Preface

In 1992, a colleague and I traveled to Austria to conduct a five-day training course in meeting facilitation for fifteen university professors from Eastern Europe. These men and women had lived their whole lives under totalitarian regimes, which had only recently been overthrown. They were hungry for knowledge about nonad-versarial approaches to solving problems and resolving conflicts. The course went well, and the participants were enthusiastic about the concepts they had learned.

A year later, these same individuals came to the United States to learn from us how to train others to be facilitators. I was thrilled to be hosting in our beautiful city of San Francisco these intelligent and enthusiastic people, who had been so gracious to us during our time in Austria.

My colleagues and I had gone to considerable effort and expense to prepare for this train-the-trainer program. We developed a detailed manual for each participant, similar to what we put together for our corporate clients. These thick three-ring binders outlined exactly how to run a facilitation training program—what to say when, what exercises to conduct during each segment of the program, and so forth.

Midway through the workshop—and much to our surprise— our Eastern European friends politely handed us back the training manuals. “We know that your course is built on a few powerful ideas,” they explained. “Make sure that we have those ideas in our hearts, and then we will sing.“

The words of these dedicated men and women came back to me as I struggled to find a way to organize the material for this book. It was a real challenge to figure out how to capture on paper what I had learned about collaboration over the last thirty years, in a way that would be useful to anyone interested in helping his or her group, organization, or community to work more collaboratively. I had enough material for at least ten “how-to” books on the tools and techniques of collaboration at different levels of society, from the interpersonal to the whole systems level. I had already cowritten one such book, on small-group problem solving (How to Make Meetings Work, with Michael Doyle). I wanted this book to appeal to a broad audience—not just organizational consultants, but leaders, managers, supervisors, and rank-and-file members of every manner of organization and community. I also wanted to share something of my own personal journey and that of the company I founded, Interaction Associates. I needed a way to boil down to its essence what I knew to be true about collaboration. Then I remembered the words of the Eastern Europeans: “a few powerful ideas…”.

A Few Powerful Ideas

So I’ve organized this book around a few powerful ideas, or principles, that, if grasped in your heart and mind, will allow you to harness the power of collaborative action for yourself and your group, organization, or community. If you understand these principles and the values underlying them, you will have the freedom to implement them in your own way in a variety of situations. In short, you will be able to make your own music.

At first glance, the ideas in this book may seem too simple, too obvious. Indeed, they represent the distillation of more than thirty years of learning and practice applying the concepts of collaboration in almost every imaginable context. So they are very “concentrated.” My lifelong goal has been to demystify these concepts—to express them as simply as possible, and to give them away. But there is a risk. They can appear too simple, and therefore too easy to dismiss. I hope you will see, when you begin to explore their implications, that these simple ideas are in fact profound.

Although the principles themselves are the stars of this book, I also take the time to explain the impact they have had on me, my organization, and our clients. I offer my own life as one context for observing what happens when you try to grasp, as well as fail to heed, these principles. I offer my company, Interaction Associates, as an illustration of one consulting firm’s struggle to practice the collaborative values and principles it preaches. And I offer the experience of my colleagues and our clients as examples of how these principles can be applied to a wide variety of situations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. These stories illustrate the obvious importance and promise of the principles.

Those of you who are organizational consultants or facilitators, or who have led collaborative planning processes of one form or another, are probably familiar with many of the principles in this book. The principles evolved from the work of many people inside and outside of Interaction Associates. I don’t claim ownership of them. However, I invite you to take a journey with me back to the roots of these principles. For example, we will reconnect with the origins of the concept of group memory and think about how an idea like this might be implemented in the new world of virtual collaboration. The exercise of writing this book has given me an opportunity to reflect on the essence of these principles, and, in the process, I have gained some new insights.

Those of you who are new to the concepts in this book and are interested in improving the quality of collaboration in some aspect of your life will find the book to be more substantial than a simple introduction, yet easy to understand and put into practice. (Indeed, the final third of the book focuses specifically on how to put the principles to use.) You may notice, too, that I don’t spend much time trying to convince you of the need for collaboration. I’m assuming that you know collaboration is necessary and that you are already engaged in collaborative work in your organization or community. Instead, I focus on the major challenges you are likely facing in those endeavors and offer a few powerful principles which, if you grasp them in your heart and mind, will help you to collaborate with success.

Before you get into the substance of the book, I want to point out that collaboration is not value-free. It’s based on some mental models and core values about people and what is possible when people work together. The ideas in the book require certain heart-sets, as well as mind-sets, to be properly implemented. Collaboration assumes, for example, the dignity and value of every human being, and each person’s right to be involved in decisions that affect his or her life. I try to surface these underlying values periodically, so that you can understand the obligations you assume if you choose to initiate a collaborative process. If you act consistently with these values, you will avoid the potential abuses of the power of collaborative action.

My intention in this book is to present a constellation of ideas about collaboration. Each idea is powerful in and of itself and speaks to both our hearts and minds. Taken together, these actionable ideas offer a hopeful view of the world and of people’s role in it. They present a vision of a better world in which people with differing interests can work together constructively to make decisions and solve problems, and even tackle the complex, systemic issues our society faces. They point us toward a more humane and healthy work environment—toward what is possible.

David Straus

Cambridge, Massachusetts

June 2002