How to teach dialogue and collaboration?
Ever wondered how to teach about dialogue and collaboration? Learn about how its done from a conversation with Dr. Janet Moore, Professor at Simon Fraser University who teaches the Semester in Dialogue.
Collaborating Beyond the Tap
As part of a panel discussion for the Red Deer River Watershed Alliance, we have the chance to hear from a panel of water experts that our ability to collaborate on significant water issues is what is allowing us to be successful.
The Concept of Leadership in Three Conversations
In three podcast conversations over the last month I’ve had the opportunity to explore aspects of leadership inside the realm of collaboration and community change. Kerry Graham, Max Hardy, Anthony Boxshall, and Liz Weaver have all touched on related and interconnected thinking around the leadership it takes to create and maintain a collaboration. But the conversation brings me to think about the nature of leadership and whether there is actually a ‘leader’ in a collaboration.
Since George Floyd
It has been 10 months and how much has changed in the world since George Floyd’s death? I reflect and repost thoughts from then so that we may remember again now.
Equanimity and Collaboration (Repost)
Equanimity is about having the chaos of the world unfold around us and not have it affect us. The traditional yoga metaphor for equanimity is the mountain, standing unmovable despite the wind and snow, sun and rain happening to it and all around it. In this post, I explore a little of how equanimity can be an important part of collaboration.
Collaborating on Complexity
Why is collaboration uniquely able to address complex problems and issues? In large part, the strength of collaboration comes from the diversity of perspectives and experience that a group of people can bring to a problem. Add in the creative nature of collaboration, and you’ve got the right mixture to tackle a complex problem.
Women Make Us Smarter
We are collectively smarter when we work in groups and we make better decisions when those groups include women.
A bit deeper on task and relationship conflict.
In a quick synopsis of a research paper on task and relationship conflict, it becomes clear that trust can be a key driver in keeping conflicts focused on the task and not the relationship. On the other hand, the way people behave, like being loud or being positional, have a less definitive influence.
Three books.
Three good books that have influenced my life and which I have given as gifts. Interestingly, they all have some element of behaviour science.
Task vs. Relationship Conflict
In this short recap of an Adam Grant interview on the podcast Hidden Brain, where he speaks to task and relationship conflict and how it shows up in successful and failed teams.
Power in Collaboration
Often thought of as an organization sharing its power with a group, perhaps we should think a bit more about the power everyone brings to collaboration and how our power as individuals and organizations is transformed and magnified.
Four Lessons from a Horse (repost)
Here’s a repost from last year that I thought I would share again, because I like how I was seeing the lessons of horsemanship translating to the world of collaboration.
5 Reasons Collaboration fails (and how to avoid them) - repost
A repost of an article penned by Annemarie Marshall that outlines 5 ways collaboration can fail and importantly how to avoid these traps in the first place.
Collaboration empowers people.
Collaboration is a force to empower people, whether its to participate, be creative, apply critical thinking, or be a leader.
Sparkplugs!
Where does collaboration start? Or rather, who starts it? Really, everyone can be a collaboration sparkplug. Read on to see some of the traits you might see in someone how sparks collaboration.
Embrace the change
This last year has taught us a lot with one big lesson being to embrace change to see what it can offer. In collaboration too, little changes are like experiments we can run to see how things might work.
A Christmas-time thought.
There are similarities between our experience in successful collaboration and our experience at Christmas. Our togetherness makes us stronger.
Seeing Stakeholders Differently
When we are trying to figure out who should be part of our collaboration, we start making lists. People who are affected. People who have a ‘stake’. People with power. Perhaps we need to reexamine our thinking to see ideas and perspectives and not artificial categories of thinking. In this post, we examine some different ways of thinking about participation.
Lessons from Kugluktuk (repost)
A repost of a lesson I learned while working in Canada’s north about authenticity, collaboration, and a boy named Eli.
Do you remember the telephone?
Sometimes we need to adjust our approach, which is the point of this post on adapting to the emerging realities of virtual meetings and overlapping, competing virtual meetings.