By Julie Drybrough, Organizational Consultant, fuchsiablue
This week we are pleased to have a guest blog from UK-based Julie Drybrough of fuchsiablue. She highlights the power of collaboration for outcomes bigger than any one organization could achieve on their own. Done well, it enables innovation, creates greater value and strengthens commitments from a broader range of people and organizations. But like anything that delivers great results, collaboration takes hard work, flexibility AND courage. Julie provides her insights into The Truth About Collaboration…
So the truth is there is a way to work collaboratively, co-creatively and constructively with others.Even with people who have vastly different approaches/preferences.
And the truth is this way can’t be defined in a top-10-tip list.
And collaboration needs worked at hard for the results to show.And it’s the less-easy path, because self-interest, self-protection and self-centredness is pretty easy to access.Including and involving others, trusting, sharing? Ah, now… that’s a lot more complicated.
When I want to work collaboratively, it is this:I need enough clarity, purpose & articulation to make sense.Know why I’m doing what I’m doing…and ensure folk know that.
State my case. Why I think what I think & stand within that…. But not stubbornly. Not blindly or narrowly. I have to be able to give, to yield, to be as wrong as I am right. To be interested in others. I have to not be a petulant child.
This is Relational Practice as I understand it.It is stuff the oils & fuels change in organisations. The stuff in between the process and procedure and formal mechanisms and rules.
It’s thinking with clients. It’s working with ambiguity & knowing that not-knowing is transitory, but necessary.
It’s loving the questions. It’s not fearing new solutions. It’s not single handedly designing a 24 week organisational solution to be delivered like an Amazon Parcel.
It’s building in consultation, iteration & experimentation.It’s sharing findings for bigger, more expansive outcomes, rather than tightly holding small fiefdoms.
It’s uncovering answers together… because somehow going slower makes us faster. It’s pulling existing knowledge into being & building on together that so it’s better and stronger.
It’s getting over yourself to the space beyond you.It’s encouraging technology for progress and positive outcomes. It’s about quiet time in the crazy.
It’s putting heart and soul in & knowing that cannot be quantified, but seeking the data to explain how it worked & articulate it as best we can & repeat if we can anyway.
It’s about power. The power we think we have. The power we exert. The power we deny we have. The power we are clueless about. It’s about how kindly or thoughtlessly we use that power.
It’s not dismissing anyone. It’s not elevating anyone either. Everyone is important, therefore no-one is. Everyone is different, therefore we are all the same. It’s about respectful opposition. And about humour in tough circumstances.
It’s about sitting in tough & tender conversations. If we prefer the tough, it’s facing into the tender. If we prefer tender, it’s putting yourself in the tough stuff.It’s about stretch.
And about dignity. Not denying your femininity / masculinity. Knowing you have both. I have the capacity to be assertive & strong & directive & agentic. I have the capacity to yield, to be soft & open & commune. I can be certain. I can be afraid. And these are right, proper at times.
And at the heart, it is about love. Love of self. Love of others. Love of the possible & the unknown. Love of the impossible & the known. Living with what these give & what they take.
It’s about a hundred stories of hopes crushed & fights fought and getting up and cracking on anyway. It’s human spirit in all it’s heartbreaking, excruciating beauty. It’s human nature that tests things of beauty to breaking point.It’s the terrible things we do to each other to make ourselves feel better & the terrible things we do to ourselves at others’ behest.
We are so clever…we are so dumb….And when I look at all of this…. the richness and the depth and the complexity of it all….I think it is unsurprising that we turn from work that is relational, social, emotional – We go for simple narratives and binary decisions.and it leads us to a post-truth world, where rational data co-exists with “alternative facts” and “he-said/ She-said” is the basic narrative – a stuck one. An adversarial one.
Here, there is such certainty, it undermines certainty itself.So how about we sack-off certainty and seek to collaborate, co-create and work through relationships with a little maturity and grace? Hard work as it is.Try it. Today. See what happens.
Julie Drybrough is owner of fuchsiablue an Organisational Consultant, facilitator, exec coach, blogger & dialogue guide. Originally from Scotland, based in the North West of England, she is founder of #facilitationShindig and works to promote good conversations and positive change in organisations.