How does resilient collaboration work?
Collaboration Incubator Research
„So, what’s the value of the Collaboration Incubator?“ I was asked by my friends and allies Deborah Heifetz and Frieder Krups at our lunch meeting this week. I went home with this question. This is how I’d put it today:
This Incubator is a networking event for collaboration around global transformation. It has the intention to bring us engaged people together to build alliances around the big dreams we carry in our hearts. Dreams bigger than ourselves, dreams about essentially moving something in our social movements e.g. mental health, regenerative agriculture, citizen engagement movement and so on.
But the initiative is not about incubating ideas or projects, even though this is also of value. This space is about incubating relationships. Because in the end it’s resilient relationships that are needed the most for making collaboration work. And even before that, a sense of trust and sympathy is a core factor for collaborations to start.
Foto: Benjamin Lee Martin, showing Bodyloops, Cards with Movements and Talking peace with Eyes
The art of supporting long lasting personal bonds is what we aim to explore. Here are some things that we’ve been curious about:
Intentionality. I can’t control how my life will unfold. Yet I can consciously set an intention in the direction I desire. If I am joining an event for personal growth, this is likely what I get. If I am joining a gathering for collaboration beyond what I know, I am setting myself up for this.
Stepping outside the comfort zone, outside my usual way of being. Participating in experiences that challenge the way I think, feel and move in the world. The people ready to step with me into the unknown become my allies.
Shared principles and co-responsibility. Along with the invitation to step into the unknown, boundaries are needed, to create a safer space. When the responsibility around an experience and the care for one another is shared, a sense of community can emerge.
Imagination becomes reality. The most powerful tool to cut through our own limitations on what can become possible is imagination. Even more powerful is to believe that our highest potential already has come true. When we embody our potential in the now together with others, we are empowering each other. We are already collaborating.
These four themes have been present in the most recent Collaboration Incubator at Medley in Berlin. Within the three hours we have been combining practices, mindsets and styles that usually aren’t, and have been playing with it. We’ve invited the visions and ideas we are seriously passionate about and explored them through awareness, embodiment, imagination and play. Then we did all of this let go, and opened a space for any form of collaboration to emerge that was possible in the now.
Foto: Mascha Lehr-Bozovic, showing the first moments of the open play space.
Here are some quotes of people that participated. They shared about their best moment:
„…it was just a lot of build up from emergence and play. The whole experience was the best moment.“ JB
„When I talked about that moment, when silence was cutting through everything, it felt like it was happening right then.“ Max
„The most surprising and magical moment was the sharing at the end.“ Maria
The photos and time-laps show some impressions of how this looked from outside.
I am curious about questions and ideas. And if you are with me on this path: What is your secret recipe to enable powerful and resilient collaboration across social movements?
