Reflection on Collaboration
David Sibbet reviews the history of collaboration in The Grove's Journal:
Has there ever been a time when collaboration is more needed? The word meant "consorting with the enemy" in World War II. In contemporary business and organizations it means cooperating with people who work in different organizations or perform different functions within the same organization. In community processes it means working across racial, ethnic and economic fault lines. We’ve been thinking a lot these last months about our mission to "transform the art and practice of collaboration."
The Grove, like everyone else, has been directly affected by recent events. The 9/11 disaster, in addition to deeply troubling our souls, practically resulted in wholesale postponements of training programs, major meetings, and most travel-related activities. In addition, the San Francisco Bay Area is struggling with a high-tech downturn.
The silver lining has been a return to a more human pace of business, with a reasonable workload and time to continue working on the new Facilitation Guide Series and other client projects. Tight times have also accelerated people’s use of virtual tools in productive ways.
Within professional communities involved in organizational development, change management consulting, and graphic facilitation, an intense conversation is ensuing about our future. Colleagues are e-mailing news and commentary from around the world. Many feel that this time presents an epochal shift in one of several directions.
Turning one way, we can retreat into fear and constriction—a natural response that Abraham Maslow so clearly described in his famous hierarchy-of-needs model. When survival issues present themselves, they take priority.
Turning another way, we can take the shocks and trauma as a call to wake up to our next step in human evolution. Those of us who spend our days facilitating group processes and helping people make sense out of complexity know that groups can be extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive when people open to each other and learn to trust differences.
It seems imperative to be more daring in our modeling and sharing of strategies that work. I, for one, have experienced a strengthening of my resolve to promote graphic facilitation worldwide. A shift to a new, non-terror based society will require each of us to take personal steps—to create businesses and organizations that respect their employees and customers, to create products that don’t do violence to the environment or indigenous peoples, to develop ways of understanding that foster creation and innovation rather than destruction and annihilation. To flourish, terror requires a context of polarization and fear. As challenging as it might be, we need to work with all our sensitivity and strength to create new contexts of respect and hope. If The Grove and its many friends and colleagues can contribute even a bit to this happening, we will have served to honor the many who have sacrificed their lives to bring us this imperative.
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