All collaborations need a strong, flexible backbone, holding it all together, channelling communication and letting the interesting bits get on with what they’re really good at. I first came across the term ‘backbone organisation’ in the work of US organisation FSG, writing about what they call collective impact, but the need for a central team of some sort has been obvious throughout my work on collaboration. What is the ‘backbone’, and what does it do?
Well as promised, here are my thoughts having attended the morning of the IEMA Conference 09.
- I'd gladly hear Jonathan Porritt again. He talked about the need to get off the hedonic treadmill, and the challenge of getting marketeers to sell austerity. His slides are here. I'm intrigued that he found Dr Steven Chu's speech to the Nobel Laureate's symposium inspiring - because JP says the speech was about energy efficiency. And in the words of Theodore Roszack,
...prudence is such a lacklustre virtue.
I couldn't find a way to read, hear or watch Secretary Chu's speech (please let me know if you know of one) but the symposium site is here. The other insight which caused me to stop short is that, apparently, family planning is the single best intervention in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, from a cost benefit point of view.
I didn't really understand what Lord Jenkin was trying to tell us. Insufficiently relevant, at least to this member of the audience. Sorry.
Peter Jones is always interesting, although his acrobatic mind can leave me behind sometimes.
The workshop I ran was an hour's worth on skills for change. I chose to focus on inter-personal influencing, through mirroring body language, asking facilitative questions, and sharing the six sources of influence that I learnt about through the 'all washed up' video which I've blogged about here.
The handouts from the session are here.
It was a lot of fun - it's amazing how quickly you can find three things that you have in common with a total stranger - and I hope stretched some people to think beyond 'awareness raising' as a way of influencing others.
I hope that it also helped people to be braver about networking later in the day, because making connections and building trust within a group such as this one, composed of IEMA members and fellow-travellers, will - in the long run - have far more impact than speechifying.
