Commitments for Co-Creating Shared Futures

The final of Exploring Intentional Collaborations, builds on intital Relationship Gardening practices, to explore one of the many avenues for structuring a discussion about the specific commitments we can each make to support the potential shared-future that is emerging through our collaborations so far.

Articulating our capacity for committing to specific aspects of this collaboration serves several purposes, including:

• Cultivating rhythms of interaction that can be sustained for the intended time-frame of the collaboration
• Recognising how we might each contribute to the collaboration in different ways
• Practising co-creating pathways towards shared goals

The following sets of questions are offered as a potential way of structuring these discussions.

Acknowledging Existing Commitments

Individually revisit your responses to Commitment Mapping exercise from the Aligning Intentions session, focusing on the energy you expect to be able to commit to this project and how this collaboration fits in with the dynamics of your existing commitments within the foreseeable future.

Identifying Potential Collaboration Time-frames (e.g., 6 weeks, 18 months, 10 years, indefinitely)

With your commitment map in mind, each write out a response to the following two questions and share (simultaneously if possible, e.g., with a 'chat waterfall' or a shared whiteboard).

• How long would we each ideally like to contribute to this collaboration in total?
• What is the maximum feasible time-frames we can each to commit to this collaboration currently?

Identifying Potential Contributions

As a group discuss what skills and resources are needed for the collaboration to thrive.

Then take time to individually reflect on the following questions:

• What are the specific skills/resource I want to contribute to this collaboration?
• What are the specific skills/resource I am currently able to commit to this collaboration?
• Are there any specific time-frames I will be able to contribute different skills/resources than currently?

Returning to the group, each share your ideal ways of contributing skills and resources to this collaboration.

Identifying Potential Forms and Rhythms of Collaboration

With your range of intended contributions and potential for time commitments in mind, consider how your rhythms of interaction might best support your collaboration. Potential topics for discussion include:

• What forms of interaction would would we most value with each other?
• What proproption of interaction would we each value being regular and/or scheduled?
• What proportion of interactoins would we each value being spontaneous and/or sporadic?
• How often would we each appreciate brief interactions (e.g., check-ins)?
• How often would we each be willing to invest in extended interactions (e.g., retreats)?
• Recalling our Preemptive Relationship Gardening discussions, how often would we each want to incorperate stuctured communication tools into our collaboration?
• What degree of asynchronous communication could we each commit to inbetween our interactions?

Co-creating Collaboration Intentions

Explore the range of options that emerged from the previous steps together and identify:

• A time-frame that everyone can commit to
• How to distribute leadership and labour during this time-frame
• What forms of interactions you all want prioritise during this time-frame
• The rhythms of each type of interaction you all want to cultivate during this time-frame
• Which structured communication tools we want to incorperated into regular and/or periodic forms of interaction
• When we plan to revisit this process (i.e., discussions about values-alignment, how contributions to this project fit into other commitments, how we can consciously iterate upon our relationship gardening practices).
• What happens at the end of the commitment time-time (e.g., if everyone's ideal time-frames are longer then the commitment time-frame you might agree to discuss re-committing to a second time-frame).

Next Steps

This is the final set of prompts in the Exploring Intentional Collaborations series.

While the process of pre-emptively discussing our ways of relating can be beneficial in of itself - revisiting these types of discussion from time to time also offers a way to recalibrate your ways of relating with each other in on going ways.

One way to build on the shared intentions articulated so far is to draw on structured communication tools and forming agreements that can be called upon to support our values-alignment and commitments as part of a process of continually iterating towards better cultures.

Examples of some of the common areas for implementing communication agreement tools include:

• Vision Statements
  Visioning is about coming up with a compelling image of the future you want to contribute to through this collaboration. As part of this, a co-created statement that articulate how your project vision reflects your shared values can provide guidelines that inform and constrain specific decisions, as well as the direction of the project as a whole.
• Decision-making Agreements
  Co-created statements that outline explicit decision-making agreements can help to clarify the governance practices that structure expectations around participation. The less centralised and autocratic a group’s approach to leadership, the more important it is to identify a shared-understanding of the group’s intended governance structure, and intentionally choose appropriate decision-making and communication practices.
• Interpersonal Conduct Agreements
  Co-created statements that outline a set of shared agreements about the responsibilities each participant will take for their conduct within a given community, and the processes for holding each other to account for not meeting those responsibilities. This can include articulating the cultural characteristics that better hold the futures we hope to see and documenting our intentions to consciously iterate towards this future through our relational practices. (Remembering that the hegemony of dominant culture is playing out unless there is intention to practice ways of relating that cultivate the cultural changes we hope to see in the world). It is important that these agreements are periodically reviewed by those participating in the community.
• Commitments to collectively navigate conflict
  There are various tools that can help articulate shared sets of expectations about how to reduce the potential for conflict and respond to conflicts when they emerge. For larger groups, this can involve articulating Code of Conduct Statements & Conflict-Resolution Guidelines that detail the explicit expectations for acceptable/unacceptable conduct within a given shared context. Remembering that our collaborations are constrained by our braoder cultural contexts, it is also worth considering how your approaches to navigating conflict can contribute to Transformative Approaches to Conflict Resolution within these broader contexts.

Further Resources

For additional pathways for building on these Exploring Intentional Collaborations, consider discussing other aspects of your collaborative practices.

For more tools for improving communication practices in collaborations see:

• Aligning Systems with Purpose and Values
• Leaderful organising - conflict icebergs
• The Collaborative Impact Methods Kit
• Gamestorming - a set of innovative co-creation tools
• Co-Creative Tools
• Liberating Structures
• Principles of co-operative conflict resolution

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tags: intentional collaborations, discussion-prompt,collaborative-practices, intentional-relationships, meta-communication

Date initially created: 2023
Version: 2.0 (2024)
Created for: Intentional Collaborations Project
Attribution: created, based on collaborations with Bridget Mullins and Susan Basterfield, by E. T. Smith on unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people.

CC BY-NC-SA