As I was meandering through Etienne Wenger’s website (which is well worth a visit if you want to explore Communities of Practice further) last week I came across his thinking around levels of participation and I thought it was a really useful approach for exploring the different ways people get involved with social learning. I…
Start small and be patient… You can’t move faster than you can build trust and ownership, without making the network reliant on you. (Jamie Pett, London International Development Network.) Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as…
From the Margins to the Mainstream: how to create the conditions for new operating models to thrive Some great research from nesta and Collaborate CIC into how innovative practices at the margins can be a catalyst for change in public services from the inside out. The self-assessment tool looks at eleven essential enablers of innovative practice…
We see future thinking as a collective, collaborative, and creative process. Earlier this year we wrote about different kinds of problem and how you might approach solving, or resolving, them creatively. From our discussions with colleagues and clients it is clear that many organisations are now beginning to turn to the daunting problem of what…
Organisations join or form networks for a variety of reasons, including the need to gain legitimacy, serve clients more effectively, attract more resources, and address complex problems. But regardless of the specific reason, in a general sense, all net-work organizations are seeking to achieve some end that they could not have achieved independently . (Provan…
How Higher Education can support local ecosystems of innovation Great paper from Stanford Social Innovation Review on how HE can support innovation at a local level using a model of knowledge sharing, developing a community of practice and capacity building rooted in reciprocity, commitment, and love. ‘Project managers and administrators can only do so much…
Continuing our merger mini-series today’s post offers a road map for merger. The framework for the map is the Design Council’s Double Diamond: a process of alternating creative and critical thinking to design and create a new merged organisation. Whilst these are shown as linear development, there will be, as in any design process, a…
The greatest change in the way business is being conducted is the accelerating growth of relationships based not on ownership but on partnership. (Peter Drucker, Collaborative Commerce Summit, June 2001) Some 19 years on Drucker’s words have never seemed more relevant. We know that a full blown merger is not going to be right for…
The Importance of Community A beautiful and powerful blog from François Matarasso about community. ‘Social media creates connections and markets, sometimes crowds, but rarely genuine communities. Community emerges when people go through the same things at the same time in the same place. It emerges from their differences in common. It’s precious, and community artists…
People working in mergers, like many others working in specialised areas, have developed jargon: shorthand for common processes and concepts that is helpful to those ‘in the know’ but intimidating for those unfamiliar with the activity. Much of it also applies mainly to the private sector and is not always easy to translate to a…
…there are two main approaches in the not-for-profit sector to mergers. The most common is ‘desperation’ where financial insecurity and the core need to maintain services pushes organisations towards reactive mergers, but there are also cases where merger is motivated by the opportunity to ‘create something bigger than the sum of the parts,’ pool resources…
Budgeting for uncertain times Timely article on how to budget within uncertainty. I particularly liked the line Effective planning and budgeting define success as improving outcomes for customers, employees, investors, and communities — not as hitting budgets. Psychological safety in virtual meetings Some great practical guidance on…
More and deeper collaboration is, as Dawn wrote on Monday, likely to be a key element in many organisational responses to the disruption we are all experiencing. Mergers, the creation of new legal entity from the combination of two or more previously separate legal entities, is at the ‘full-on’ end of the collaboration spectrum. Mergers…