Welcome to our co-created, online, collaboration Tool Box!
Here you can access guidelines, new thinking and ideas generated by people like you who are working remotely in multi-stakeholder partnerships, coalitions and consortia. This is a facility created for practitioners by practitioners – based on the realities of first hand experience.
The prompt for this resource is the following: remote partnering is increasingly the rule not the exception and yet very little attention has been paid to the additional challenges partnering remotely brings to multi-stakeholder collaboration.
This Tool Box does not provide a series of ‘do it this way’ instructions, rather it aims to help you to reflect on how you can take account of your specific partnering scenario and turn remote partnering into an opportunity to do things differently to optimise partnering potential in spite of any number of constraints and challenges. It is also important to remember that many people prefer verbal or visual communication to written… so these tools should be used as jumping off points for other ways of communicating.
Doing things differently requires building individual and institutional capacity as well as the courage and confidence to:
- Manage collaboration processes more effectively and confidently
- Question conventional and / or unhelpful practices (including assumptions and power dynamics) when these impede the progress of collaboration
- Be more penetrating in their assessment of what is really needed in their specific context / scenario
- Share new knowledge as they explore new approaches and lead change with fellow practitioners
Sometimes we can learn most from the experiences of others – so please use this site to share your case studies or to seek advice from other practitioners – see below for how to connect.
How to navigate this Tool Box:
The starting point is exploring the rationale for investing in the partnering process, this will help in becoming more reflective in our partnering practice. The top tabs are designed to help us do this:
- Getting Beneath – introduces the idea of moving from understanding ‘what?’ (partners want or do) to understanding ‘why?’ (they want it or do it). Delving into the underlying drivers, interests and concerns of partners is critical to building strong relationships and more valuable partnerships.
- Getting Better – to do things differently, we need also to understand where we (and our partners) are now. Examining capabilities and working to improve them is important for building the confidence and courage to work through challenges and to be ready for change
- Getting Beyond – encourages a focus on planning from the future and raises questions for us each to consider about what we can do in terms of incremental steps and in creating opportunities for leadership at all levels.
It is important to build our partnering work on strong foundations and on new ways of thinking and working.
When we know ‘why’, we can focus more specifically on ‘how’. The tabs on the right provide tools for specific interventions that will encourage more penetrating and productive partnering – with a specific focus on long-distance / remote working.
The materials here are designed to support, rather than direct, your partnering work. They are prompts for action and reflection not solutions to problems per se. But we believe that they will help to strengthen your working practice as you make them work for your contexts and partnerships. The best tools are those that are co-created by partners for their own use.
We suggest taking 30 minutes to explore the Tool Box so you know what is there for when you may need it.
A primary resource that covers core partnering frameworks, common challenges and partnering principles is:
Download: Brokering Better Partnerships by Investing in the Partnering Process (pdf)
A further resource specifically produced for those partnering remotely is now available.
Download: The Remote Partnering Work Book (pdf)
This work book is based on the experiences and insights of front-line practitioners and is part of the Remote Partnering Project which has just completed the first ever online Certificate in Remote Partnering. For more information go to: www.remotepartnering.org
We regard this whole website as a continuing ‘work in progress’ and will review, revise and replace material on the site as it emerges from you in the field.
Connect and share: info@partnershipbrokers.org
Remote partnering refers to groups of people working together from different entities as part of a structured collaborative relationship. They share a common social or environmental purpose and are accountable to each other, but they largely work long-distance across different locations, cultures and time zones rather than face-to-faceSource: www.remotepartnering.org
