Hamilton Musings

I had the opportunity to present some of the early lessons learned in the Hamilton Roundtable process at the 2007 Communities Collaborating Institute.  I thought I would share my 12 lessons with you.  If you are engaging in collaboration, one or more of these might be helpful as you begin or continue your journey. 

1. Personalize the issue - have each collaborative partner share their understanding and experience with the issue which will be tackled by the collaboration - and find common ground.

2. Inform your collaborative efforts with as much data as you can get your hands on - look at previous community consultations, promising practices in your and other communities, demographic data, and use this information to learn and understand as much about the issue as you can.

3.  Consult broadly in your community - find out who is doing what, what people are thinking and where the gaps are - you don't want to reinvent something that has been done or someone else is doing.

4. Settle for the BEST...recruit the best partners you can, look for the best consultants if you engage them, identify the leaders in the best practice areas and connect with them. 

5.   Develop an ASPIRATION, this is more than a vision, it is a statement that will motivate, engage, and inspire. 

6.  Develop a framework or approach you will follow.  The framework for change will become critical as you move through the collaborative journey.

7.  Develop some core operating principles which will govern your collaborative and stick to them.  We have a principle of 'no blame' that has been key to our work. 

8.  Identify and embed key touchstones, those rituals which you can imbed into the collaborative process which brings partners together and refocuses their efforts on the collaborative work each time you meet.

9.  Construct your collaborative effort to fit your community and the issue you are seeking to address, while you can learn best practices from others, you cannot take a cookie cutter approach to collaboration.  Not reflecting your community context will only lead to failure. 

10.  Identify the resources needed to drive the process forward, Create a space where these resource - human, financial and in-kind - can be accessed by partners. 

11.  Balance process, engagement and outcomes.  There has to be enough of each to create momentum and direction.

12.  Model your commitment to community at all levels in your collaborative - find ways to engage leaders from all sectors into the work. 

In a collaboration, you are as successful as the engagement of your partners.  This takes time and effort to build respectful relationships which, when in place, enable magic to happen.