need for diversity.

Communication: ensure channels of communication are clear and intentional, and suited to the needs of that specific community.

Relationships: take time to build sustainable relationships with each member of the community, so that everyone knows they are a valued member

Partnerships: regularly demonstrate how this is a twoway partnership between the community and the organisers, with a good balance of ‘gives’ and ‘asks’

Motivation and Incentives: provide opportunities for celebration and growth to keep the community excited about what they are working on.

Question I came in with: How do we build sustainable foundations within groups, so that they remain active long after we have worked with them?

Accountability: follow-up with each member of the community about their goals, with the focus always being on impact

Joe Morrisroe

joemorrisroe@gmail.com @joemorrisroe

Question I leave with:

How can we grow collaborative and systemic approaches in the Civil Service?

I decided to sign up to Enrol Yourself shortly after finishing a course in systems thinking. I was excited by a whole range of different thinkers (Marianna Mazzucato, Kate Raworth, Peter Senge and Adam Kahane) who were talking about the kinds of skills and mindsets that are needed in the 21st century, particularly in public service. But I felt I had only just begun to explore the question of how I could help to grow and test these practices and ideas in the Civil Service.

Collaboration felt absolutely core to this, and enrol seemed like a huge opportunity. I was interested in how thinking about why and how we collaborate within a peergroup context would be a valuable experience. And having been trained in the Civil Service, I wanted to learn from others working in very different contexts. I was also motivated by the opportunity to learn and experiment with new skills and practices. Enrol has been a chance to both experiment and reflect whilst actively participating in a collaboration. The process has been a genuine experiment. We’ve co-designed our own ground rules and workshop plans, drawing on what people wanted from the process and felt able to offer. We’ve shared and experimented with new practices and ideas, ranging from deep democracy and stretch collaboration, to workshop design and prototyping. And as the process has evolved, I think we have increasingly understood what we want from the process as individuals, and realised where expectations differ. We’ve felt the challenges of experimentation, such as not having a defined process or path, and that group decision making can be slow and meeting everyone’s needs isn’t easy. We’ve also had amazing moments of group creativity, shared insights and learning, and bursts of contagious group energy that have swept up even the most tired of us late on a Tuesday evening.

Coming away from the process, I feel I’ve had an opportunity to practice, reflect and learn with a fascinating group of people in a way that has generated so many new insights and connections. I’ve learnt that designing collaborative experiences can help us to be more creative and to move to action faster. At the same time, facilitators themselves have their own interests and hold a lot of power. I’ve learnt that creating space in groups for emergence is hugely powerful, and that too much structure can suppress this. I’ve realised that collaborating well requires us to both assert and amplify differences, as well as actively trying to align those with others where we can. Practically, I’ve changed my own approach to growing and testing ideas in the civil service, moving towards working in the open, and taking a proactive approach to sharing and connecting with others. I’ve recognised that I can be a conduit for new ideas in a network and an individual proponent. Finally, I’ve developed a clearer sense that moving between reflection and action, as an individual and as a group, is a hugely powerful way to learn. There is a huge amount that is left unexplored, but I’m hugely grateful to the group for the experience we have shared, and that we have trusted in the process to arrive at this end point.

Linda Gemmill

linda@chariklo.co.uk www.chariklo.co.uk

Question I leave with:

As the coordinator of Bradwell B Action Network (BAN), I was aware that in trying to prevent the building of a new nuclear plant in our local environment, we were in for a long and tough campaign, possibly up to five years or more. Despite our initial success in gaining support and community engagement, our yearlong campaign had already started to show signs of fatigue and discord within our core team. Learning outcomes • Sometimes collaboration requires decisive leadership, particularly where an individual’s communication style is being disruptive to the cohesion of the larger group. • Interventions require compassion, empathy, honesty, and courage.

• Diversity of opinion and experiences makes a team more effective, resilient, and creative if that diversity is facilitated in an empathic and empowering manner. • Focusing on the co-shared values and wanted outcomes can help greatly in solving issues. • I have come to understand that if I have the intent to learn something useful for my personal growth, that intention will draw to me, through relationship, all the learning I need. I need only be present and aware to what is turning up in my life to receive the lessons life offers. Learning Edge Honest communication about the impact an unhelpful behaviour is having is the most difficult aspect of being a leader for me; and one I continue to struggle with due to my own conditioning. I have yet to learn anything of sustaining community engagement over a long period, however, I have no doubt that life will present me with the lesson in due course!

My process during the Learning Marathon

Stephanie Hall

hall_stephanie@icloud.com stephanie.bio

Question I leave with:

What’s my work here? Enabling cultures for more, more sustainable impact

Question I came in with: How can I create the conditions to find collaborators, and collaborate successfully? How can we seed the possibility & capability for collaboration within culture more broadly, to live in a more regenerative world where more people can thrive?

Experiment in Collaboration felt like an exciting and rare opportunity to, as a consensual and curious collective, put collaboration under the microscope. Through Circling, a relational meditation practice, I’d experienced the power of groups sharing their moment-by-moment experiences within a field and how transformative that could be, on personal, interpersonal and collective levels. I wondered if EIC would be a container where we could really openly explore our experiences of collaboration, and learn about collaborating better, in real-time, together.

What have I learned? Healthy Cultures. Sparked by Sophy Banks & Dan, I’ve focused a lot on Healthy Cultures, and I’ll take this forward, as I’ve learned how much there is to learn! I’m uncertain in what capacity – as a coach, facilitator, systems thinker…? I’ll potentially pilot a Collaboration workshop as a facilitator at Oxford Hub, drawing out my learnings from this process to help teams go further together. Collaboration. I’ve learned that collaboration is hard, especially coming together to figure out what to build in a short time frame. I’m curious to seek collaborations where there’s a lot of initial energy around an idea, and to make the barrier to saying yes super high, and see where that leads! It’s made me more determined to go all in on projects, or not engage at all - some sense that I have too many things simmering, that it’s hard to do really good work towards anything this way.

in a group of such great individuals within a collaborative project. It’s clear to me that for new things to start to flourish, and for me to recover some generativity and creativity, I need clear ground. I’m sitting with big questions around rest, boundaries and priorities, and how to find the work that resonates and is sustainable for me. Self-World. Learning to put myself out in the world seems important – being in the group has shown me that I have powerful tools to share. Bringing circling to the group seems to have powerfully influenced others’ enquiries, so it feels important to share. I’ll be co-facilitating circles across the next few months, and by Janurary, will have Circling SAS Certification, so I’m excited to explore applying this in an organisational context, perhaps to add depth to our diagnostic, or to explore feelings around it in a sense-making context.

Input/Output – Individual/Collective. I didn’t work on my initial individual question as much as I’d hoped. I’m curious if our journey would have been richer with a stronger focus on individual learning early on in the process, and then converging to collaborate later on after a real diverse depth of research had been done.

Organisational Psychology. EIC has shown me that I’m really interested in growing and nurturing Healthy Cultures at every level, so I’m exploring further training in organisational psychology & culture. There’s such a deep evidence base here already, and I’m excited to start to explore it - working from evidence as well as experience feels important.

Where next? Clear Ground. Entering into the process, I was unsure whether I needed less, or more, on my plate. I’ve ended up feeling thinly spread – and the final weeks of EIC have seen me grapple with deep exhaustion, difficult

Aliveness. It’s clear to me that I find aliveness through depth and expertise, and that aliveness is a really important element of getting great work done for me. I’m curious where I find curiosity & further collaboration that energises me.

Four months ago ten people planted ten seeds, in the form of ‘learning questions’ such as ‘how can I use my skills as a developer to create something that has real value?’ and ‘how can I expand my range of being in the world?’ Since then we’ve been growing these seeds alongside one another, into projects, meetups, podcasts, toolkits, artworks, ways of being and more. Now the Learning Marathon is drawing to a close, but a new chapter is just starting to unfurl.

Enrol Yourself is an award-winning social enterprise redesigning lifelong learning by harnessing the power of peer groups to multiply individual and collective development. The Learning Marathon is a 6 month peer-led learning accelerator designed to integrate into life alongside work. WEB: enrolyourself.com BLOG: medium.com/enrol-yourself TWITTER: @EnrolYourself INSTAGRAM: @enrol_yourself EMAIL: hello@enrolyourself.com