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Thursday 4 June 2009 11.00 - 12.30 FULL
or 14.00 - 15.30
In an increasingly networked world, organisations are expected to foster internal collaboration in order to harness their full knowledge and expertise for the benefit of their stakeholders – and also to collaborate with an increasing number of partners. Though easy to say, this is difficult to do. Significant barriers get in the way of the effective internal and external collaboration, such as:
- How do you create time, space and motivation for collaboration when organisations – or units within them - are usually measured on and therefore focused on achieving their own immediate objectives?
- How do you know what knowledge is needed where and provide it when it’s needed? Which are the best processes to help people learn from others, cost-effectively?
- How do you answer the ‘What’s in It For Me?’ question?
- How do you avoid the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome that often stops good practices from being transferred?
- How do you measure and demonstrate the value of collaboration?
- What can leaders do to encourage collaborative behaviour?
- How can you build a strong foundation of trust to maximise the impact of internal and external collaboration?
This session aims to develop a shared understanding of the value of sharing knowledge and collaborating across organisational boundaries. It will offer the participants a common language about collaboration, explore the practical challenges involved using a number of ‘war stories’ from a range of organisations and will give the participants an immediate experience of the benefit of collaborating with each other through a ‘speed-dating’ style workshop.
Session structure:
The session will have two main components:
- an overview of the opportunities and pitfalls of collaborative working, why it is an important aspect of leadership capability in a knowledge economy and what different organisations are doing to meet the challenges involved 1/2 hour
- a lively ‘speed dating’ session to enable the participants to directly experience the benefits of collaboration by working on a number of business challenges together. Several ‘table hosts’ (one per table) share a real professional challenge they face with the group at their table and the group contributes their ideas and experience in a ten minute round. Two further groups of ‘advisors’ move in succession to the host’s table and offer their ideas and experience, in two further rounds, so that within approximately 45 minutes each table host benefits from the ideas of 20 or so people. The three knowledge-sharing rounds are followed by a debrief on the process. 1 hour
The table hosts for the ‘speed-dating’ session can be invited to play that role beforehand or can volunteer on the day. The former is preferable as it gives them some time to choose the issue which they would like to use for the workshop. Ideally the table hosts should be a diverse group (nationality, gender, professional background, etc.) so that the issues being addressed are diverse. They should be confident communicators and good listeners. The issue they select can be any professional challenge (note: it doesn’t have to be about collaboration) as long as it is genuinely something they would like help on and can be described in no more than 2 minutes. Once they have described their issue their role is to listen to their advisors’ ideas, take notes and share what they have learned at the end of the process.
Participants: 80 people per session, 10 tables of 8 per table
Presenter: Elizabeth Lank is an independent specialist who works with private, public and voluntary sector organisations to help them improve efficiency and effectiveness through greater cross-boundary collaboration and knowledge sharing. She recently published a book on collaborative working across and within organisations, entitled Collaborative Advantage: How Organizations Win by Working Together (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). As an advisor, speaker, facilitator and author, the leadership challenges she has helped to address include: - How can we make cross-boundary working effective – both within and across organisations?
- How do we get better at sharing good practices without coming up against the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome?
- How do we eliminate the organisational ‘silos’ that often lead to expensive reinvention of the wheel?
- How can we ‘know what we know’ and put that knowledge to work to achieve our goals?
After completing the INSEAD MBA degree in 1986, Elizabeth joined I.T. services company ICL (now Fujitsu Services) and held a number of strategic organisational development, management development and internal communication roles. She led ICL’s ‘Mobilising Knowledge’ programme for five years before setting up her own business in January 2001. She spent the early part of her career working for the European headquarters of an American computer company in Geneva, Switzerland. A Canadian by birth (though now based in the U.K.), she graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1980.
Elizabeth is co-author of the book The Power of Learning - A Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage (IPD 1994), written as a practitioner’s guide to building ‘learning organisations’. She has published a number of articles on collaborative working and knowledge management and collaborated with Amin Rajan on the research report ‘Good Practices in Knowledge Creation and Exchange’ (CREATE 1998). She is a member of the international editorial boards of the Journal of Change Management and Knowledge Management Review.
Elizabeth is an expert evaluator for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Information Society. She is a Faculty Associate at the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) in Aix-en-Provence, France and has been a visiting lecturer on the U.K. government’s Cabinet Office Top Management Programme, at INSEAD, London Business School, Henley Management College, Solvay Business School in Brussels and the Berlin School for Creative Leadership. She is also a regular speaker, facilitator and programme director at public and in-company management conferences. |
