Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success : This i‌borative person works: 23. search for and use small town solutions
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Sleeping with the Enemy Achieving Collaborative Success Sharing collaborative and partnership working best practice.
Friday, 7 July 2017
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This is how a collaborative person works: 23. search for and use small town solutions
Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success: 5th Edition Now Available at Amazon
(This post draws heavily upon the experiences of Paul Macalindin as described in his book Upbeat, which chronicles his inspiring work with the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq.)
'An excellent book that outlines the value and benefit of collaborative working...' This book is about collaborative and partner...
'From the word go, I felt good about this small town solution, which I'd already seen work in Bonn, Edinburgh and Aix. Elgin, with some 110,000 people, lay about 70 kilometres west of Chicago, Illinois. Talking to the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra team, I felt the warmth and generosity that we needed to carry the orchestra to America and look after us. I also heard the same clear-headed problem-crunching and local connectivity I'd experienced in previous years. Most importantly, I heard women with passion and nous. Elgin presented itself as a solution I could believe in, and my relentlessness began to reboot. Elgin had found the pioneering spirit the big cities had lost.' From Upbeat: the Story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq by Paul Macalindin
The above quotation emphasises the advantages of the 'small town solution' when choosing partners for a collaborative project: the benefits gained through engaging with small rather than large communities. It also begins to reveal some the traits that make small town solutions particularly beneficial: warmth and generosity, clear-headed problem-crunching, local connectivity, tapping into the talents and expertise of women, and a pioneering spirit. It is not that the above traits do not exist within large communities, of course they do, but that they are more likely to be consistently identifiable and accessible within small communities. This is because small communities tend to be more joined-up than large communities (which means someone is likely to 'know someone who knows someone'), have a well-developed sense of family (which not only deeply enriches relationships but also inevitably enhances and encourages the involvement of women in the community), and possess a hands on practical approach to problem solving that is unencumbered by bureaucracy.
Charles M Lines
Being a small American City with a settler history, Elgin emphasises the last trait mentioned by Paul: the pioneering spirit. Arguably, it is this pioneering spirit that, if present, can turbo-charge the effectiveness of a small town solution. The risk-taking associated with the pioneering spirit can add creativity and innovation to practical clear headed problem-crunching. The reciprocity and enlightened self-interest crucial to successful pioneering, where everyone by necessity needs to be able to rely on everybody else, encourage warmth and generosity and a feeling of family and community that enable easy access to needed resources and expertise. The stories of pioneering and achievement, and the shared social history they create, further strengthen the feeling of family and community and help build the mutual trust needed to take risks and give and receive help and support. Lastly, small communities make it relatively easy to put not only a name but also a face to key local officials and other valuable people. This helps create enhanced working relationships: ones which are not only suitably formal and professional but also appropriately informal and personal. These well balanced holistic relationships increase the enjoyment and attractiveness of working with people and, again, encourage the building of trust between people. Also, as well as enabling easy and timely access to needed resources and expertise, they encourage a strong tolerance and even enthusiastic encouragement of differing perceptions and approaches. This increases the flexibility, creativity and inventiveness of the work people do together.
Available at Amazon
Small town solutions, however, have one major weakness: they are vulnerable to infection from rapidly spreading group-think:
http://cuttingedgepartnerships.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/this-is-how-collaborative-person-works_7.html
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