Our services

We provide facilitation, process design, consultation and mediation for stakeholders seeking collaborative outcomes.

Coming to the table

When conflicting parties finally come to the table, very helpful conversations can occur.

Simple answer

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

-H.L. Menken

Ending debate

Collaboration is a process for doing adaptive work, not a debate or power struggle.

Chrislip, Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook

Collaboration

"Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by individuals and organizations to achieve results they are more likely to achieve together than alone."

-American Cancer Society National Advisory Group on Collaboration with Organizations    

Discovery

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

-Daniel J. Boorstin

Getting started

"[M]any collaborative initiatives start when other processes have broken down."

-Chrislip, Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook

Merging ideas

"Merging ideas, approaches and technologies from widely diverse field of knowledge ..is one crucial strategy for solving complex problems."

-Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering and Beyond, Nat. Academy of Sciences, May 2014

Collective impact

Collective impact occurs when a group of actors from different sectors commit to a common agenda for solving a complex social or environmental problem.

-Guide To Evaluating Collective Impact, Part 1

Decision making

My goal as facilitator is not to facilitate meetings and take notes - rather, it is to facilitate decision making (which may occur in or after meetings).

Role of science

"The relationship of science to environmental decision making is complex and a matter of considerable controversy in public policy."

-DiMento & Ingram, Science and Environmental Decision Making

Working together

"A boat doesn't go forward if each one is rowing their own way."

- African proverb

Collaboration

“In the long history of humankind…those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

~ Charles Darwin

Healthy conversation

Even with high levels of conflict, positive results often emerge from a healthy conversation.

Social change

"Large scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated interventions of individual organizations."

- Kania & Kramer, Collective Impact

Conversation

There is an immense difference between a healthy conversation and multiple intersecting monologues.

Determination

"When people are determined, they can overcome anything."

- Nelson Mandela

Collaboration

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others."

- African proverb.

Collaborate

Collaborate is "com" and "laborare" - to work with

False autonomy

Many of the challenges we face as a global community are founded in the illusion held by some that they exist independent of, and isolated from, the rest of humanity.

Finding the right path

If conflicting parties can begin healthy conversations, the right path for them often becomes clear.

Vision-Action

Collaboration needs vision. "Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare."

Japanese proverb

Motivation

"As with many things, motivation is everything."

-Thomas Keating

Multistakeholder processes

"Ultimate success lies in developing the collective commitment and capacity to turn ideas and plans into action."  MSP Resource Portal, http://portals.wi.wur.nl/msp/?page=1184

 

Collaborative competence

Collaboration requires more than a decision to do so; successful collaboration requires competence.

Collaboration

"Gettin' good players is easy. Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part."

- Casey Stengel

Our services

Collaboratives Processes provides training, facilitation, and mediation to stakeholders or organizations seeking to bring about change.

Facilitation

Responsive systems

[To respond to current challenges] we need systems that can self reorganize, that are better at sensing emerging disruption; that encourage cooperation rather than division; we need systems where a failure in one part of the system does not bring down every other part of the system. Andrew Zolli (2013)

Being adaptive

“Any procedure that is adaptive is, by definition, one that involves incomplete data.”

Physicist Edwin Jaynes

Hypothesis

Every statement should be taken by a scientist as a provisional hypothesis that has to be tested.

-Physicist Neils Bohr

Mistakes

Collaborating with others means that one must accept, from time to time, the mistakes or missteps of others. That is "Collaborative patience."

Attitude

When collaborative processes are approached with a positive attitude, progress automatically follows.

Facilitation

Analytic facilitation

To really help groups make decisions, one must go beyond "event facilitation" to a deeper role of assessing the decision architecture the group faces.

Consensus

Many multi-stakeholder processes seek consensus decision making. It can be wholly appropriate in some contexts, and difficult and unnecessary in other contexts.

Conflict within

Organizations are living systems in which conflict can arise due to scarce resources, structure, roles, communications and personality.

Organizational conflict

Conducting conflict assessments; Help turn from conflict avoidance to finding the value inherent in productive conflict; Addressing inter or intra organizational conflict; Mediating internal conflict; Assist in development of conflict management systems and Assessing the health/function of networks or associations.

Assisting organizations

Developing strategic frameworks; Designing programs and action plans; Planning and implementing monitoring and evaluation processes; Assisting new organizations consider the structure for their efforts; Independent assessments or investigations of organizations or multistakeholder groups; Forming informal networks; and Training and capacity development.    

Facilitation

A Facilitator can do much more than drafting agenda, working with flip charts/pens and drafting meeting summary notes.  We work to meet your specific facilitation needs – no cookie cutter approaches. Experience in environmental, water, construction, construction, commercial and organizational matters.

Mediation

When conflict escalates or when legal processes are likely/ongoing, mediation is sometimes appropriate. Our experience includes mediation in the topics of environment, environmental, natural resources, business, as well as litigation/court related mediations.

Conflict/situation assessments

Situation or conflict assessments help stakeholders determine whether there is a process that would help them address their share problem or challenge.

Consultation, Capacity Development

We work with groups or organizations that want to increase their capacity to complete the tasks they have identified as their goals or vision. Drawing from recent work in the field, we define capacity as “the ability of a human system to perform its desired activities, sustain itself and self renew.”

Collaborative Processes

Collaborative processes® provides facilitation, mediation, consultation, planning advice to groups of persons, business entities, nonprofits/NGOs and government agencies that want to:

  • Learn to make collaboration a real and meaningful component of their activities.
  • Work effectively together toward common objectives.
  • Where needed, use dialogue to transform conflict from destructive to productive.
  • Collaboratively develop a strategic framework for action.
  • Move collaboration from a concept or “vision statement” into action.
  • Realize and accept the reality and benefits of inter-connectedness (avoiding the illusion of fragmentation and disconnection).
  • Search broadly for options, avoiding the narrow field of view that law often brings to conflict.
  • Use collaboration to create institutional strategies, and make important decisions.

My recently published article on organizational conflict

Our work with diverse groups has included environmental and natural resource matters, developing strategic frameworks, creating action plans, developing governmental policy and improving working relationships. Collaborative Processes is a verified Veteran Owned Small Business

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Example engagements

Joseph McMahon CV

Joseph McMahon’s Article on Mediation in ACResolution, 2014

Common steps in the mediation process (a schematic)