COLLABORATION:

Collaboration skills are necessary to facilitation, group leadership, and public engagement at any level. We all work with people. As public sector consultants, we usually find ourselves bringing different groups of people with varying perspectives to work together on common goals. You need to know how to collaborate and how to cause collaboration. Together we are even better. There is a reason why it is our motto. Collaboration is the core of democracy and it’s how big things get done. Here’s some of the latest information we have found on collaboration skills. Thanks for letting us share it with you.

Concept of diversity and crowd cooperation symbol as diverse hands holding together in a 3D illustration style.

Collaboration

Words Matter

Helping people understand new information, as we suggested in the opening of this newsletter, requires getting them to first just consider what you’re trying to convey to them. At a time when all of us are bombarded with online and traditional media constantly competing for our attention, getting people’s attention ...
read more →

Be Grateful

I’m sure that you’re proficient with the overall do’s and don’ts of reaching, working with and engaging people in communities. But, fact is, that real success most often comes from the doing all of the little, seemingly innocuous things really right. Like, for instance, expressing authentic gratitude to the people ...
read more →

How Ugly Can It Get?

It was pointed out recently that we seem to be a nation united on values and divided by politics. (Values unite, issues divide.) Almost all of us want to feel safe, secure and provide better futures for our kids. How we do those things is where things begin to deteriorate. ...
read more →

Facilitate Don’t Dominate

Getting the best out of people and nudging them into some level of cooperation is a learnable art and skillset. It’s sort’a required for the work that we do. Although we do deal with students and clients who sometimes just oversee the function of public participation but don’t actually work ...
read more →

Sagebrush Collaboration

As a transplanted westerner for 40 odd years, I’ve come to love the skies, the vistas and the stubborn individualism that runs deep in the culture of so many of the wide open places west of the Mississippi. That stubbornness sometimes goes a little overboard like it did with the ...
read more →

Meetings are a Mess

The pandemic halted face to face meetings, but we adapted and video conferencing became mainstream. Office buildings turned into ghost shells for nearly two years until employers began slowly enticing people out of their bathrobes and back to an agency/business desk, for at least parts of the week. We’re now ...
read more →

Collaborate or Compromise?!

Democracy – and a Democratic Republic like the U.S. – is an exercise in collaboration and it’s how we’ve gotten this far. I’ll argue that the best public participation is almost always a collaboration. But in recent times, the idea of compromise has been branded as a weak-kneed, liberal-minded copout. ...
read more →