by Lynn Barendsen
I have recently returned from a thought-provoking meeting, and write here to share some reflections. For almost two decades, our Good Project team has been investigating Good Work, and more recently we have expanded our research to include investigations into Good Play, Good Citizenship, and Good Life. In particular, I have been tasked with considering the legacy of the Good Project: our impact in and beyond the classroom and our influence within the broader conversation among educational organizations, social movements, and changemakers.
In San Francisco, I attended the quarterly meeting of Eric Liu’s Civic Collaboratory. Our thanks to Eric Liu for inviting us to attend the Collaboratory (Howard Gardner and I have both attended, on separate occasions) – the opportunity to participate gives us the opportunity to connect (and potentially work) with many who share our interests. Similarly we hope to contribute substantively to the work and ideas put forward by the Collaboratory group. Our involvement with this network has given me new insight into what it takes to collaborate well.
First, a bit about the Collaboratory. Part of Citizen University (formerly known as the Guiding Lights Network), the Civic Collaboratory is the brainchild of Eric Liu, writer, “civic entrepreneur” and former speechwriter for the Clinton White House. The collaboratories are invitation-only working meetings, gathering leaders of civic and democratic organizations, activists, writers and researchers from the worlds of education, business, law, science, art, politics and technology. The shared goal of this non-partisan group is to invigorate citizenship and democracy in the US.
Clearly this is a “can do” group. During each meeting, a few members of the Collaboratory present a major initiative or question to the entire group. The rest of the members are expected to provide not only feedback but also genuine, real commitments of time, energy and resources. This format, dubbed the “Rotating Credit Club,” is taken seriously: in addition to commitments made during the session, members of the Collaboratory are also encouraged to work together in between sessions.
An example: Jacqueline Smith, Advisor to the President for Social Embeddedness at Arizona State University, is tasked with helping to design ASU’s Public Service Academy. Jacqueline and colleagues are thinking about the kinds of leaders we might need in the future, hope to graduate “collaborative leaders of character,” and “redefine what public service is in our country.” To accomplish these goals, the Public Service Academy is creating a Social Impact Training Corps (SITC), a civilian version of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). ASU, the largest public university in the country, has 73,000 students across four campuses in the Phoenix metropolitan area; this is a project with big potential impact. Jacqueline asked the Collaboratory for immediate feedback (e.g. would you hire a SITC graduate) and for longer-term help (how can we spread this idea). One participant from Change.org said he’d happily hire a graduate because they had already been vetted. A fellow from a major foundation suggested Jacqueline consider how to pull returning veterans into the model and contact the Tillman Foundation.
I am still learning the ins and outs of this network, but there are a few critical elements that make me optimistic that the Collaboratory will be an example of “good” collaboration. Each of these elements, present here in practice, have been identified as crucial in our research on Good Collaboration:
-The delineation of responsibilities is clear. Interestingly, it is up to the individual who is doing the asking to follow up with all connections made.
-The collaborative process is clearly laid out and consistent from one meeting to the next.
-Goals are articulated at the outset, revisited at the end of each meeting, and explained in between quarterly gatherings.
-Attendees, or collaborators, are all present because they want to be. Participation has not been imposed upon anyone.
Attention to these nuts-and-bolts make me hopeful that actual change may be achieved by this group, for example, opportunities for local impact (community gardens, senior centers) are increased by broadening the reach of new organizations like Citizenvestor, new technologies like google plus “hangouts” can be utilized to improve the civic and cultural dialogues that are going on around us constantly. I have personally connected with three participants since the meeting, in each case discerning potential projects that could encourage good collaborative work in new venues.
Over the years, my colleagues and I have written quite a bit about what it takes to do Good Work, acknowledging that carrying out high quality, ethically responsible work is anything but easy. We began to study collaboration because we were curious to determine why it is that some collaborations go well while so many fail. We believe that collaborative skills are increasingly important in an age when interconnectedness is the norm. At the same time, one needs to be very wary of pseudo connectedness and pseudo collaboration – like, for example, the teenager with 1000 “friends” who has no one to turn to when in need.
The connection between Good Work and collaboration is more direct than I previously realized. In Gardens of Democracy, Liu and co-author Nick Hanauer rework several common beliefs about that basic democratic notion, “self-interest.” For example, “It’s survival of the fittest – only the strong survive” becomes “It’s survival of the smartest – only the cooperative survive” and “rugged individualism wins” becomes “teamwork wins”. We exist in a world that is constantly connected, where workers across sectors are always “on” and are regularly asked to communicate between multiple cultural understandings. Perhaps, Good Work in the 21st century faces too many challenges to be achieved in isolation; perhaps, Good Work in the 21st century is necessarily collaborative.