It’s a busy time with a community event last Sunday (see Koala, Platypus, Bushcare, and Community), and stalls at other community events on both days this weekend.
Cooperation and coordination are needed to make joint activities and events possible. We hold the event and then it’s over until next time.
Collaboration increases the outcomes, and nurtures ongoing innovation and emerging opportunities. The event becomes a milestone that makes your next step visible.
If you’re into the theory of collaboration, especially in the community space, Ed Morrison | Notes from the Swampy Lowlands is worth following.
In this recent post, Ed describes the difference between cooperation, coordination, and collaboration.
Often theories only make sense when you’ve seen them applied in practice. This is what it looks like with the Shady Lanes approach to verge gardens.
Cooperation is residents following council guidelines (often begrudgingly) where everyone does their own thing. If you stop here, verge gardening remains a niche activity.
Coordination is when we start to see that our interests align and we start learning more about each other’s worlds.
Street trees + native verge gardens = better results for shade and biodiversity.
The focus is on the activity and outcomes for natural ecosystems. This is where many funded group projects stop.
However, the activity also provides the space for conversations to start, and trust and relationships between diverse participants begin to grow - if we know how, or are eager to learn.
My book, Garden on the Verge: A New Approach moves us from cooperation to coordination, and to start building the relationships and trust that form the invisible connections for networks. It prepares us with our first, relatively-simple, collaboration between council, resident, and nature to transform that first patch of land.
The second book, Essential Skills in a Networked World, has the practical skills needed to do this in today’s messy world where the Internet and public discourse is dominated by conflict and blame. You can see many of the practices described in the book in action here in Shady Lanes, and in the Substacks of our evolving network.
Collaboration becomes possible when we’ve nurtured the people ecosystems as well as the natural ecosystem around the one activity. That’s when the ideas and opportunities begin to emerge. We see the connections between interlinked issues and scale outwards through loose networks.
It’s what everyone wants, but few realise what goes into making it happen. That’s the topic of the post below, and will be part of my presentation at the TREENET Symposium in September.
The Shady Lanes Project is about creating the conditions and connections to make cross-discipline and cross-sector collaborations possible. I wrote about that last year, inspired by Jim Williams and his idea of a nursery layer for regeneration.
How to create and manage more complex collaborations (across sectors and disciplines) is in the next book.
The Shady Lanes approach is not bottom-up or grass-roots change. The contested nature of that shared space inspired my hope that conversations and collaboration starting on the verge were a key to transitions to a more sustainable world. Ed Morrison‘s insights and his work with Strategic Doing have been invaluable in working out how we can make it happen.
We’re all in this together in the swampy lowlands.
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