How do you put your finger on the pulse of a group when you walk into your first meeting with it? What questions should you ask as you plan, inaugurate, and participate in a new collaboration so that you know what you can do to help make sure it succeeds?
How do you get the conversation going when your collaboration has stumbled, faces conflict, gone fallow, fallen victim to a few too-strong voices, or otherwise is troubled … but you can’t figure out just why or how best to intervene?
ICL assessment and planning tools offer a variety of ways to predict or interpret what needs to happen inside an effective collaboration and to pose the questions we need in order to explore each phase of Collaboration’s Life Cycle deeply. They give us a framework for:
- strategic guidance for developing new collaborative initiatives that avoid pitfalls and accelerate the achievement of partners’ shared or overlapping goals, and
- deep assessment of the operations of existing collaborations with an eye toward elevating assets and targeting irregularities that may cause (or have been the cause of) difficulties within a collaborative initiative.
ICL’s tools are integral parts of all our services … growing and improving as we learn alongside our clients and strategic partners. You can learn more about some of these tools in the 2009 edition of Collaborative Leadership: Developing Effective Partnerships for Communities and Schools.
Contact us to explore whether an ICL Collaboration Audit might be helpful as you plan or assess your collaboration.