Co-Creative Communities – Ripples into the future

The Adaptive Cultures Community consists of passionate culture practitioners and leaders.  Together we are developing collective insight and practices to enable more adaptive organisations and communities.

Our aim is to embody the highest aspirations we have for the cultures of the organisations and communities we work with.  This includes continual evolution of us as individuals, as a collective and of the systems, structures and processes we use.

In the 2010 HBR article, “Building the Co-Creative Enterprise”, the authors observe that “In co-creation, strategy formulation involves imagining a new value chain that benefits all players in the ecosystem.”  This is something that we continue to work on as a community, asking questions that can help us to perceive and act on opportunities to make a positive contribution to all in our ecosystem.

At a recent accreditation workshop, the Adaptive Cultures community agreed on some guiding principles of how we can work together. The premise of these principles is that they would help us to make a greater positive contribution in all our interactions within and beyond the community. The principles are:

• Constantly revisit who we are becoming and who we need to become
• Uncompromising support of each other
• Act in the moment, in the service of the emerging future
• Embrace ambiguity and confusion as the gateway to new possibility
• Hold deep compassion and forgiveness for each other, for our work colleagues and for our organisations
• Hold and synthesise the polarities we face in our daily work
• Courageously challenge ourselves to stretch into our individual and collective edges
• Celebrate every test, learning and act of courage
• Ask co-creative questions

We also discussed what is not acceptable in this community. Themes included:

• Not exploring the meaning of people’s language
• Act out of a sense of obligation rather than a sense of integrity
• Project authority onto others, expect others to ‘come up with the answers’
• Jump out of the ”developmental fire” without a discussion
• Ignore or not pay attention to the impact of our behaviours and language
• Stay on the surface and not do the ‘real’ work

The ripples of healthy, adaptive organisations go well beyond their immediate communities and companies into collective ecosystems and creating a healthier more sustainable world.

If you would like to be part of this community of passionate culture practitioners and leaders, you can find out more here.