North East Together 23: What helps us collaborate? Collaborate for social change with Collective Leadership Scotland (November 2022)

Our November North East Together event was event 23, and marked eight years since our first event in November 2014. This was the first in person whole network event since February 2020, and it felt very special to be back in a room sharing cups of tea, fighting over the best biscuits¹, talking and being together.

We heard about collaboration and collective leadership from Janet Whitley and Dot McLaughlin from Collective Leadership Scotland who will bring their wisdom, learning and some of their approaches to us in the north east. We had on our minds how the pandemic has affected how we collaborate and felt what Janet and Dot shared will help us be super collaborators in the north east. We also shared the NET collaboration framework and toolkit we’ve been working on with those who attended or who sent their apologies.

The event’s advance information pack and slidedeck tells you more about the event.

Collaborate for social change: learning with and learning from Collective Leadership for Scotland

The majority of the event was led by Janet and Dot with an intention to introduce the work of Collective Leadership for Scotland with a focus on

• Creating space for the group to pause and reflect
• Exploring what complexity means for us
• Practising taking an inquiring stance into their own individual and collective work
• Connecting with one another relationally
• Encouraging individual and collective action in uncertainty

Five components of collective leadership

We heard more from How do we know we are doing good work, the recent Collective Leadership for Scotland impact report, and more about the five components of collective leadership. The five components are all music to our ears and are ones you will recognise, and are…

• understanding complexity — systems, collective leadership complex issues
• practices that support self — reflection, journalling, pausing
• curiosity and inquiring stance — being open, action inquiry
• relational — asking good questions, listening, surfacing diversity, building relationships
• working more comfortably with emergence — taking action in uncertainty, now knowing, working with what is

We also heard about CLfS work and approach to complexity and inquiry, coaching for social change, and a couple of case studies about their work with local government and the police.

Learning from practice and practicing

We were treated to four/five practices Janet and Dot use in their work

• Invitation to pause — a very short mindfulness practice — a couple of minutes in silence, focusing on our breath, taking a pause from what went before to what we’re going to be doing
• Brief encounters — a form of speed networking (similar to Liberating Structures’ impromptu networking), three minutes to answer prompts in 3s, resetting the 3s for each prompts to maximise the people we each connected with
• Rich pictures — we were invited to get together in 3s, spend time on our won to draw what was most on our minds and then talk through our picture with the others using active listening and open questions to draw out our thoughts. The purpose is to convey an impression about the issue or the problem, with the intention to reveal thoughts you haven’t already had and say things you haven’t already said. Our instructions for drawing were: not a diagram, not complete, avoid words, don’t need to be an artist (it helps not to be), fill the page, use colour.
• Guided journalling — we were led through five questions to write and reflect on our own to make sense of what we’d been doing. The prompts were: What stood out for you? How does that make you feel? What possibilities do you see to use in your work? What do you need from people around you to allow that to happen? What is surfacing for you now? And we had 2–3 minutes to write our thoughts.
• Group sharing — a short time for those who wanted to to share what they thought about the practices and what came up. The comments included…[Janet and Dot] creating a safe space to do this…Helped build our muscles…How can we talk about love more in our work…This [time to pause and reflect] never happens for me so what about my team? Do they get any of this time?

My (Stephanie’s) reflections on these practices: in short, loved it all, and having experiencing them, and hearing generally positive feedback from the group, gives me the confidence to try them out in my own work. The invitation to pause felt very refreshing, a tiny oasis in a busy day, intentionally creating liminal space (time between ‘what was’ and ‘next’ … a place of transition, a time of waiting and not knowing the future). The brief encounters felt a little brief and we cheated by not rotating our three so having two rounds with the same people…we ‘should’ have come back to our interesting conversations over the break. The rich pictures felt quite a stretch — I can’t draw! How will I explain this to the others?! A few deep breaths and just getting on with it made it OK. The live journalling was lovely and it helped me work out a few things particularly around how I might use some of these practices in my own work.

North East Together collaboration framework and toolkit

We shared a summary of collaboration framework, and shared the full toolkit with those who came or sent their apologies. We asked people to have a go with it or at least some of the tools to support your collaborative work and share back with us their experience — successes and challenges — at a future event. We think this will be May and we’re curious about how it is used. Or not.

Interestingly when creating this version of the toolkit, we had two options for the leadership icon — a compass or a heart. Heart to reflect the humanness we feel is very much about leadership and the love and care we know we need to bring to collaborative and relational work. Compass to reflect the purposeness of leadership, the north star, thinking about where to go, and taking yourself and others along with you. We could very much go either way though as you can see we settled on the compass. What do you think about this decision?

We know our region faces challenges and opportunities that no one person or organisation can resolve or respond to alone. We also recognise the need to embrace complexity and systems thinking when we reflect on the health of our social systems in the north east in order to develop more nuanced and ultimately effective interventions. Embracing complexity and systems thinking requires a fundamental commitment to working collaboratively.

Together we can.

Thank you

Thanks to all our members for showing up and being there for each other. This is what it’s all about and we appreciate being part of this community in the north east. We hugely grateful to Janet and Dot for bringing their wisdom and experience from Collective Leadership for Scotland. We’re also grateful to Dr Joanne James and Cissie Tsang from Newcastle University Business School for continuing to collaborate with us with North East Together — the afternoon tea was pretty spectacular! Thank you all.

About North East Together

North East Together is the network for social change leadership in the north east.

Our collective mission here at North East Together is to create the conditions, and platform for, collaboration to become the norm in the north east and to nurture a healthier social change system.

Our network offers mutual support, enables collaboration and inspires social leaders. We offer a series of dynamic network events; whole day events, self-organised collaborative working groups; pathways into coaching; and independent social change events. The whole network events hear from inspirational speakers who provide new insights into social change. They are a supportive space where leaders can meet one another, explore issues of social change, network and begin to collaborate. It’s for leaders from the voluntary, charity, social enterprise, education, public and private sectors. It’s for experienced, new and future leaders of organisations, work, and ideas.

North East Together is hosted by Yes We Can and is a collaboration between Yes We Can and Newcastle University Business School. We’re grateful for the support both organisations give to North East Together.

Next events

These are our current plans

• 14 February — NET Connect, 16:00–17:15, online (bookings open!)
• May — North East Together 24, whole network event, 16:15 for 16:45–20:00 + later for more informal networking
• 13 September — NET Connect, 16:00–17:15, online
• November — North East Together 25, whole network event, 16:15 for 16:45–20:00 + later for more informal networking

We’ll share dates and plans as soon as we can in the new year for May’s whole network event.

We’ll also host more NET pop ups to inspire us and nudge us to collaborate as topics and opportunities come up. If you’re feeling inspired to hold your own NET pop up event, don’t forget the NET team can collaborate with you to host your own. Talk with Robert, Marie or Stephanie if you’d like to do this.

¹ This did not happen. We had visitors so I was on my best behaviour utilising the FHB² buffet protocol from my childhood

² family hold back