I treasure this hiatus between Christmas and New Year. No urgent client work to complete, no meetings, a precious bit of breathing space to reset, catch up, look forward.
By the end of the year my diary is battered and worn. The new one holds such promise and possibility! Clean, smooth and with clear edges.
Tempting and disconcerting in equal measure: being asked to write a book is such a flattering thing, dangerously seductive; being asked to write a book is such a frightening thing, because "what if it's rubbish?" Putting something in writing is a moment of commitment: hard for an inveterate hedger and fence-sitter like me. (I couldn't even decide between 'hedger' and 'fence-sitter', could I?)
In an attempt to stop it being rubbish, and to remind myself that it's not me that's being flattered - it's the wise things I've learnt from others - I made a conscious choice to stand on shoulders of giants both for theory and for tips that really make a difference, when writing Working Collaboratively.
I found some great academic research and theory before I decided that I really needed to stop reading and get on with writing. But it was more on 'collaborative governance' (advising others on how to do things) than multi-sector collaboration to get things done. Noticing that distinction helped me decide what to get my teeth into.
I knew I wanted to include examples, and there were plenty out there even from a cursory look. But I wanted to find ones which were more than contractual, more than cause-related marketing, and which involved multiple collaborators not just two (you can't change a system with just two players). I wasn't so interested in crowd-sourcing, where the hive mind is used to generate multiple clever ideas which might be the solution, but stops short of putting collaborative solutions into practice. That feels like another form of consultation to me.
It's not to say these are bad things: but to me they are less difficult and less necessary than when collaboration is a way to solve system-level wicked problems, where there is a need for simultaneous action by players who each bring a different piece of the jigsaw with them.
So I drew up some criteria and then searched for examples which both met those criteria and that I had a head-start with: knowing key players, for example, who I could be confident would at least read my email or return my call.
Hearty thanks to everyone who made time to be interviewed or to give me their perspective on some of the examples.
The project has followed a pattern I'm now pretty familiar with, in my consulting, training and facilitation work:
Then the actual creativity begins: knitting new things, finding scraps of existing articles, handouts or blogs to recycle and stitching it together like a quilt with additional embroidery and applique. I start committing myself to a narrative thread, to a point of view, to some definitive statements.
Then the first of many moments of truth: sending the draft off and nervously awaiting the feedback - sitting over my email until it arrives and then putting off the moment of actually opening it and reading the response.
Altering and amending the draft in response to that feedback and to my own nagging unhappiness with how I've captured something which may be very hard to pin down.
And then there's a dip: the boredom as I get too familiar with the material: is there anything new here? Will anyone else find it interesting?
At that point I know I need to leave it all to settle for a bit and come back to it fresh after some weeks. Fortunately, when I did, I felt "yes, this is what I wanted to say, this is how I wanted to say it" and crucially: "this has got things in it that readers will find useful, amusing, novel, easy to understand."
It's sobering and enlightening to remember how much goodwill was involved - interviewees, people who gave me permission to use models and frameworks; anonymous and other reviewers; people helping to get the word out about it. There was a lot of swapping favours and continuing to build and reinforce working relationships. It might be possible to analyse these all down to hard-nosed motivations, but I think much of it was trust-based and fuelled by enthusiasm for the topic and a long history of comfortable working relationships.
As an author, it feels as if the project is ended when the final proofs go back to the publisher. But of course it doesn't, thankfully, end there. Now that I've been invited to blog, present or share expertise off the back of the book (e.g. Green Mondays, MAFN, DareConf) I have to remind myself of what I've written! Because your thinking doesn't stand still, nor should it.
In-the-room facilitators often use a lot of flip chart paper and plenty of marker pens. It's very irritating when the pens begin to dry up. A juicy pen is best. And I get through a lot of them. I use two different kinds of marker pens which I can refill: Staedtler and Rosinco. I buy the refill ink from the Green Stationery Company, who order them in for me because although the pens are widely available in the UK, the refills are not.
The systems are different.
With Rosinco, it's a 'drip and soak' system, where you stand the pen on its bottom in a rather charming wooden stand, and fit a plastic funnel around the nib end, a bit like the collar you put on a pet to stop it biting its stitches. You then drip the ink from a bottle into the collar, and it soaks into the pen. It's a bit messy when the collar is removed, as there is inevitably some ink left around the head of the pen. The pen itself uses a cardboard tube, and the refill set comes in a brown paper bag. So it's got an old fashioned 'natural' feel to it. And do you know, I couldn't find a web page showing the refill pack. If you know of one, please post a comment.
The Staedtler refill ink comes in a short stubby tub, and you put the pen head down into the refill station and leave it for four minutes (or it could be four hours, the diagram of a clock face is ambiguous).
During workshops, I put masking tape around the lid of dried up pens which I can refill, and put the non-refillable ones straight in the bin. When I get back to the office, the dehydrated pens go in a special box until I have time to do a refilling session.
So is it a waste of time? I don't mean this from an environmental cost-benefit analysis. I'm convinced enough that refilling is better than one-trip pens.
I mean clock time.
I'm a busy person. Can I slow down enough to supervise the pens as they drink their fill? Can I multi-task while they are soaking? (I can only blog about this once!)
Taking the time to do something slowly when there is a faster option feels eccentric and hard, when a glance to my left shows my to-do list growing all by itself. Shall we add slow stationery to slow travel and slow food?
So I multi-task by using pen refill time as time to stop and stare. I may not be standing beneath the boughs, but I can gawp at the tall tree outside my office window and - on a day like today - listen to the swifts screeching and see an urban fox sunning itself on a shed roof.
It's also an opportunity to reflect on mindfulness and intention. Even in these small things, I have an intention. Even for this small amount of time, I am aware that I find it hard to quieten the task master in my head.
So not a waste of time: a use of time.
