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Collaboration

Achieving more together

Developing collaboration

We support you in bringing collaboration between teams and organisations to life. With clear processes and a sensitive eye for relationships, we help you to prepare the common ground for collaboration and create structures that enable long-term impact.

What does collaboration mean?
Our understanding

 

 

 

We are greater than and greater through the sum of us.”
Heather McGhee

For us, collaboration is more than just working together for a specific purpose. It means overcoming institutional boundaries to work together towards greater goals. In a world characterised by complexity and polarisation, collaboration is a source of strength, learning and shared resilience.

But collaboration is also challenging: expectations need to be calibrated, tensions between individual and collective needs need to be navigated and workable agreements need to be made. Good collaboration is built on trust, communication and a shared set of values - while remaining flexible enough to meet the needs of everyone involved.

Collaboration is the art of making diversity productive. It makes it possible to develop solutions across borders for social challenges that no one could achieve alone. But this requires courage and the will to engage with the dynamics between people and organisations.

A collaborative attitude means letting go of competitive thinking and instead focussing on mutual learning and growing together. It requires openness and clarity - both in the organisation of relationships and in the structures and processes that support collaboration. Collaboration thus becomes a source of innovation, resilience and social change.

Our offer

We support you in designing your collaborations - from brainstorming to realisation:

  • Stakeholder dialogues:
    We help you to identify relevant stakeholders, moderate joint meetings and support you in the strategic development of partnerships.
  • Network development:
    Together we develop the „common ground“ of your networks, work out common interests and frameworks of action and accompany you in decision-making processes.
  • Team development and conflict resolution:
    We moderate processes that strengthen relationships, clarify misunderstandings and build trust. We rely on creative large group formats and effective feedback mechanisms.
  • Structure and control:
    We work with you to design decision-making and coordination processes that reflect your goals and your culture - from loose networks to intensive collaboration.

Examples of our work

  • Supporting interface and decision-making processes between two co-operating teams at Greenpeace Germany.
  • Cross-provider strategy development in Berlin neighbourhoods with creative future workshops and reconciliation of interests.
  • Process support in setting up the Rückenwind initiative for civil society actors in eastern Germany.

Want to find out more?

Discover our resources and get started now

„Common Ground – A tool to help you define the common ground and goals of your collaboration.

Collaboration continuum – This tool helps you to agree on how „close“ or „loose“ your collaboration should be.

Change Essentials: Collaboration and Networks – A comprehensive online course on forms and methods of collaboration.

Blog posts on the topic: Collaboration

ALL BLOG ARTICLES

Culture of cooperation, collaboration

Listening, even when it gets uncomfortable

In the run-up to the oe-tag, we were very uncertain and asked ourselves: how will this topic, which occupies us so intensively and at the same time seems so far removed from the context of „organisational development“, be received? How would our long-standing Berlin participants react to us going to Halle? And how are we ourselves able to „speak“ about this topic, as a group of colleagues, in [...]

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Culture of cooperation, strategy, collaboration

The complex recipe for social change

Strategy discussions in organisations that we support are increasingly characterised by tensions. Where there is a struggle for the „right“ impact approach, discussions become passionate and spirited: it has often long been clear what we are against, but what are we actually for? And what exactly does it take to achieve this? While impact orientation in the 2010s was primarily a concept [...]

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Culture of cooperation, resilience, collaboration

There are no power-free spaces

We invited Žaklina Mamutovič and Nele Kontzi, two pioneers of the anti-bias approach in Germany, to the SOCIUS lab in June. The two have been working together in the anti-bias network for over 23 years. They educate, support, offer training and advice, and it is clear to see that they do this with conviction and passion. Back in 2015 [...]

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Products on the topic: Collaboration

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