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:
- 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.
- Collaborative Processes’ role is to encourage the behaviors and attitudes that foster collaboration.
- Collaboration requires: (a) an appropriate context, (b) a will to collaborate, and (c) competence in basic collaboration skills.
- 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.