Art of Collaborative Leadership: Community Building for a New Economy

Community Building for a New Economy

Collaborative leadership capacity building - new skills to innovate across systems and with multiple stakeholders to co-create sustainable solutions 

Working in complexity.

The 21st century calls for a new approach to leadership. Every day, social innovators grapple with massively systemic challenges. Many of our current societal systems – from the economy and finance, to healthcare and the environment - are not contributing to a just and sustainable world. At the same time, our challenges are broader and more interrelated than ever before. In this context of complexity, individuals, organizations, and communities must build collaborative leadership capacity in order to innovate across systems and with multiple stakeholders to co-create sustainable solutions.

Art of Collaborative Leadership and Social Innovation

The Art of Collaborative Leadership and Social Innovation is informed by the Art of Hosting (AoH), a set of patterns and practices for working with complexity. It invites curiosity, non judgment and generosity, believes conversations matter and that good conversation will lead to wise action with different results.

Art of Hosting and Hubs

The global network of HUBs uses AoH as a set of practices for cultivating the conditions of collaboration, horizontal innovation, knowledge sharing, and action. HUBs convene social innovators in inspiring workspaces to tackle some of the worlds’ toughest problems from new perspectives and with new strategies. 

At the HUB, hosting strategies help us surface what is possible when social innovators, communities and organizations work together to create change. The Art of Collaborative Leadership and Social Innovation supports these conversations through powerful questions, creating deep explorations, leading to wise action with a sense of shared ownership and inspired implementation.

AoH has been employed in diverse and high-level settings, including the European Commission, regional healthcare systems in England, Nova Scotia, Ohio, and Utah, with youth, the food movement, with the Innovation Finance Lab, Global HUBs, and other nonprofit, governmental and organizational settings. You can find case studies here: tinyurl.com/AoHcasestudies.

The Training: Methods and Technologies

This two and a half day intensive develops participants’ capacities and skills for building solutions to complex social and environmental challenges. We focus particularly on learning how to stand in this paradox, and how to navigate the territory between too much chaos and too much control - key to leading in these complex times where resources are limited and the stakes are high.

You will experience and learnpractical facilitation tools through action-learning including:

• Process-design
• Frameworks for working in complexity
• Collaborative  problem solving
• Non-judgmental learning

You will gain understanding of specific powerful frameworks that guide process design.

Co-hosts

Kathy Jourdain, Shape Shift Strategies, Inc.i

Dana Pearlman, The Lotus. 

Jesse Sleamaker, The Hub Bay Area.