Several mornings I week, I play basketball with a group of women in my town. We have no rules and do not keep score. We just enjoy the exercise and the fun of playing and teamwork. Our core group has been playing multiple times a week for over five years, which is probably more time… Read more
Category: Collaboration
An Energizing Staff Retreat
Kathy Gallant, the owner of the Blue Moon Market & Cafe in Exeter, NH, had run this successful health food store and cafe for 12 years when she recognized it was time for the next phase of the business’ evolution. Last October, the doors re-opened as Blue Moon Evolution, a full-service restaurant featuring organic, locally-grown… Read more
Preparing for the Unexpected
Outside my window, the snow is heavily streaming down as New England is being buried in a blizzard. In the hype of media coverage about the approaching big storm, emergency response officials talked about their efforts to be prepared for whatever would come. This got me thinking about how leaders in any type of work… Read more
Collective Impact: Emerging Issues and Challenges from the Field
Last week, the Leadership Learning Community sponsored a beautifully-facilitated gathering in Boston to celebrate the launch of its new publication Leadership & Collective Impact. The room of about 25 people included network weavers, organizational consultants, funders, writers, community organizers – all working in some way to advance collective impact and network approaches to social change…. Read more
There IS Time: How a False Sense of Urgency Gets Us in Trouble
“People are so busy, it will be difficult to get them to take the time for a longer meeting.” “C’mon, we had a majority vote, we need to make a decision and move forward, stop belaboring things, even if some people disagree.” “Enough talk, let’s move to action and get things done.” This sense of… Read more
How to Spur Collective Innovation or Stall It
When physicist David Bohm studied what enabled Einstein and other physicists able to achieve breakthroughs, he discovered that they emerged out of free open conversations where they “exchanged ideas without trying to change the other’s mind and without bitter argument” as described in a Psychology Today article called Awakening Our Collaborative Spirit. They felt free… Read more
Collaborating to Enhance Energy Efficiency in Transportation
New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative process to develop a framework for considering energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in transportation decision-making. The initiative was led by the Colorado Department of Transportation and the… Read more
If We Only Knew What We Know
Collaboration tools, such as blogs and Twitter, are changing the way people interact and the way information can flow within and across organizations. In a recent interview in MIT Sloan Review with Andree McAfee of the Center for Digital Business at MIT shared his take on what sells CEO’s on social media. He uses the… Read more
Building Trust before a Crisis
One of the memorable stories of 9/11 is what unfolded in response to the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 at the Pentagon. On that Tuesday morning, a plane carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel going over 300 miles an hour crashed into the building, ultimately killing close to 200 people. Consider the challenge emergency responders… Read more
Connecting Farmers to Farmers – A World Cafe
New Directions Collaborative helped to facilitate a World Cafe dialogue at the New Entry Farmers’ Project Farmer-to-Farmer Conference. New Entry’s mission is to assist socially disadvantaged and other underserved individuals with agricultural backgrounds to successfully enter farming in Massachusetts. The theme of this one-day conference was “Fertile Ground – Connecting Farmers to Farmers to Promote… Read more