Schlagwort-Archiv: Creating Resonance

The Gift of Listening

When managing Stakeholder Dialogues, never forget that the core of every cooperation process is made out of people and the way they interact. Seen like this, a Stakeholder Dialogue can only be as fruitful as are the relationships between the people that participate in them. In my eyes the most powerful and yet quite simple tool for raising the quality of relationships in a cooperation process is: Listening.

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Why? Because the way people voice their ideas, concerns or doubts is often dependent on the way people listen. Weiterlesen

The 12 principles of good engagement process design

_DSC0544Designing a more sustainable value chain for cashew nuts in Ghana or reforming the Cambodian Land Ministry – depending on the issues at stake and the actors involved, Stakeholder Dialogues can take very different forms and hold diverse challenges. Still, there are some principles that are crucial for the success of any change process. Here is a list of the 12 main principles that the Collective Leadership Institute has refined over the last years that will help you kick-start your engagement processes. Weiterlesen

“Yes, and…” about a small word – and its big impact

In Stakeholder engagement processes collective intelligence and the ability of a group of people to generate ideas together is crucial. Last week we held our training course „Working with Stakeholder Dialogues“ here in Potsdam. The participants brought with them really exciting project cases, so me and my co-facilitator decided to introduce to them a little tool that would leverage their potential for generating wild ideas and positive dynamics in their change processes – the “Yes, and…” exercise.

Yes, and...

© Jan Lamprecht – Jupiter Union

Here is how the exercise works:

Inform the group that they get to spend 500.000 € and can go on a holiday trip. The only condition is that everyone that contributes an idea on how to spend the money has to start his or her sentence with the words “Yes, and…”. Weiterlesen

Raising the energy for change and dialogue

Recently I introduced you to the Dialogic Change Model that the Collective Leadership Institute developed to help you facilitate a process design that is owned by all stakeholders. Today I want to dive deeper into the first phase.

Dialogic-Change-Model_ENG_Phase1Phase 1 is essentially about creating the resonance for the envisioned change and exploring the Stakeholder Dialogue’s context, taking other existing initiatives and the people involved into account. Talking to selected but relevant stakeholders and opinion-leaders informally in this phase can help to understand the prospects and potential obstacles for dialogue and change. Weiterlesen

Do your homework when engaging stakeholders

Getting in touch with your stakeholders, finding out what moves them, where their interests lie, is a prerequisite for a meaningful dialogue. This is why we interview the alumni of our educational programs regularly. Like this we find out in which ways we have to develop our methodology further and ultimately how to shape the future of the Collective Leadership Institute to stay in touch with what our stakeholders need. This interview my colleague Katharina held with Mouna Lyoubi from Morocco – and left the room inspired…

Mouna, you are working on a very interesting project – tell me more about it.

Mouna The project is called “Cooperation between Cities and Municipalities” (CoMun). It is a regional project with presence in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. It started in 2008 in Morocco and in Tunisia after the Arab Spring, but not yet in Algeria. I am a local Junior Advisor in Morocco. We had a contest of projects coming from 16 cities and we selected 7 projects from 7 different cities. The cities proposed projects on energy efficiency, waste management, transport and rehabilitation of ancient medinas. The projects were provided with technical support and in 2012 we implemented networks between the cities. These networks create bridges for cooperation between the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian cities and the countries themselves. Weiterlesen

Only dedicated circles give birth to something new

This saying by a circle of African wise women captures an important lesson in Stakeholder Dialogues: engagement requires a team of committed people.

In order to bring a project forward, it is important to have a group of people that are dedicated to the change envisaged and to implementing the intended change jointly. At the CLI we call this a Container – and as methodology it is the core of our work. Many stakeholder involvement processes fail or have little impact because there is no solid Container of people who feel collectively responsible for fostering and holding the process from beginning to end.

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Leave your To-Do Lists at the Check-In please!

You probably know those typical meeting situations: People arrive one by one, some don´t take their eyes of their laptops to write last-minute mails and at some point the meeting is opened and starts by jumping right to the first agenda point.

© kalafoto - Fotolia.com

© kalafoto – Fotolia.com

At the CLI we try and do it differently. Meetings – no matter how small – start with a check-in and end with a check-out. We are not big fans of airports, but we like to think of our meetings as little journeys. And to leave our  “mental luggage” outside for the while. The check-in is a great tool to frame your meetings in a different atmosphere, get people into a conversation and focus on the topics to be discussed. Weiterlesen

A short history of the Dialogic Change Model

Let´s start our learning journey with looking back at the birth of the Dialogic Change Model – the model that lies at the core of our approach to Stakeholder Dialogues. Are you familiar with it yet?

While supporting the 4C project, a cross-sector partnership between coffee traders, producer organizations and international civil society organizations our founder Petra Künkel learned a lot about what factors make a cooperation project successful and how important the quality of dialogue is. Over the years she collected her experiences and developed a model that balances the ancient human knowledge of dialogue and collective intelligence with result-oriented process design and communication architecture. This is how the Dialogic Change Model was born. The model introduces four phases that help you facilitate a process design that is owned by all stakeholders:

Dialogic Change Model

Dialogic Change Model

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