Many of us have come to understand that we need to reach out to new allies and partners if we’re going to make progress on the complex challenges we face. But real collaboration is often much more difficult than we expect. Those that we need to work with are different from us. They may think differently and their ways of working, needs, values, and interests may be different than ours. Even if we have common interests and obvious reasons to work together, moving forward together can be challenging every step of the way.
This course will be a deep dive into the challenges and practices of collaboration. We will examine common misunderstandings and look at real life examples of effective cross-sector partnerships and multi-stakeholder alliances. We will learn how to create just enough structure for both agreement and disagreement while finding our way forward together. We will apply what we learn to our own context.
During the 4 modules of 2-3 hours each, participants gain skills and perspectives that help them to successfully:
- Recognize when and why it makes sense to enter into a “stretch collaboration”.
- Identify collaborators towards a specified purpose.
- Initiate collaboration with those who see themselves as allies, competitors, or even adversaries.
- Set up a collaboration to leverage the strengths of each member when working across sectors, disciplines and worldviews.
- Sustain a healthy collaboration through embracing both conflict and connection.
Distributed Collaboration
For over 20 years, Reos Partners has been facilitating collaboration among groups of stakeholders from different organisations, sectors, and geographies. The core of this work has face-to-face conversations, but there has always been a distributed element to it since the participants are not co-located in their daily work. We keep up with supporting technologies for distributed collaboration to support the work in our own organization as well as the multi-stakeholder collaborations we facilitate. This course will benefit from these technologies and practices as a fully online offering.
Details
Dates: 26-29 May
Time-slots:
- Tuesday 26 May: 14:30 – 17:30 pm (CET)
- Wednesday 27 May: 14:30 – 17:30 pm (CET)
- Thursday 28 May: 14:30 – 17:30 pm (CET)
- Friday 29 May: 15:30 am – 17:30 pm (CET)
Location: Online through Zoom and a whiteboard tool for interactive remote collaboration. These technologies are easy to use and no prior experience with them is required. Detailed instructions will be emailed to registered participants, a few days in advance of the course.
Costs: 500,- EUR
Language: English.
Discount: 15% discount for teams of two or more.
Questions and more information: maes@reospartners.com
Click here to register
Click here to view the invitation
Course facilitators
Ravenna Nuaimy Barker is Senior Consultant at Reos Partners and she has extensive experience working with groups to develop and implement solutions to social and environmental challenges. Ravenna brings a rigorous curiosity about how to transform systems in order to create a better future for people and the planet. She supports groups to create questions and processes that identify opportunities for impact and that lead to continuous learning and improvement.
David Winter is Senior Associate at Reos Partners. He is a designer and facilitator of participatory multi stakeholder group processes and an organizational development practitioner. He helps diverse groups address their most pressing complex issues through a mix of methodologies from dialogue to awareness based approaches to agile innovation techniques. He enjoys creating processes with stakeholders to address their specific needs.
Special guest
Mille Bojer is a director of Reos Partners, who co-founded the Reos Partners offices in Johannesburg, São Paulo, and most recently, Geneva. Mille has facilitated multi stakeholder collaborative initiatives around the world on topics including justice transformation, AIDS, children, education, democracy, peacebuilding, oceans, civil society, sustainable development and regional economic transitions.