Theory of change

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This is a Work-In-Progress. Feel free to edit!

Basic Framework

Collaboration is a holistic craft. You get good at craft through practice. In order to improve our collective collaborative literacy, we need to find ways to encourage and support practice. Ultimately, the path to this is to focus on practitioners.

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We do this by:

• Modeling skillful, high-performance collaboration (especially continuous improvement)
• Synthesizing the principles, practices, and lessons learned of high-performance collaboration
• Nurturing and supporting other practitioners

There's overlap between these areas, as indicated in the venn diagram to the right.

• Model + Synthesize — Continuous synthesis is an important principle of high-performance collaboration, so if you're modeling, you're already synthesizing. The key distinction here might be intention, specifically for whom.
• Model + Nurture — If you're modeling, you're working with others, and if you're being an effective facilitative leader, you are helping to lift those with whom you work. You can be even more intentionally about this by inviting, welcoming, and mentoring emerging practitioners and colleagues who want to shadow.
• Synthesize + Nurture — Synthesis can form the framework on which you teach and nurture other practitioners as well as the hook to draw people to your work.

Examples

I use fitness examples a lot to describe what I'm doing, as it's visceral and accessible, especially when it comes to grasping high-performance and the ecosystem at large. In the fitness world:

• Model = Getting really fit myself, maybe even competitively
• Synthesize = Writing down how I get and stay fit — principles, practices, etc.
• Nurture = Helping friends and family get fit. Teaching classes. Starting a gym.

Intersections:

• Model + Synthesize = Overlap here is smaller than with other fields, because getting fit isn't a knowledge practice.
• Model + Nurture = Working out with other people. Making sure everyone at my company is fit.
• Synthesize + Nurture = Writing a book. Maintaining a fitness website, where I'm proactive about engaging with my audience / community.

Food

State of Collaborative Practice

We need lots of people doing all of these things in order to foster a healthy ecosystem of high-performance collaboration practitioners. Where to prioritize depends on the practitioner as well as the state of the ecosystem.