Alan Fowler

My professional life connects two fields: one as an organizational development adviser, the other as an academic.

Organisation development work typically involves analysis, advice and facilitation around:

  • Civil society governance, policy, strategy and capacity development. This theme involves work with the Berlin Civil Society Centre.
  • Aid policy and effectiveness, linked to enhancing and evaluating capacity.
  • Improving relational capabilities and collaboration to increase performance.
  • Innovation in the types of inter-mediation and brokering services available to multi-stakeholder negotiations and collaborative initiatives.

The academic field of work includes supervision, seminars and curriculum development spanning:

  • Civic Driven Change (CDC) and civic innovation: that is change in society stemming from citizens and their civic and uncivil energy. This theme is being pursed with my colleagues at the International Institute of Social Studies.
  • Investigating the organisational development of NGOs when linking up improvements in their governance, accountability, transparency and evidence.
  • Studies on philanthropy as practiced by people who are poor.
  • Knowledge generation, writing and dissemination around the theory and practice of capacity and capacity development

Joseph McMahon

I am a facilitator and consultant working with groups seeking to make decisions in a collaborative framework. I view collaboration in the following context:

  1. Collaboration is a perspective, not a set of tools or skills. As such, a person or organization does not merely ‘learn’ or adopt it; rather it is adopted as an organizing perspective.
  2. Collaborative Processes’ role is to encourage the behaviors and attitudes that foster collaboration.
  3. Collaboration requires: (a) an appropriate context, (b) a will to collaborate, and (c) competence in basic collaboration skills.
  4. Although many situations are complex and challenging, the key is in the attitude (and therefore the behaviors) of the participants. If you want it to work – it will.
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