THE COLLABORATION INSTITUTE

The Challenge: Helping communities and organizations learn and thrive through large-scale cooperative projects

In a world made smaller and more complex by new viruses and technologies, ever-expanding knowledge, and the urgency of news cycles, collaboration is essential because it provides a way to build trust and address complicated issues.  Whether the setting is a community or an organization, the challenge is overcoming silos of effort to generate larger impacts in ways that are more financially feasible.  Collaboration involves developing a shared strategy and roadmap for collective effort. 

Leadership is essential to collaboration and can take many forms, including leading from the side and leading from behind.  Because collaboration and leadership underpin our democracy and institutions, learning how to grow the knowledge, trust, and skill to do these well is a must for institutions and regions that want to thrive.  Simply stated, collaboration and leadership are fundamental to making the world a better place.

The Solution: Learning to collaborate

The Collaboration Institute (TCI) helps local governments, businesses, and nonprofits collaborate to create new economic value and educational opportunities that improve the well-being of residents, workers, and visitors. Whether it be in an organizational or regional development context, we provide a forum for local and organizational leaders to connect, learn, share their visions for the future, and join forces to advance those visions. 

We specialize in bringing multiple stakeholders together

– either within or across organizations – to design and fund organizational, local and regional initiatives.  These initiatives may involve public-private partnerships, which typically include entrepreneurs, government agencies, and educational institutions. We also provide concrete guidance and tools that have proven successful in helping community and organizational initiatives succeed. We have more than 50 years of collective experience developing economic, business, and educational opportunities for small and large municipalities and all types of organizations.

We strive to improve the quality of collaborative efforts in communities and organizations by helping leaders learn to:

• Design and execute local and regional economic and community development initiatives

• Improve organizational capability and effectiveness to capitalize on the new opportunities

Regional Innovation

• Creating Transformative Regional Impact video series
  Transformative Regional Impact (TRI) suggests strategies and actions for the intentional development of regional economic and community systems that work together, in concert so to speak, to create impacts on the organizations, businesses, and people operating and living within the region that improves their health, wealth, and general prosperity.  We borrow the term, Alchemy, from early chemistry as a metaphor for bringing together the elements and catalysts of these highly complex, loosely-coupled interactions.  The Alchemy of TRI = approaches and strategies to a community’s intentional efforts that build synergies and responses that collectively have a transformative impact on conditions…and the various systems for growing well-paying jobs, skillful, talented people, and connected, quality places within the community.

  • Creating Transformative Regional Impact:  Key Ingredients and Issues (1 hour)

  • Creating Transformative Regional Impact:  Mapping Quality Connected Places (1 hour)

  • Creating Transformative Regional Impact:  Mapping Talent and Brainpower (1 hour)

  • Creating Transformative Regional Impact:  Mapping Innovation and Entrepreneurship 91 hour)

  • Creating Transformative Regional Impact:  The Alchemy of Transformative Regional Impact (1 hour)

Strategic Planning and Doing

• Strategic Doing interactive offerings (in-person or online)

  Strategic Doing teaches people how to form collaborations quickly, move them toward measurable outcomes and make adjustments along the way. In today’s world, collaboration is essential to meet the complex challenges we face.  Strategic Doing enables leaders to design and guide new networks that generate innovative solutions. It is a new strategy discipline that is lean, agile and fast—just what organizations, communities and regions need to survive and thrive.

  • Strategic Doing:  Leadership Complex Collaborations (2.5 days)

  • Strategic Doing:  Foundations and Table Guide Training (1 day)

  • Strategic Doing Community or Team Collaboration Workshop (1/2 day)

Collaboration and Leadership

• The Moral Dimensions of Leadership video (30 minutes)

  What is “moral leadership” and why does it matter?  Topics such as trust, inclusion, diversity, and integrity are discussed during this 30-minute video. 

Our Workshops, at a Glance

We lead dynamic workshops to provide the tools, strategies, processes, and background you need to advance your community’s or organization’s well-being. Our workshops address topics related to both 1) organizational development and 2) regional/local development.  In our workshops, you will collaborate with other local/organizational leaders to develop ideas and plans of action for positive

community/organizational impact. Our workshops are customizable to address your community’s or organization’s specific needs. They are designed to foster changes that will deliver lasting, large-scale benefits for your community/organization.  And they are grounded in mutual cooperation and respect. We offer four types of workshops, customized for the needs of each of our clients, to help you build an effective plan to enrich your community/organization:

 1. Our Strategy workshops help diverse stakeholders with both visible and hidden advantages create a shared vision—and develop a practical path to help you realize that vision.  Outcomes include defining a collective goal and means to achieve it.
 Get more info on our Strategy workshops.

2. Our Process workshops teach you methods to plan, act, and manage your community/organizational initiatives effectively. Outcomes include broadening a community’s or organization’s capacity to lead these change processes.
Get more info on our Process workshops.

3. Our Tool workshops give you specific techniques to overcome common challenges in building community/organizational initiatives. Outcomes move initiatives past barriers standing in the way of success.
Get more info on our Tool workshops.

4. Our Futures workshops are targeted to communities or organizations wanting to learn about promising practices and their choices before moving forward into one of the other workshop types.  Futures workshop outcomes help participants reach a common framework or approach for working together along with a set of “know-how” skills in topics such as technology-based economic development, workforce strategies, leadership, agile collaboration, agile strategy, civility, and others.
Get more info on our Future workshops.