Skip to main content

Collaborative Thinking is a Social Change Tool


This is another in a series of posts devoted to concepts that David Castro introduces in his book Genership 1.0 Beyond Leadership, Toward Liberating the Creative Soul. Strategic thinking is the subject this time. While the practice of strategic thinking is well known, the standard approach to it can be improved.

A new way of thinking collaboratively thinking about the future promises improved results from strategic planning sessions. CoThinking is Castro's term for that new way of thinking. To quote Castro, CoThinking is a process whereby “We engage with others in reflective dialogue our desired future, our present circumstances, and the possibilities for strategic action.”

Instead of trying to predict the future, concentrate on what future to create and how that work might be accomplished. Whether two people are talking about maybe starting a nonprofit, or a long-established development organization is ready to expand into new territories, thinking about the future is a necessity. Strategic thinking is a necessity, as are the tools for doing effective creative thinking.

Planning tools such as SWOT analysis or Delphi polling can be valuable sometimes. Often, social entrepreneurs can rely on their knowledge of what is changing at the time and what is reasonably likely to happen in the near future. Is now really a good time to start building village-scale power plants in rural Cameroon? Knowing the social environment in Cameroon should make the question an easy one.

Predicting the future might be useful, but creating a detailed map of what to do and how to do it, is more important. This is what CoThinking is for.


In the Genership model of doing things, there is no one way to envision the future. Castro refers to the journey metaphor here. Getting from where your nonprofit is to where you want to it to be is NOT like a journey. There is no organizational planning equivalent of MapQuest. Individuals should focus on creative efforts to find ways of reaching a desired destination.

CoThinking provides a method for planning in that “create-it-yourself” mold. To that end, CoThinking uses three “domains of thinking”:

  1. Think about the desired future – Here is where the ability to articulate a SMART goal, that the team agrees on will be crucial. What does the group want the future to look like? How many projects serving how many people by what date?
  2. Think about reality in light of that desired future – Scan the group's experience and knowledge of the current social environment, and discuss the group's assessments of same. What resources does the group still need to acquire? Information and skills count as resources too.
  3. Engage in practical planning, execution and evaluation of a certain action – Plan interim objectives and action steps, evaluation criteria, and first steps then take action.

CoThinking is not that difficult to understand, but some effort is required. Read Genership 1.0, Chapter 3 in particular, to find out why CoThinking is a good idea and how exactly it works.

Comments, suggestions or ideas? Feel free to post a comment, and share this post.   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...

Setting Good Social Change Goals: The Problem of Police Brutality

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...

How to Think About Social Problems, Part I

Whenever a problem like gun violence or illegal immigration gains traction in the media, you'll find people misrepresenting the problem. The world is full of uninformed people, but the world is also full of dishonest actors trying to "sell" an idea. This post is the first of several where I will try to help the curious reader defend themselves from the fools and con artists and understand social problems, for real.  Confirmation bias is just the tendency to look for information that confirms what we already know or think. Everyone wants to be right, and the more important the subject is, the more the person wants to continue being right. Information that shows we're right gets more weight than information showing we are wrong. So, with that psychological note in mind, let's look at the outline of a formula for thinking about social problems.  Abusing Statistics - Raw Numbers A real thinker always gives numbers a context and always uses the right kind of numbers. A...