The Power of Working Together: Stories to inspire Radical Collaboration
At Leadership+Design, one of our core values is collaboration. We practice this value in just about everything we do and it guides our work as a collective. We believe that the work of effective leaders is highly collaborative. L+D embeds collaboration in our methodology and work with individuals, schools, and organizations. This focus has led us to several collaborations over the past year that have proven meaningful opportunities to partner with organizations to build on ideas and model what we mean when we say radical collaboration.
Recently, L+D partnered with the Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools to launch a School Leader Institute. Participants had an opportunity to develop their vocabulary for leadership, build a cohort of trusted colleagues to learn with, and prepare for the next step in leadership. In February, we headed to Nashville and partnered with our friends at The Head's Network for their annual Conference, where we worked closely with over 120 heads of school to explore how we can lead in new ways, how to develop new skills and new habits and new narratives that enable us to evolve in ways to meet the needs of the time. Throughout the three days, participants learned and practiced new ways of thinking and being in a laboratory format amongst colleagues who shared a passion for learning collaboratively and were eager to try new things. This year L+D is partnering with the Virginia Association of Independent Schools to bring our work, methodology, and programs to members of VAIS.
In an age dominated by digital transformation and rapidly evolving global landscapes, "collaboration" often emerges as a common thread in success stories across sectors. Real collaboration, intense, hard work, everyone gives 150% type of collaboration is challenging. Yet, it is hard to argue that if we look for examples, we can see how radical collaboration has led to innovation, growth, and solving shared problems.
The Human Genome Project: A global endeavor involving numerous institutions worldwide, the project successfully mapped all the genes in human DNA. This unprecedented collaborative effort has revolutionized biomedicine, paving the way for personalized medicine and advancing therapeutic research. Governments from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France, China, Germany, and Canada collaborated with private sector partners, and this combination of public and private efforts accelerated the completion of the HGP. The shared effort was declared complete in April 2003. Could this have been possible if political borders or perceived competition between researchers kept the effort siloed and distributed? It's possible but unlikely.
Open Source Software Movement: Many organizations, both nonprofits and for-profits, have supported and continue to foster the open-source software movement. At its core, it is the tech world's rebel, pushing against Silicon Valley's profit-hungry, data mining, subscription based machine. Some key organizations and initiatives associated with the open source movement included the Free Software Foundation, Linux, Open Source Initiative, Red Hat and Mozilla, Apache, and Eclipse Foundations, to name just a few. Again, a radical approach to collaboration, this social movement, begun by a group of computer programmers and was built on the idea that secrecy and centralized control of creative work was problematic. Instead, the movement puts forward a model that believes in decentralization, consistent transparency, and unrestricted information sharing.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium: An initiative that arose in 2016 from a collective desire to help make mastery learning available to all learners. Traditional transcripts, which typically focus on grades and standardized assessments, often fail to capture a student's full range of abilities, experiences, and growth. In response to these concerns, the MTC created an alternative: the Mastery Transcript. What started as a small group of schools looking to collaborate and reshape the conversation around transcripts resulted in a movement with more than 385 member schools, 201 private and 184 public—radical collaboration.
These examples illustrate that when a group of organizations collaborate towards a shared goal, the resulting innovations and solutions can reshape the fabric of our world. With increasingly complex challenges facing the education sector, are we ready to begin having conversations that push forward new models of teaching and learning? Can we finally come up with a new business model for independent schools? Imagine what we could do if more organizations came together to create this revolutionary change and innovation.
So, how are you fostering collaboration within your organization and across your extended communities? While investing in collaborative spaces and technology is needed, are you building time in your schedule for your community to collaborate? When sending individuals off to professional development opportunities, are they going alone, or can you commit to sending teams to PD together so they have a joint experience? Do your professional development choices for your teams foster collaboration, or are they focused on the growth of the individual only? Are you looking beyond your campus for opportunities to collaborate? Can local or regional partners, universities, nonprofits, or businesses support your mission and foster radical collaboration?
At its core, collaboration is one way to foster creativity. I have yet to meet a school community that doesn't speak to creativity as a core value or central to its mission, and yet, when you look for evidence of creativity and collaboration, do you see it on campus? Imagine what the world of schools could look like in 10 years if we set aside individual agendas and embraced collective goals. Music industry icon Rick Rubin says that genuine collaboration is when everyone at the table works together toward whatever is the best solution. When collaborating, if the best idea gets picked, we all win, regardless of whose idea it is.
