Ever had those moments at gatherings where you left feeling like you didn't really learn anything about how people are doing? Or spent countless hours with family, yet still feel like they don't truly know you? In some social circles, it's always the same voices dominating the conversation, making it exhausting. 😓 And meeting new people? Breaking through the ice can be tough.

Collaboratio helvetica is self-organised and operates along the collaboration principles of Sociocracy 3.0. The collective decision was taken to embark on a learning journey and to explore the Conscious Leadership approach by the Conscious Leadership Group.

The iceberg model reveals deeper aspects of social and environmental challenges. Take plastic pollution in oceans: cleaning is crucial, but without addressing the root causes, we're stuck in a cycle. We must question the structures, laws, and mindsets that perpetuate this issue. Read our insightful blog post on understanding and addressing the iceberg model. Let's avoid repeating history and move beyond surface-level fixes to create lasting change.

The term social innovation has become a buzzword, but it’s important to keep in mind that there is no one single definition that everyone using it agrees upon. Put simply, social innovation is about addressing the challenges humanity is facing, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and gender equity - just four of the many challenges contained in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Social innovators are the people deploying different types of strategies to address these challenges.

Funders typically go through a cyclical process when fulfilling their purpose. They strategise and make key decisions about what should be funded and how, to what end. Then, those who choose to be transparent communicate about this strategy and the process that enables it, for example with a call for applications or a page on their website explaining their funding approach and who is eligible…

Organisational learning is important for all contexts, yet more important still for innovative, action research-based, prototype driven initiatives. Dedicated to catalysing social change in Switzerland, collaboratio helvetica designs and runs prototypes and experiments in order to find ways to achieve this goal, and often the learnings from these are the most valuable outcome of the projects.

The Theory of Change framework is designed to aid social innovation projects to hypothesise about the outcome and impact of their work, in order to be able to respond to rapidly changing contexts and emergent insights while remaining accountable to stakeholders and funders.

Here, you will find templates of a dossier, timeline, budget and financing plan. Have fun experimenting with it!

Difficult conversations are an essential part of meaningful collaborations. A big part of changing the ways we work together implies changing the way how crucial conversations within an organisation take place. Many of the social tools we use at collaboratio helvetica, including dialogue, 4-levels of listening and liberating structures, among many many others offer different methods to have deep conversations that allow everyone to be heard, and any topic to be discussed. But are these conversations also successful in terms of outcome? Do we achieve what we gather for in the first place?

More and more people agree that we need to work towards systemic change. But how can we define it, and where to begin? Systemic change can be understood as a change in how a system operates from the inside out. Besides deep shifts in the underlying paradigm(s), this includes changes in the Rules, Roles, Relationships and Resources that govern a given system (USAID, 2016).

I like to start with a story that impressed me when hearing it the first time, and I am still inspired when re-watching the video footage. It gave me a metaphor and scientific “evidence” for how subtleties can have huge and unpredictable ripple effects:

Systemic thinking is “like a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behaviour of systems” (see more here: Fifth Discipline Fieldbook). With this approach it is possible to get away from the - often only short-term effective - treatment of symptoms and to concentrate on the deeper causes, which are mostly inherent to a system (see also the chapter on Root Causes and the Iceberg Model).

What we usually say is that Radical Collaboration is both a toolset and a mindset. We can practice being together, in relationships with one another and the collective both on a practical level as well as on a more energetic and emotional level. To practice collaboration takes a lifetime to master. In this lifelong practice, we see the Catalyst Lab as a boot camp. In order to bring upon systemic change in the world, improving and deepening your relationships is a key skill and is, unfortunately, often underestimated and practised insufficiently.

Prototyping refers to building or creating a small but essential part of a larger project in order to see if it works as envisioned. It is rooted in ‘doing’ - development, testing, evaluating, reiterating. In the original framework of Theory U, it is the definitive step into concrete action, while staying closely connected to the deep mindset shift that happened in the previous steps of the Catalyst Lab journey and to the source of our intention.

In order to tackle the complex societal challenges we are facing, for instance around topics of climate change, migration, health etc., we need to come together across sectors and organisations and learn new ways of collaborating with each other, engage in meaningful conversations that go beyond polarization, learn from each other, and find new ways forward together. The challenges we are facing are too multilayered and complex to be addressed in a meaningful way just by one organisation or even one sector.

In multi-stakeholder workshops relevant stakeholders from a specific system (for example stakeholders linked to the healthcare system) come together around a specific calling question and topic to explore it in depth together, learn more about different perspectives and experiences, get a deeper understanding of the topic and identify leverage points for change. Ideally multi-stakeholder workshops take place as a series of events, where the same group comes together several times to explore relevant questions.

• a laboratory: a container of social experiments with intensive, experimental interventions

• a strategy for addressing complex ground-breaking social challenges on a systemic level.

• a space for multi-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together people from across the system aimed at key leverage points

• Social Labs consist of a team, a process and space(s) supporting social innovation and experimentation.

At collaboratio helvetica we believe in catalysing change by bringing people together and sharing an inner and outer exploratory journey, as a necessary preparation for collective action. What happens in such a collective space, like a Social Innovation Lab?

What takes place in such spaces, including the Catalyst Lab itself, is individual and collective learning. But what is learning, and how can we create and cultivate an environment where it can take place?

To achieve system change - a large-scale change that will affect everyone - funding the social innovation process itself effectively is key. Such an innovation process requires cross-sector collaborations that shift the focus from fighting the symptoms to addressing the root causes. Given the urgency for systemic change, foundations have been exploring new effective funding mechanisms that support system change.

During module 5 of the Catalyst Lab, the collaboratio helvetica’s team organised a one-day virtual prototyping workshop. The goal of the prototyping day was to support further the catalysts towards convening their systems and tap into the resources and knowledge of the community. The invitation was to get into a prototyping mindset and discover the benefits of experimenting with rapid prototyping tools, crowdsourcing, and co-creating with other changemakers working on diverse challenges, all while having fun. This workshop took place online due to restrictions linked to covid-19.