Exploring the IDGs: Collaboration

Next up in the Inner Development Goals framework is Collaborating. You might notice how these skills and qualities build upon and support each other. Collaboration is a critical piece to make progress on shared concerns. To collaborate and co-create, we develop our ability to include, hold space, and communicate with stakeholders with different values, skills, and competencies. The earlier skills and qualities support this. First, we develop our relationship with ourselves, so we can connect with our personal values and motivations. We need to expand our thinking skills to understand the complexities of the scenarios we face and the perspectives of all involved parties and stakeholders. To take further steps forward, we need to care about the greater whole, not just our part of the situation. So let’s look closer at our communication skills, our co-creation skills, and our mindset around trust, inclusion, and intercultural competence. To solve big problems, we need each other! 

So within a space of self-compassion, we start this inquiry by simply pausing and asking ourselves a few questions. 

1. How well do I listen to understand someone’s perspective? Rather than listening to help solve a problem and fix it or prove my point and “win” a conversation?

2. Can I motivate others with supportive language and gestures and support others’ work towards their goals?

3. Do I find myself seeking out similar-minded people and opinions in my projects or do I embrace diversity and include people with different views and perspectives?

4. Do I generally show trust in my relationships and invest my time to build and maintain trusting relationships?

5. Does my language and way of being inspire and mobilize others to engage in shared purposes?

If you’ve identified an area of focus, the IDGs offer a free online toolkit. And under Collaboration, you’ll find many powerful exercises to cultivate these skills and qualities, including Cultivating Psychological Safety and Non-Violent Communication. I offer learning workshops around both these topics. But the exercise I want to share here is a sample of a workshop I believe everyone could benefit from. Listening to Pause. Here are the instructions from the IDG toolkit.  

Listening to Pause

Pausing on what we just heard is an inner skill that enables connecting to “what the person just said” and “how those words landed on oneself”. It can help us act from a more conscious state of being.

Pausing to reflect is embodying what we just heard, and developing that inner quality of being more conscious during the process can change the outcome. When practicing in teams, pausing can also help us notice from which level of listening we are operating from Otto Scharmer’s four levels of listening:

•  “downloading” (reconfirming what we know)

• “factual” (what is different from what we know)

• “empathic” (allows us to connect with the experience of the other)

•  and “generative” (connects us with who we are and who we want to be).

Practicing listening more deeply to sense a deeper connection with the environment enables us to relate to our surroundings. Elder Miriam Rose Ungunmerr said we learn by watching and listening, waiting, and then acting.

How to practice

When starting with listening to pause for the first time, try the following:

1. In teams, each person can be given the same amount of time for communicating, e.g. 5 minutes.

2. Around 1 minute (more or less) is given to pause between each person's interaction.

3. During the pause is space for awareness to know from which level of listening you are operating, and to discern the quality of how to continue the dynamic.

Going back to the earlier skills and qualities, you might notice how helpful it may be to cultivate self-awareness and humility. Humility opens us up to not knowing and having the capacity to be with that. Humility opens us up to listening deeply to each other, which allows us to collaborate and co-create together.

I’d love to hear from you if a learning workshop or coaching could help support this developmental discovery for yourself. Unlike some assessment approaches, I don’t take a gap analysis or start from a place of deficiency. We start where you are and explore the threads together.

Reach out if you’d like to chat.