Designing for collective impact effectively means that Integral City teams are always paying attention to how we speak with one another. That is why we start off with agreements forms for Consent to Participate and guidelines for respectful dialogue. (We include the Guidelines for Respectful Dialogue with every Agenda and print them on the back of the Executive Directors business card – so that we make them contagious throughout the city.)
Designing for collective impact, also means that during any meeting we designate the role of “scribe” to more than one person so that the stories do not get lost in the excitement.
We believe that, “People need stories more than food to stay alive.” (Barry Lopez)
Integral City creates a design team with an intention to capture the stories from the beginning to the end and create a report that can be shared with the whole city.
We look for a local scribe who will record (on the computer, in writing or by audio or video recording) the stories that people tell.
In small groups our team brings professional facilitators and/or trains local participants to record small group conversations on flipcharts. The collection of flipcharts is then organized after the event and given to the local scribe as input into the report that she/he curates.
Integral City assigns an editor to review the report and keep multiple reports consistent in format and aligned in intention.
With Imagine Durant, the Executive Director also played an important role in sending the draft reports back to the participants for their approval – because our reports will be published on the Imagine Durant (and Integral City) websites.
Not only that, but the Executive Director also negotiates with the community newspaper to have the Thought Leader reports published in special editions and circulated to all households in the city.
The collecting, curating and communicating of the stories from our dialogues, mean that we create a self-energizing feedback loop that assures participants that they were heard and reaches out to include those who could not attend.
With Imagine Durant, their website and Facebook pages further amplified their many activities and continuously tied together the multiple themes they explored in search of a unifying Vision.
This blog series celebrates the launch of Book 2 in the Integral City Book Series: Integral City Inquiry & Action: Designing Impact for the Human Hive.
In this blog series, we share a case study that we presented at Tamarack’s Collective Impact 3.0 conference to tell you how Imagine Durant has used the Integral City Placecaring & Placemaking tools for the Human Hive.
The series includes:
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