There are a great variety of reasons to organize people
If you know of a successful method in use anywhere but not mentioned here, please add it.
Collaborative work between groups of stakeholders that "don't speak the same language". It takes art, patience and a sound method to get them to immerse themselves in the environment of the problem or opportunity they need each other to respond to.
They find there's more to the reality than they thought, and to each other.
They often make the error of not continually rediscovering their purpose, like nature does.
Peter Merry's model for Meshworks - Inspired networking
William Moyer's and his model Movement Action Plan - Sensible observations about planning successful campaigns
Anne Forbes - "Partners in Place", facilitator in Illinois - starting with immersion in the place
Phil Henshaw - 4Dsustainability, a whole systems environmental design cycle, continually rediscovering the context and expanding the problem
US National Academy of Science review of partnership methods - Enhancing the effectiveness of sustainability partnerships
Kurt Richardson & Gerald Midgley - Systems thinking for community involvement in policy analysis - finding the boundaries of the problem
Gerald Midgley - Towards a new framework for evaluating systemic and participatory methods.
ICRA - International Center for Development Oriented Research in Agriculture - Links to Partnership research and analysis
The Partnership Initiative - The Partnering Cycle & Principles, Knowledge, Strategies, Publications & Forum
MSP - Multi Stakeholder Processes Resource Portal - Methodologies
A. Coordinating different views of common problems that no one can solve by themselves takes a partnership in a exploratory learning process.
How economic markets coordinate multiple views and capabilities is a bit like how nature builds partnerships, effortlessly and invisibly. In nature and economies no part needs to understand how all the different parts are connected. Humans have unwittingly disrupted our environmental systems, somehow causing our economic markets to disrupt the systems of nature. So... half the task is to immerse ourselves in how the natural systems do and don't work, a group learning process that connects different views of that common reality. Now to start correcting the market steering mechanisms by hand until we can figure our how to let them work on their own again.
The other half of the problem is that people have not been taught how to recognize natural systems or how they work by themselves, or why they don't when they fail. That's a good way to say what the prior problem was, that let our profit motive cause the markets to disrupt the natural order to start with.
So because we're missing a language for how nature works, it's very hard for different people to see the same subject when immersed in the same problem. That means first learning to point to the same physical subjects, the clear evidence of the natural orders we're working with, and then succeed in agreeing on what the right thing to do is. There's even a basic common error in our ideas of cause and effect.
People tend to think of "systems" of nature as "fixed rules of pushes and pulls". It's clear that natural systems aren't fixed, though, but continually changing, and more influenced by discovered connections between opposites, the complementary differences that are the core of all relationships and economies. That goes to the core error of our culture's tendency to represent nature with equations.
So, that's the reason for *immersion*, to reorient and accelerate your learning of the natural process by exposing your awareness to the whole complexity of the system. Then you begin to think both rationally and intuitively about it as a whole. It feels so nice to no longer be stuck trying to use logic with nothing but scattered and uncertain facts to go by.
B. People may be "timid" and not ask the key questions they need answered, not realizing how often others are using terms differently from how they do. (adding to a list of barriers to productive conversations between stakeholders)
It's one of the effects of how people naturally develop separate languages and world views, and so don't notice the meanings of other people's languages and world views, or even that they have them. Our ways of thinking develop separately, for just ourselves or relatively closed communities.
That we seem to naturally construct our schools of thought as "separate realities" is one way to say it. I think it's the origin of the "ivory tower" or "silos" problem, and affects the intellectual communities more because they develop their own careful definitions and avoid using "vague" universal terms. The "double bind" of it seems to be that most people don't seem to have a language for understanding that problem either. It would be good to have one.
One hurdle for people understanding my science, for example, is that I use fairly general terms, both for pointing to the physical things in question as the natural reality and physical subject, and discuss explanations as separate subjects of interpretation, like the term "growth" referring to both physical and cultural realities that don't really match.
So we all find it hard to talk to each other, because we are each using words to mean different things. I notice other thinkers often appear unaware that's why other people's ideas seem meaningless, or to just not make sense, and then don't know what to ask about.
The 'solution' would be partly for people to "loosen up a bit" and more frequently ask the fairly obvious "dumb questions". People do that somewhat more easily in personal contact, sure, and get a much better sense of each other as individuals. But there are lots of inhibitions and groups that form into disconnected cells of self-agreement.
In either personal or online meetings maybe a "boundary spanning" facilitator might help. There are structured "social games" to get people to cross fertilize and understand each other's languages, as used for stakeholder collaborations. Someone aware of the problem might also ask key questions to facilitate the translations needed.
At conferences with panel discussions, sometimes a moderator succeeds in doing that, and asking just the right question to expose how the different views connect. It's an art and not many are good at it, though. When it works, of course, people realize that they may actually be talking about the SAME reality after all! ;-)
p.henshaw