Beyond organizations

As humans we are truly social, and we depend on relationships with others. We have always organized in communities. A community is a small or large social unit that gravitates around a common interest, purpose, reason, agenda, values or identity.
Communities get things done that the individual would not be able to achieve. They give us a feeling of home and of belonging; we often feel safe and understood in a community.
The power, strength and effectiveness of a community depends on the quality of relationships and of the social interaction, commitment, engagement, sense of belonging, loyalty etc. of its members.
All of this can be worked on and fostered. We speak of building community by design. With our Community Building processes, we support:

• clarifying a community’s purpose
• developing a common identity
• setting up relevant community structures
• building synergies between actors
• fostering the creation of a community culture that lasts and goes forward. e.g. OSS Entech Program by InnoEnergy

Every organization operates in a context. The relevant business context of an organization typically consists of its suppliers, its partners and its clients etc., sometimes even its competitors. To address work on today’s complex challenges in an increasingly digitalized and connected world, it is no longer enough to search for solutions and look at value creation inside one organization, but it becomes necessary to look at it in a broader context, across organizations.
Apart from of course legal issues, it is the lack of trust and confidence, as well as the knowledge of how to, that hinders this new agile form of collaboration. We support organizations in their quest for new ways to engage with their context, so they can collectively master complex challenges.
With our co-creation experience we support:

• creating new, effective, win-win based forms of collaborating
• crafting dialogue containers and formats that allow deep engagement with partners for collective learning
• designing settings that allow research into new commercial opportunities with business partners (suppliers, customers or even competitors) that are not in the reach of the individual organization. e.g. Pipeline Day, Clean Coal conference, Deutschland Forum and UFOs Umsetzungsforen, Electro Chemistry Science Award

When it comes to large scale complex challenges or societal change, it needs the whole system to make it happen. The different actors from across the sector and beyond need to collaborate and work together to effect the change. Global challenges such as climate change, the global refugee crisis and the global food supply crisis demand cooperation across national boundaries. Regional or national political, social, economic or environmental challenges such as Brexit, the future of mobility, renewable energy production etc. require the public sector, industries, research institutions and NGOs to work together to find sustainable solutions. No individual actor is powerful enough to tackle these challenges on its own.
We design, develop and facilitate co-creation processes that bring the whole system together to allow us to examine a complex challenge from different angles and to put together innovative, sustainable solutions. e.g. Kenya Police Summit, ECF & CC Clean Coal conference, Deutschland Forum, Palmoil Paris.

This approach goes back to Adam Kahane from the Reos group and his book ‘Transformative Scenario Planning’.
Social systems can get stuck. This happens if there is not enough goodwill and agreement among key actors about what is currently happening or what could or should happen for the system to be able to move forward. Confusion, disturbance and conflict inhibit progress and create the risk of regression. In such contexts, TSP can be useful.
Transformative Scenario Planning is a creative and constructive way for often opposed actors from across a whole system to work with complex problematic situations that they want to transform but cannot transform unilaterally or directly. It is a way of working with the future that can be used to deal with complex challenges at all levels: local, sectoral, regional, national, or global. Transformative scenario planning is not a way for actors to adapt to a situation or to force it to be transformed or to implement an already-formulated proposal or to negotiate between several already-formulated proposals. It is a way for conflicting actors to work cooperatively and creatively to get unstuck and to move forward.
In the TSP process the participants work and discuss the burning sets of problems. They collectively create stories that give insights into a range of different possible futures that could come about from taking different paths. Throughout the process the participants align on what futures they collectively consider worth striving for and bringing to life.