When a Partnership is Greater than the Sum of its Parts
Drawing on the collective intelligence, skills and knowledge of teams and communities makes it possible to create more value for all stakeholders. This is the basic idea behind strategies, such as user-driven innovation, intrapreneurship, cluster management, and growth through partnerships.
However, the outcome of such co-creation initiatives often fails or falls short of the potential that could have been realised. Far too often, participants prepare themselves for co-creation projects by formulating narrowly defined outcomes they will push for – before meeting the people they are supposed to co-create with. Such predefined outcomes lower peoples’ capacity to listen to each other in ways that allow them to capture and implement the true collaboration potential.
In this course, you learn the skills needed to optimise your ability to both participate in and lead co-creation projects. The course is based on research on collective thinking from MIT (Dialogue and Theory U) and on research on what managers can learn from collaborative art practices.
Methods
The course is an energizing mix of practical reflective exercises, short presentations of relevant research, and group dialogue. To ensure relevance, the course focuses on working with the participants’ own challenges.
Learning Objectives
- Identify your strength and weaknesses in relation to co-creation
- Develop a plan for practicing the skills you personally need to upgrade your capacity for participating in and leading co-creation sessions
- Capacity to identify and draw on co-creation strengths in other participants.
- Knowledge about how to draw on the collective intelligence, skills and knowledge of teams and communities.
Claus Springborg, PhD and lecturer at CBS
10+ years of experience teaching leadership and cocreation skills, management theory, systems of personal development, and entrepreneurship as an executive educator and as a lecturer at business schools across Europe. Being active as publishing academic, entrepreneur and social entrepreneur, I’m passionate about developing theories through practice and for practice. In my teaching, I value humanistic principles, precision, reflexivity, and humour
Knowing how to build and preserve strong communities has always been a crucial leadership skill. On this course, you will learn concrete and practical tools that can help you build communities – in particular, among geographically dispersed groups of people. 
In this course, we investigate how to manage growing organizations, focusing on the process of community building, both internally in the organization and externally among customers and other stakeholders, ecosystem development and user-involvement as growth strategies. During the course we also advance the necessary skills related to co-creation and to identifying possibilities for generating value for groups of people. We learn to translate knowledge of these processes into practice by applying them to the development of a YouTube channel. Working with YouTube offers a unique opportunity for students to gain new practical experience with innovation processes involving quick, iterative prototyping and co-creation. YouTube also offers an opportunity to increase one’s practical experience with community building and user involvement. Creators of YouTube channels, such as, Crashcourse and Epic Rap Battles of History have achieved both fame and economical success by building communities around their products. The course will unfold over six weeks, with 4-hour sessions meeting once a week. Participants will work in teams and engage in processes of user involvement and ecosystem expansion. Using different approaches to community building, they will develop their brand and product over time, refining their business model in relation to their growing community. 
Different leadership ideologies encourage leaders to be confident, supportive, courageous, inspirational, empathetic, appreciative, and/or powerful. It seems obvious that possessing such leadership qualities will enhance a leaders’ ability to pursue both organisational and personal objectives effectively. However, enacting and embodying these leadership qualities, will, for many leaders, take a lot of energy and will, therefore, not be sustainable. Trying always to be confident or inspirational can be exhausting. Trying always to be supportive, appreciative, and empathetic quickly leads leaders to override feelings of frustration and anger and, in the long run, to various health issues. The reason it can be difficult to embody leadership qualities is that many of the ideas about how leaders should go about doing this are based on an outdated and inefficient understanding of the human mind and psyche. In this course, you will be introduced to a model of the human mind and psyche that is based on a fusion between old wisdom traditions and new cognitive science. We will explore the essential leadership qualities and the common misconceptions surrounding each of these. Changing how you think about the nature of leadership qualities will enable you to enact and embody leadership qualities with much less effort and in much more sustainable ways. The course will unfold over eight months with one whole day session each month. In each session, we work with one leadership quality. 
Conversations are at the heart of any organisation. When you improve the quality of the conversations that occur in the workplace, you improve the quality of every process. You will, for example, get higher quality decisionmaking, increased productivity, and increased innovation. Improving conversations is a matter of skilfully creating conditions under which conversation can flourish. However, different types of conversations need different forms of leadership. So, to improve conversations, you need the ability to recognise what type of conversation is happening and knowledge of how to lead each type of conversation to the next level. Creating the conditions for people to talk about the important issues instead of being stuck in politeness is different from creating the conditions for moving conversations beyond stubbornness, prejudice, or silo thinking. On this course, you learn to recognise different types of conversation and ways of creating the conditions that will move each type of conversations to the next level. You learn to use dialogue as a strategic tool that engages collective intelligence and mobilises energy for collective action towards realising organisational objectives.
Most people are familiar with the inner voice that tells you that whatever you just did (or didn’t do) is wrong. It is the voice that tells you not to ask a question at a meeting because it might reveal your lack of knowledge or skill. It is also the voice that after the meeting tells you that you are a coward for not asking. At first glance, the inner critic may seem to offer guidance and support. However, in effect, it mainly creates feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and inferiority – without providing any real support in life. Inner criticism can prevent you from making important contributions to the organisation and from advancing your career. It can cause unnecessary worries preventing you from focusing on the work at hand. It can undermine your natural curiosity, drive, courage, confidence, and ability to connect and form fruitful relationships – all of which are important for leaders. The inner critic does not always appear as overt self-criticism. More often, it appears in subtler forms that are easily mistaken for “guidance”, “conscience”, or “realism”. Regardless of the form, the effect is the same. In this workshop, you learn ways to detect the inner critic and disengaging from it. You learn how listening to yourself and others in kind, compassionate and non-judgmental ways can unlock aspects of your own and other’s unused potential that has been blocked by inner criticism. 
Leadership challenges that mid- or senior-level managers face are often not primarily technical or purely professional. They are often emotional and internal. Failure to recognize this can prevent leaders from dealing efficiently with such challenges and make them appear as far more complex and persistent than they are. When people either avoid a difficult conversation or rush through it without giving others time to react, it is rarely because they do not know what they want to say or because they do not have time. It is usually because they want to avoid feeling the emotional and internal states that arise during the conversation, such as anger, sadness, vulnerability, hatred, insecurity, guilt, or shame. Avoiding emotional and internal states makes leadership unnecessarily complicated. It limits dialogue and leads to unresolved conflicts, lack of trust, withholding of important information, silo-thinking, and ultimately poor decision-making, poor performance, and lost revenue. In this course, we will explore a range of emotions. We will look at common prejudice and misunderstandings related to each emotion and explore how embodying the energy of each emotion can contribute in its own unique way to your skill as a leader.
Most mid- or senior-level managers encounter Gordian Knots. Gordian Knots are problems with a significant, negative impact on the organisations’ bottom line, which persist in spite of the managers best efforts to solve them. You may already know what your Gordian Knot is. A sign that you are faced with a Gordian Knot is that you feel a particular problem is unnecessary and that it wouldn’t be a problem if everyone just did what they are supposed to do. You may believe the reason for the problem is that your fellow managers or employees are uncooperative, lack initiative, lack positivity or lack the ability to learn. Another sign that you are faced with a Gordian Knot is that you see an unsolvable dilemma where two essential objectives seem mutually exclusive or where pursuing a crucial objective seems inevitable to bring something harmful with it. Gordian Knots are not unsolvable. They only appear to be so. What typically blinds managers to the solution is their ideas about general leadership concerns, such as, confidence, commitment, collaboration, work-morale, motivation, freedom, strength, courage, appreciation, power, inspiration, and human nature. In this course, we draw on new cognitive science, spiritual traditions, and modern psychology to detect and change the ideas that obstruct managers from enacting effective leadership in their Gordian Knot situations
I have written a new book on how you as a manager can deal with those problems that on the one hand are important for you to solve, but on the other hand seems to persist no matter what you do. It can be very frustrating to be held back in your career by such problems. This book offers a practical and research-based approach to dealing with them.