Defining & Building Relationships

Defining Relationships.

Self-fulfilling Prophecies.

The Six Process Factors.

Community Linkages.

Merging Community Linkages with the Framework.

How Things Appear.

The Six Contextual Factors.

Organization of Information.

Analysis of Process & Contextual Factors.

175 KB

Time:
45 minutes to 4 hours depending upon the number of people, the level of current knowledge, and the manner of facilitation.

Audience:
Equipment:
10-50 people interested in collaborating together.
Overhead projector, paper, pencils, flip chart, felt pens, sticky dots, sticky notes, masking tape or push pins.

Unit 4
defining & building relationships

Defining relationships

• OUTCOMES: To assist the group's understanding of the importance of relationships to the Collaboration Framework.

• DISCUSS: Relationships are the fundamental building blocks upon which communication, cooperation and collaboration are built. They tie disparate aspects together, into a whole much greater than its singular parts, through trust and shared vision. Relationships begin with one person—you—and encompass all those with whom you connect in an intricate web of mutual understanding. Nothing in our world is truly independent from anything else. In science we observe that no subatomic energies exist without engaging other energy sources. Everything is based upon relationships, yet, we tend to focus upon singular aspects or symptoms, rather than complex relationship-based issues. Changing our system of service delivery from competition to collaboration depends upon a clear understanding of the big picture, and the invisible lines of relation-ships which tie it all together.

Analyzing the Contextual Factors surrounding your efforts—Connectedness, History of Working Together, Political Climate, Policies/Laws/Regulations, Resources, and Catalysts—can help you prepare for possible obstacles and pitfalls.
Understanding the dynamic interaction between Contextual Factors and the Process Factors— Leadership, Community Development, Understanding Community, Communication, Sustainability, and Research and Evaluation—can help you determine the possibility of having a successful collaboration.
Focusing upon these factors helps to reduce fragmentation within the collaboration, and tends to move group conversation from polite discussion to skillful dialog, sound decision making, and action.
Our tendency is to identify problems to fix. We see things and results easier than patterns of interaction. We want to fix things as if they are external events, not dependent upon underlying relationships. In so doing, we are drawn toward quick, superficial fixes which may worsen problems in the long run. By contrast, building relationships takes time and long-term commitment. There may not be tangible "results" for years, because building relationships tends to elude objective tracking measures. It's hard to quantify trust and respect, both of which are needed for successful collaborations, and both of which spring from carefully nurtured relationships.

• ACTIVITY: (1) Ask participants to turn to the person next to them and discuss how they feel about this. (2) Break into small groups and using the graphic in the back of this unit, ask participants to identify three positive relationships underlying the current collaboration of which they are each aware. Why are they positive?

self-fulfilling prophecies (from Leadership and the New Science - Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe, by Margaret J. Wheatley.)

• OUTCOMES: To increase participants understanding about our expectations, and how our perceptions of others affects how we interact in a collaboration.

• DISCUSS: "Schroedinger's cat is a classic thought problem in quantum physics. Physicist Erwin Schroedinger constructed the problem in 1935 to illustrate that in the quantum world nothing is real. We cannot know anything about what is happening to something if we are not looking at it, and, stranger yet, nothing has happened to it until we observe it... The problem of the cat has not yet been resolved, but it is constructed as follows: A live cat is placed in a box. The box has solid walls, so no one outside the box can see into it. This is a crucial factor, since the problem centers on the role of the observer in evoking reality. A device will trigger the release of either poison or food; the probability of either occurrence is 50/50. Time passes. The trigger goes off. The cat meets its fate. Or does it? Just as an electron is both a wave and a particle until our observation causes it to collapse as either a particle or wave, Schroedinger argues that the cat is both alive and dead until the moment we observe it. Inside the box, unobserved, the cat exists only as a probability wave. It is possible to calculate mathematically (as a Schroedinger wave function) all of the cat's possible states. But it is impossible to say that the cat is living or dead until we observe it. It is the act of observation that determines the collapse of the cat's wave function and makes it either dead or alive. Before we peer in, the cat exists as prob-abilities. Our nosiness determines its fate." -p60.
Not all things that are important can be observed and measured. What is our relationship to the cat? Why is the cat important?
Try to understand Schroedinger's cat in light of self-fulfilling prophecies and the impact they have on the people with whom we interact. This is a concept that has been discussed at length in management theory and education. If a teacher believes her student to be gifted, it is a well known fact that that particular student will excel. If a manager believes a new employee to be especially smart, she will hear words of wisdom every time the new hire speaks. If we think someone is stupid or gifted, they appear stupid or gifted to us. Our beliefs about others color their actions in our eyes and it affects the way we interact. If we're in a position of authority, we may give choice assignments to an employee, expecting them to succeed, and observing them in a way that confirms our own beliefs.
Our powers of observation can bring Schroedinger's cat to life. Our willingness to let others care for the cat may keep it alive, too. Think about this as it relates to diversity and your world view. Where do you stand? What experiences do you bring to the observation? The lenses we see through are different for different people.
• ACTIVITY: In small groups have participants share their feelings about the information that has been presented. How does this affect the way we work collaboratively? What beliefs do we have that get in the way of working together effectively? How can we best surface our beliefs? Clarify our beliefs? Reach a new understanding about them?

the 6 process factors

• OUTCOMES: To have participants gain knowledge and understanding about the Collaboration Framework's six Process Factors.
• ACTIVITY: A series of questions designed to help clarify participants understanding about Process Factors within their community are developed in the following paragraphs. Answers can be discussed in large or small groups. Results from this activity can tie in with the Spider Web Analysis at the end of this unit – think about how that may best work. Standards

(1) Have participants write down their ideas regard-ing each of the six factors and share them with the group, or (2) Divide participants into six small groups concentrating on one factor each, discuss among themselves and report back to the full group, or (3) Use a large flip chart poster to accommodate all responses to visualize an overview of the group.
• DISCUSS: Process Factors focus on the "how to" aspect of the collaboration and cover specific skills and components which are necessary to build effective working relationships. The Framework has identified six major factors influencing the process itself: (1) Understanding the Community, (2) Community Development, (3) Leadership, (4) Communication, (5) Research and Evaluation, and (6) Sustainability. Each factor covers a broad range of skills and/or tasks which impact the collaborative process.
(1) Understanding the Community: How well do you know your community? Its people? Its values? Its habits? The more you know now, at the begin-ning of your collaboration, the better off you'll be later. It's important to gain a sense of your community's self-image, where the power rests, and who has gifts to share. Who will your potential audiences be? Your potential collaborators? Where are the potential turf battles? An understanding of your community will bring answers to these ques-tions. It will allow you to recognize the diversity of strengths and weaknesses that will influence the success of your collaboration.
(2) Community Development: How will your collaboration mobilize communities and build upon community strengths? How will your efforts enable trust to be built with community citizens? The collaboration defines its own vision, mission, values, principles and outcomes within the larger context of the community's attitudes, norms, beliefs and values. Your collaborative efforts must build upon the positive environment within the community, overcome potential barriers, and mobilize citizens to change things for the better.
(3) Leadership: For purposes of collaboration leaders are those who can impact change within their community, group and/or organization. A key responsibility is to assure diverse and representative members have been brought to the collaborative effort. Potentially impacted groups and individuals should be contacted. Leadership should facilitate team building, help define roles and responsibilities and group protocols, capitalize upon diversity, and focus upon group and individual strengths and assets. Who are the leaders for your collaboration? Who can best facilitate defining roles? Appreciating diversity? Bringing representative community members together?

(4) Communication: Clarity and openness of communication is essential, and norms for commu-nicating must be established that are acceptable to all current and potential members. Respect for diversity is important. A process for communicating between meetings must be established, as well as how the collaboration will communicate with the broader community. Both formal and informal communicative paths should be explored. How will you establish norms for communication acceptable to all current and potential members? Who will be responsible for taking meeting minutes? For communicating between meetings?
(5) Research and Evaluation: Your effort should review examples of other successful collaborative models, best practices, and approaches that may Standards benefit your efforts. What data do you need in order to establish objective benchmarks for future success? How will you analyze and evaluate your efforts? Consider these questions now, because the primary objective of your collaboration will be to meet its desired outcomes and without an evaluative method built in, you won't know whether or not your efforts are successful.
(6) Sustainability: Plan now for ways in which to assure that your membership, resources, and strate-gic program planning will be strong for both the short and long-term. What terms will members have, and how will they be replaced? Will you have formal agreements of operation? How will you assure that appropriate levels of money, time and people will be available to meet the collaboration's efforts?

community linkages

• OUTCOMES: To develop participant's understanding of community relationships and communnity linkages.

• One of the first steps in defining existing and potential relationships is developing an under-standing of the linkages within your community. They generally fall into five levels—Networking, Cooperation or Alliance, Coordination or Partnership, Coalition, and Collaboration. Each level can be evaluated in terms of its own purpose, structure, and process. Developing a matrix of "community linkages" provides focus and clarity as your collabo-ration supports new relationships. By recognizing the interrelatedness of relationships within your collaboration you will strengthen your infrastructure and help your efforts to be successful.
• ACTIVITY: Using the chart of community linkages have participants identify current linkages within their community. This may best be done in small teams analyzing and recomposing to present back to the large group. Have the group reach consensus on the linkage(s) they are now in, and where they want to be in a specific time period. These results tie directly to the next section, Merging Community Linkages with the Framework. What examples of Networking are occurring in your communities now? Of Cooperation or Alliance? Of Coordination or Partnership? Of Coalition? Of Collaboration?

merging community linkages with the Framework

• OUTCOMES: To build a workplan correlating the group's linkages with the Framework.
• DISCUSS: Oftentimes a visual representation of our collaborative efforts helps us understand where we are now, and where we hope to be. Now that we've identified current linkages (and future linkages) we can relate these linkages with all five aspects of the Collaboration Framework: (1) Grounding, (2) Core Foundation, (3) Process Factors, (4) Contextual Factors, and (5) Outcomes.
• ACTIVITY: Using the chart, Merging Linkages with the Framework, have participants identify the parts of the Framework and their levels of influence on the different linkages. What does this mean for the group's collaborative effort now, and in the future?
On the chart, Grounding refers to how extensive the diversity of the people are that are involved; Core Foundation relates to how well the vision, mission, etc. have been designed and established by all members; and Outcomes correspond to how well clearly defined outcomes and impacts are owned by the whole group. Process and Contextual Factors are those factors that influence the linkage the most.

how things appear (from Leadership and the New Science -Learning About Organization form an Orderly Universe, by Margaret J. Wheatley.)

• OUTCOMES: To develop an understanding of how our perceptions of people and events shape our realities.

• DISCUSS: Physicists such as John Archibald Wheeler believe in a participatory universe, in which the act of looking for information evokes the information we go looking for. The double-slit experiment in which electrons behave as if they know we're watching them—patterning as a wave with two slits open or as a particle with one slit open, and acting differently if the recording apparatus is on or off— has become the basic question upon which quantum physics rests. The correlation in this for collaborators is the mystery of observation and the role of the observer, and how our perceptions of people and events shape our realities.
"It is difficult to develop a new sensitivity to the fact that no form of measurement is neutral. Physicists call this awareness contextualism, a sensitivity to the interdependency between how things appear and the environment which causes them to appear. Contextualism raises some very important questions. How can we trust that we get the information we need to make intelligent decisions? How can we know what is the right information to look for?" -p63.

What this suggests is that we should be less worried about the data we collect and organize and the information we sift in hopes of finding the right answer, and more concerned with the nature of our participatory experience together. Bringing all participants to the table, enjoying the diverse richness of many different interpretations and observations, generating information, thinking about who we are and what we want to be together— that's collaboration.
It's also the best way to build ownership! People support what they create. Quantum physics suggests that it's impossible for any idea, plan, strategy or collaboration to be successful if the participants don't personally interact with it! "Reality emerges from our process of observation, from decisions we the observers make about what we will see. It does not exist independent of those activities. Therefore, we cannot talk people into reality because there truly is no reality to describe if they haven't been there. People can only become aware of the reality of the plan by interacting with it, by creating different possibilities through their personal processes of observation."

"A quantum universe is enacted only in an environment rich in relationships. Nothing happens in the quantum world without something encountering something else. Nothing is independent of the relationships that occur. I am constantly creating the world—evoking it, not discovering it—as I participate in all its many interactions. This is a world of process, not a world of things." -p68.
• ACTIVITY: Ask participants to turn to the person next to them and discuss how they feel about this. Or break into small groups for a more in-depth discussion if time allows: Have participants (1) Observe - "What do you see?", (2) Reflect - "How are you responding?", (3) Interpret - "What does this mean?", and (4) Decide - "What will you do?".
How does this knowledge affect us? How might our collaboration affect some one or some thing that we haven't discussed? How have our perceptions colored the way we've done business in the past?
Currently?

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Time:	45 minutes to 4 hours depending upon the number of people, the level of current knowledge, and the manner of facilitation.
Audience: Equipment:	10-50 people interested in collaborating together. Overhead projector, paper, pencils, flip chart, felt pens, sticky dots, sticky notes, masking tape or push pins.

		• OUTCOMES: To assist the group's understanding of the importance of relationships to the Collaboration Framework.
		• DISCUSS: Relationships are the fundamental building blocks upon which communication, cooperation and collaboration are built. They tie disparate aspects together, into a whole much greater than its singular parts, through trust and shared vision. Relationships begin with one person—you—and encompass all those with whom you connect in an intricate web of mutual understanding. Nothing in our world is truly independent from anything else. In science we observe that no subatomic energies exist without engaging other energy sources. Everything is based upon relationships, yet, we tend to focus upon singular aspects or symptoms, rather than complex relationship-based issues. Changing our system of service delivery from competition to collaboration depends upon a clear understanding of the big picture, and the invisible lines of relation-ships which tie it all together.
		Analyzing the Contextual Factors surrounding your efforts—Connectedness, History of Working Together, Political Climate, Policies/Laws/Regulations, Resources, and Catalysts—can help you prepare for possible obstacles and pitfalls. Understanding the dynamic interaction between Contextual Factors and the Process Factors— Leadership, Community Development, Understanding Community, Communication, Sustainability, and Research and Evaluation—can help you determine the possibility of having a successful collaboration. Focusing upon these factors helps to reduce fragmentation within the collaboration, and tends to move group conversation from polite discussion to skillful dialog, sound decision making, and action. Our tendency is to identify problems to fix. We see things and results easier than patterns of interaction. We want to fix things as if they are external events, not dependent upon underlying relationships. In so doing, we are drawn toward quick, superficial fixes which may worsen problems in the long run. By contrast, building relationships takes time and long-term commitment. There may not be tangible "results" for years, because building relationships tends to elude objective tracking measures. It's hard to quantify trust and respect, both of which are needed for successful collaborations, and both of which spring from carefully nurtured relationships.
		• ACTIVITY: (1) Ask participants to turn to the person next to them and discuss how they feel about this. (2) Break into small groups and using the graphic in the back of this unit, ask participants to identify three positive relationships underlying the current collaboration of which they are each aware. Why are they positive?

		• OUTCOMES: To develop participant's understanding of community relationships and communnity linkages.
		• One of the first steps in defining existing and potential relationships is developing an under-standing of the linkages within your community. They generally fall into five levels—Networking, Cooperation or Alliance, Coordination or Partnership, Coalition, and Collaboration. Each level can be evaluated in terms of its own purpose, structure, and process. Developing a matrix of "community linkages" provides focus and clarity as your collabo-ration supports new relationships. By recognizing the interrelatedness of relationships within your collaboration you will strengthen your infrastructure and help your efforts to be successful. • ACTIVITY: Using the chart of community linkages have participants identify current linkages within their community. This may best be done in small teams analyzing and recomposing to present back to the large group. Have the group reach consensus on the linkage(s) they are now in, and where they want to be in a specific time period. These results tie directly to the next section, Merging Community Linkages with the Framework. What examples of Networking are occurring in your communities now? Of Cooperation or Alliance? Of Coordination or Partnership? Of Coalition? Of Collaboration?

		• OUTCOMES: To develop an understanding of how our perceptions of people and events shape our realities.
		• DISCUSS: Physicists such as John Archibald Wheeler believe in a participatory universe, in which the act of looking for information evokes the information we go looking for. The double-slit experiment in which electrons behave as if they know we're watching them—patterning as a wave with two slits open or as a particle with one slit open, and acting differently if the recording apparatus is on or off— has become the basic question upon which quantum physics rests. The correlation in this for collaborators is the mystery of observation and the role of the observer, and how our perceptions of people and events shape our realities. "It is difficult to develop a new sensitivity to the fact that no form of measurement is neutral. Physicists call this awareness contextualism, a sensitivity to the interdependency between how things appear and the environment which causes them to appear. Contextualism raises some very important questions. How can we trust that we get the information we need to make intelligent decisions? How can we know what is the right information to look for?" -p63.
		What this suggests is that we should be less worried about the data we collect and organize and the information we sift in hopes of finding the right answer, and more concerned with the nature of our participatory experience together. Bringing all participants to the table, enjoying the diverse richness of many different interpretations and observations, generating information, thinking about who we are and what we want to be together— that's collaboration. It's also the best way to build ownership! People support what they create. Quantum physics suggests that it's impossible for any idea, plan, strategy or collaboration to be successful if the participants don't personally interact with it! "Reality emerges from our process of observation, from decisions we the observers make about what we will see. It does not exist independent of those activities. Therefore, we cannot talk people into reality because there truly is no reality to describe if they haven't been there. People can only become aware of the reality of the plan by interacting with it, by creating different possibilities through their personal processes of observation."
		"A quantum universe is enacted only in an environment rich in relationships. Nothing happens in the quantum world without something encountering something else. Nothing is independent of the relationships that occur. I am constantly creating the world—evoking it, not discovering it—as I participate in all its many interactions. This is a world of process, not a world of things." -p68. • ACTIVITY: Ask participants to turn to the person next to them and discuss how they feel about this. Or break into small groups for a more in-depth discussion if time allows: Have participants (1) Observe - "What do you see?", (2) Reflect - "How are you responding?", (3) Interpret - "What does this mean?", and (4) Decide - "What will you do?". How does this knowledge affect us? How might our collaboration affect some one or some thing that we haven't discussed? How have our perceptions colored the way we've done business in the past? Currently?