Exploring principle-led decision making
I’ve gone back to trying more micro-musings in my blog posts.
This week, as we kick off a really exciting partnership, with a piece of investigative work that will lay the foundation for much longer-term community-led change. The project team have been exploring some of the ways to ensure alignment to inform how we collectively make decisions across a blended core team from different organisations.
Governance means many things to many people in the context of both projects, programmes and the pursuit of long term change. In our larger pieces of work, we tend to have both an advisory group (to steward decision making and enrich our knowledge across the work) and a hive-mind group (a chance to bring in a broad range of experience at critical moments).
The advisory group brings a wide set of representative perspectives from across the partnership to support the core team as we enter the complexity of the work, creating space for us to sit with ambiguity in (often) challenging problem spaces both personally and professionally.
For this particular partnership, we’ve outlined the following project principles that we believe are integral in guiding us to the outcomes we seek, they are:
1 Build to a better future,
2 Nurture social capital,
3 Ensure community-led and owned,
4 Grow through experimentation,
5 Be complementary not duplicative,
6 Take a trauma-informed and strengths-based approach,
7 Further self-determination and foreground Indigenous wisdom,
Whilst all partners felt these were the right principles (and indeed the extended definitions of these in context), we were concerned about how these would work in everyday decision making when many streams of concurrent work were happening. How would we bring these to life, with so many diverse partners around the table with rich perspectives and how will we collectively hold ourselves to account when push comes to shove?
We’ve been using this format to unpack these so that we may use these co-created and documented principles at each of our project rhythms so as a core team we can continue to open the space for guidance, feedback and reflection in action.
The following is a (first draft) example:
By discussing these as a group openly, slowly and purposefully, we scaffolded a rich conversation to anchor us as we move into complexity. I found it enormously helpful way of uncovering different assumptions and hope that this means in the event we have differences of opinion we can use these to ground ourselves over making things about individual differences.
We’re really excited about the next steps in this partnership and the opportunity to create and hold the space for communities to guide visions and action for the future of their communities.
