Here's a small kit of simple tools that we often use to help minimize resistance and polarization in groups so they can get and stay aligned in the work and collaborate effectively. Try these out, and let us know how they worked for you!

In supporting the startup and turnaround of numerous collaborations, we've learned a few things about how the Collaborative Innovation approach is different than collaboration as it is commonly practiced. This article shares a table that summarizes some of the key differences.

We turn difficult underlying tensions and conflict into resources for deep collaboration and innovation. Watch this keynote at the 2012 Systems Thinking in Action conference with our colleague Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships for some insights into one of the many frameworks we use to advance productive collaboration among diverse stakeholders.

Donella Meadows’ powerful concept of "transcending paradigms" offers a transformative approach to creating meaningful change in our families, communities, and the world. She argues that by recognizing the complementary nature of opposing values—like freedom and accountability, or reason and faith—we can transcend the limitations of entrenched perspectives and foster true interdependence. To shift the systems we live in, we must not only question our own paradigms but learn to do so together, embracing the hidden truths within each other’s beliefs.

How do today’s leaders create profound innovation in the face of complexity? According to an executive report by the IBM Institute for Business Value, they do it by “embracing dynamic tensions.”

In an exchange on the Collective Impact Forum, CoCreative partner Russ Gaskin offered some advice about funding and shared measurement concerns that might arise among stakeholders when initiating a collective impact initiative.

In an inspiring case study of financial innovation and social impact, learn how a diverse coalition of industry leaders transformed funding for community development.

Sometimes, things just don't feel right in collective impact initiatives. If you feel that way about your own initiative, it might be time for a checkup. Fortunately, collective impact initiatives don't need doctors or even outside experts to tell them how they're doing. Conducting a transparent, shared, and meaningful self-assessment is a powerful experience that can build even greater commitment and energy among your group.

CoCreative partner Russ Gaskin was interviewed by Christopher Skroupa of Skytop Strategies on how companies can more effectively collaborate with stakeholders to solve tough sustainability challenges.

To understand facilitative systems, let’s look at how traffic control is handled in three countries: The Philippines, Singapore, and the U.K.

This article is an attempt to at least outline the whole elephant—all the fields and concepts that we tend to use at CoCreative. It lays out the 28 fields and over 200 concepts and practices that we draw on—sometimes daily, sometimes occasionally—in our work.

People often assume that work needs to happen in a linear, sequential way or that everyone needs have a say in all parts of the work. That not only slows down the work, it’s less productive and less engaging for participants, and it can silence diverse voices. This article outlines some of the benefits of working concurrently.

Innovation is often perceived as a neat and orderly process, but it’s actually messy and unpredictable, and the desire for it to be orderly and predictable blocks the very learning and innovation that we need to be successful in our work together. We often present the Design Squiggle in the very first meeting of a network and explain that the process won’t be linear and neat, and why that's a good thing.

We spiral all the time at CoCreative. No, that doesn’t mean we’re losing it, or that we're stressed out. Spiraling is about expanding the circle of ownership and deepening engagement as we discuss an initiative's potential goal, analysis, critical shifts, and potential solutions with a growing network of people. Read on to learn more.

This article reveals how seemingly opposing values in collaboration - like fast vs. slow, or action vs. analysis - aren't problems to solve, but powerful catalysts for better solutions. Learn how successful facilitators frame these "Creative Tensions" as assets rather than obstacles, and discover eight key polarities that drive innovative teamwork.

Discover the often-overlooked key to successful collaborative innovation: the art of "Checking Back." This essential practice ensures your team's current work remains aligned with its original purpose - or evolves intentionally when needed. Learn why treating every aspect of your project as a "working version" leads to more dynamic and effective outcomes.

Are your meetings falling short of breakthrough insights? Learn how to leverage the critical "divergence and convergence" cycles that lead to true innovation.

Virtual meetings can be places of rich collaboration or they can be places where people connect in and then immediately check out to get through email. In this article we share some learning about how virtual collaboration can be both richly meaningful and closely intimate.

We often assume that online meetings mean disengagement and boredom but some of our most meaningful, intimate, and energetic sessions have happened online. Learn and experience some methods and guidelines for genuine online engagement in this archived webinar from April, 2020.

A clear and powerful shared intent is key to the success of any collaboration. In this session, Russ Gaskin and Sharon Simms explored how to keep diverse stakeholders at the table despite their differences, generate energy and momentum to fuel the work, and establish the focus for everyone to stay on track amidst competing priorities and political forces.

This session is a spicy and brief introduction to the Collaborative Innovation Approach that serves as the foundation for the network-based systems change work we do here at CoCreative.

This era of disruption requires us to take on deeper systemic challenges. As changemakers, how do we embrace failure as an inevitable part of the work of shifting complex systems? In this webinar, CoCreative team members Russ Gaskin, Heather Equinoss, and Luzette Jaimes led a co-inquiry to deepen our shared understanding of productive failure, why it is important to systems change and the key mindsets that need to be challenged to do so.

This interactive webinar explores what being a better ancestor could mean for each of us and poses questions to reflect on this alongside changemakers who are charting long-term paths to resilience all around the world.

In this webinar, Andres Marquez-Lara, Founder and CEO of UFacilitate, and host and CoCreative team member Luzette Jaimes, focus on our relationship with other humans and in and in particular how our cultural values and backgrounds influence these interactions often in ways we often don't realize. Through a series of highly interactive and introspective activities participants are invited to reflect on their own culture and stories, as well as introduce a performance framework to help transcend the dominant narratives that often prevent us from connecting and tapping into our collective strengths.

Fostering patterns of aliveness in ourselves, our teams, our organizations, and our stakeholder systems is essential for bringing about transformative change. In this webinar, Dominic Stucker, Managing Partner at the Collective Leadership Institute, and host and CoCreative team member Luzette Jaimes, explore patterns of aliveness at the individual and systems levels.

A session introducing The System Sanctuary’s feminist systems change framework, offering key insights and implications and exploring why we need a feminist systems change ethos.

A conversation with Tema Okun, Karen Proctor, Diane Johnson, our colleagues Marta Ceroni from the Academy for Systems Change and Luis Alejandro Tapia from Illuminate for joining us in our inquiry to learn more about white supremacy culture, discuss how it's shifted in the last 20 years, and explore implications for our work in complex systems change.

Luzette and Russ joined Liz Weaver from Tamarack Institute for an intimate conversation about how dominant cultural norms impair effective collaboration. We shared the results of new research on the negative results we get when dominant cultural values suppress other ways of knowing, being, and doing in collaboration—and how to cultivate more integrative approaches. 

In this highly participatory talk, we explored the power of personal storytelling by re-membering ourselves through the lens of the personal, the political, and the planetary. We navigated the perpetual tension between the individual and the systemic to honor our differences as we create new senses of belonging and liberatory power.

In this justice oriented and joyful wayfinding session, we explored the wisdom rooted in ecological connections and the healing refrains of the natural world.

Together with Hasshan Batts, we explored the idea that to be truly effective, our systems work must be rooted in our interdependence as well as an examination of the past. We explored the role of relationships, self reflective practices and systems change in healing from individual, collective and organizational trauma.

We were very pleased to talk story with Hawaiian elder Aunty Pua and hear a call from our ancestors to behave as 'ohana, Family, in a moment of chaos, and to remember: Ua mau ke Ea, o ka 'Aina i ka Pono (The Life of This Land is perpetuated in Hope).

This session archive is from Ashoka's Series on New Leadership and was recorded in May, 2019.

Do you wish you had a way to transform stuck-ness and confusion into innovation and engagement? How can you help people "see together" so they can combine their diverse perspectives to create better solutions? In this session we focus on a practical and sophisticated method for creating solutions that are best for the short-term AND the long-term, for strategically optimizing learning AND action, for helping stakeholders be both realistic AND optimistic as they work through complex systemic challenges.

In this webinar, hosted by our good friends at the Tamarack Institute, Russ Gaskin and Heather Equinoss introduce Collaborative Innovation, provide a roadmap to guide how this work unfolds, and introduce the “four agendas” of collaborative innovation that build momentum, accountability, and meaningful change.

Ever heard of "use of self"? It's the idea that we can use ourselves as powerful instruments of change in service of a greater good. But what is use of self and how do we cultivate powerful use of self in our systems change practice? Join our team and special guest host Hasshan Batts as we explored these important questions in our March, 2020 webinar.

A virtual panel discussion on "Social Labs and Collaborative Approaches to Systems Change" with Russ Gaskin of CoCreative, Stephanie Daniels of The Sustainable Food Lab, Zaid Hassan of 10 in 10, and Charlotte Hochman of Wow!Labs.

At a time so deeply painful for many, what design principles might we draw from to shape a positive new normal? We explored some of the practical ideas that made Donella so beloved by people interested in making a world that works for all.

If you're leading systems change work, you will no doubt experience fear, conflict, resistance, and even failure at some point along your journey. These might show up in the people you work with and might show up inside you.   But these things are not only normal in our work, they actually have some hidden benefits.  In this archived webinar, we explore how these traditionally "bad" things can actually help us in our work.

In this webinar, Kerstin Tebbe, Founder of Collective Mind and webinar series co-hosts Marta Ceroni (Academy for Systems Change) and Russ Gaskin (CoCreative) invite us to consider this connection between our self-awareness and how we show up in collectives. The event focuses on introspection for self-knowledge as a key pathway for interacting in healthy, effective ways in the groups and collectives we participate in. Reflect on relevant personal experiences and think about building our introspection muscles to increase self-awareness and interact more effectively in collectives.

Aunque podríamos desear estar bien todo el tiempo, hay momentos cuando la desesperación, el desgaste o la desesperanza surgen y nos abruman. En estos momentos, cómo nos envolvemos con otres, nos cuidamos y abrazamos el aprendizaje y las percepciones que estos momentos “en baja” nos ofrecen pueden ser determinantes poderosos del bienestar. En esta sesión, Ana Lucía Castaño Galvis (ARARE) y Paz Bascuñán (Ancla Latam), nos van a guiar a través de una reflexión sobre cómo no estar bien puede ser una fuente poderosa de aprendizaje sobre lo que realmente necesitamos para estar realmente bien, individual y colectivamente.

How might we differentiate between unconscious habits and intentional practices that could sustain our well-being for the long haul? In this thoughtful and inspiring session in our Well-Being for All series with the esteemed Zen Master, Norma Wong, we reconnected with our bodies, particularly through the power of conscious breathing. By becoming aware of our breath, we can better manage stress and anxiety, and enhance our leadership presence. In conversation with Norma, we explored how we cultivate the self-discipline required to maintain spaciousness, fostering resilience and creativity in the face of global challenges. 

In this final session of the Well-Being for All series, our community reflected on 8 key insights that emerged across the 6 series sessions, and what they mean for us individually and collectively.

This webinar explored a reframing of equity to liberatory change, and the possibilities it presents for systems change that supports thriving, at the interpersonal, organizational level and beyond.

In this interactive session, we explored how the stories we have about the world shape how we see and respond to challenges and how understanding this can help us shift our quality of life for the better. We worked together to understand how the nervous system is wired for safety and threat, and how we can work with it to develop the capacity to manage stress, deal with tough situations, and come back to a state of balance and possibility.

In this session, Deb Halliday invited us to elevate the beloved world we are co-creating, and foster one another’s path of well-being in our personal, relational, organizational, and community lives.

Dr. Eruera Tarena and a group of rangatahi from Tokona Te Raki share Te Korekoreka, a #socialinnovation framework grounded in the three realms of the Io tradition through which things come into being: Te Ao, the world of light; Te Kore, the world of potential; and Te Pō, the world of darkness. Building from these realms, Eru and his team have developed a systemic change framework that is inherently intergenerational and continuously iterates between past, present, and future.

In this article, we explore 6 key patterns that show up in any collaboration, and how we can manage these patterns for greater inclusion and effectiveness.

Once you've identified your network's key initiatives and formed teams around them, here's a simple template to track and manage the group's work. Of course, you'll share many more documents and tasks with the group, but this is a simple, useful way to get started in organizing the work.

Backcasting is a simple but powerful and engaging tool for planning work together with groups. It builds collective ownership and helps everyone see the critical dependencies in the work, so they understand why the work today needs to get done. Here are instructions for a simple backcasting exercise.

Entrepreneurs are amazing at leveraging limited resources to launch new products and services, and build new businesses – and serial entrepreneurs are the best of all because they've done this multiple times. Based on our work with both business and social entrepreneurs over the years, we've collected this list of the ways they think and act that have informed our own practice.

A template that we use when network participants have identified potential projects (e.g. possible solutions) and need to develop those ideas into more complete concepts.

What makes good strategy? There are many opinions on this but here's our take. We use this checklist to help organizations assess the strategy that's emerging from our Collaborative Strategy process.

We often employ methods from human-centered design in our collaborative innovation projects. Here are 10 of those methods that you can start using today.

Is your collaboration getting stuck in endless analysis and discussion? Are people getting polarized because people are unable to move beyond their favored positions? Here are 5 ways to get unstuck and move faster in your work together.

Most brainstorming sessions use technology that was developed 60 years ago – the "all ideas are good and we need to generate as many ideas as possible" approach. Here are four methods that will usually generate better ideas than the conventional approach.

The foundation of our work at CoCreative is our belief in the need for Shared Prosperity and Ecological Sustainability. This page summarizes the 7 “system conditions” that we believe must be met in order to achieve sustainable prosperity for all.

Shared information, insight, and analysis is key to effective collaboration, but understanding complex systems can be difficult, especially for diverse groups with different ways of thinking and knowing. Here are several useful methods, rated by level of difficulty, that help diverse groups simultaneously see a system, understand the dynamics within that system, and identify possible intervention points.

This model describes 4 levels of meaning-making that people can engage in, from asserting their positions (the most superficial and hardest to collaborate around) to exploring and understanding their interests and values to understanding their seemingly opposing values as polarities. The deeper we're able to work in the iceberg, the more creative and generative we can be in our work together.

Accountability can seem like an elusive thing when working across organizational, sectoral, and cultural boundaries. It can be difficult to ensure that people will do what they say they will do when they say they will do it. Luckily, accountability is a mindset and commitment that can be built. This document outlines some ways to do that.

Here's a reliable and effective approach to handling feedback with stakeholders in a way that builds understanding and trust while improving behaviors that are interfering with effective collaboration.

A handy overview of the key elements of the structure of a collaborative innovation network.

A brief overview of the key roles that various participants might fill in a collaborative innovation network.

The basis of our approach, the Four Agendas framework is based on our observations from dozens of multi-stakeholder collaborations and helps leaders design the optimal mix of Connecting, Aligning, Learning, and Making needed to advance effective collaboration and co-design.

Disponible en Español: Las Cuatro Agendas en la Inovación Colaborativa

Here's a small kit of simple tools that we often use to help minimize resistance and polarization in groups so they can get and stay aligned in the work and collaborate effectively.

Try these out, and let us know how they worked for you!

Moving your meetings and convenings online? We often assume that online meetings mean disengagement and boredom but some of our most meaningful, intimate, and energetic sessions have happened online.
This accessible guide provides practical tips and resources for supporting engaging and meaningful meetings online.

As a baseline assessment for any collaboration or network, we like to clarify the level of engagement they believe they need to succeed. Using the 5 Levels of Engagement Model, we ask:

1. What level are you leading at now?

2. What level do you need to lead to achieve your greatest goal?

3. What will it take to get to that level of engagement?

We want to make sure that all the right voices are in the room in our collaborative innovation initiatives. The Four Voices of Collaborative Innovation, based the Four Voices framework conceived by our friends Jim Scully and John Body at ThinkPlace, helps us ensure that we have the voices of Intent, Experience, Expertise, and Design, and provides examples for how to bring those voices into your work.

Based on the pioneering research of Everett Rogers on how innovations spread throughout social networks, this model is helpful for identifying which stakeholders to engage in spreading social innovations too. Our version of the model identifies the unique roles of various groups in developing, translating, and scaling social innovations.

To advance the work quickly and powerfully, we seek out high-leverage stakeholders who are well-positioned to drive innovation and influence others in the system. These Collaborative Innovators have certain characteristics, each of which represents a key tension between two seemingly opposing values.

Ever heard of "use of self"? It's the idea that we can use ourselves as powerful instruments of change in service of a greater good. But what is use of self and how do we cultivate powerful use of self? This resource describes  four key elements.

This is a capture of the most common creative tensions that we leverage in developing effective innovation networks. These tensions can either tear groups apart or become sources of profound innovation.

We'd love to hear how you've experienced these.

A clear and powerful shared intent is key to the success of any collaboration. Use this guide to learn how to keep diverse stakeholders at the table despite their differences, generates energy and momentum to fuel the work, and establishes the focus for everyone to stay on track amidst competing priorities and political forces.