Collaborating in groups can be challenging. How do you merge all those different opinions into effective action without starting an argument?
Collaboration Skills: Consultation
Here at Our Prosperous World, we’re developing a series of training workshops for youth that teach the skills of consultation — a form of group decision-making that searches for truth and builds consensus.
These workshops utilize both science and the arts to give students practice in collaborating together to develop a plan and carry it out.
The first workshop focuses on the mechanics of consulting together and covers the topics of:
Searching for Truth
Expressing Your View
Letting It Go
This downloadable PDF includes a brief introduction with a supplies list and notes on setting up the space, a facilitator guide and the participant handout.
These materials are designed with a DIY approach — Draw It Yourself. So you’ll want to have colored pencils, crayons or markers available for the participants to doodle, draw or sketch their notes while they take turns reading the panels out loud.
Search for Truth
After a brief introduction, we lead with a science experiment using colored light to illustrate the search for truth. We’ve included a supplies list and where to purchase or make them.
If we just argue over our opinions, we obscure the truth. It’s like placing the colored filters on top of one another.
But if we let the light shine through our opinions, we can see more. Here we shine the flashlights through the colored filters to create beams of red, green and blue light.
If we focus these beams together, we get white light and we can see the truth more clearly.
Express Your View
We then move on to Express Your View and talk about the importance of valuing diversity. In every group there’s some mix of extroverts and introverts. Here we call them Trailblazers and Detectives.
The Trailblazers open doors, break down barriers and tell you what they see. The Detectives analyze and make connections. They see what others miss. We need both. The Trailblazers will open up new territory to explore and the Detectives will be able to tell you where the cliffs are. Which means, we need to make space for everyone to say their piece.
Let It Go
The third skill is that once you’ve expressed your view, you need to let it go. It now belongs to the group. It’s like putting a puzzle together. If we all hang onto our pieces, we’ll never find out what the picture is. But if we lay our pieces out on the table then, as a group, we can rearrange them and find the pieces that fit together. Then the picture emerges.
Practice
We end with practice putting these skills to work. The participants divide into groups of 4-5 people. Each group chooses an element of a thriving community and decides on the ideal state for that element. For instance: in a thriving community, food would be health, abundant and affordable. Then they use the arts to present their vision to the larger group. They can draw it, act it, sing it, dance it, whatever expression they feel moved to use. Then they reflect on how well they consulted together.
Vision for the Future
This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on building collaboration skills through consultation:
Group interaction
Inner work of the individual
Decision-making and the learning process
Connecting the dots - putting local action in a global context
Just think—if we can raise a generation of youth who know how to consult and collaborate effectively… we’d actually start solving these global problems we face.
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