In august 2019 the Urban Lab in Lund had a workshop with Natalia Lombardo of the Hum organisation. The lab is about policies and how organisations can share, collaborate and learn together to make a better impact. Natalia Lombardo showed some different ways to make decisions, including many people or stakeholders.
What do you do when you can’t decide on your own? How can we be strong together? How can you solve big challenges with many stakeholders? These were some of the questions that the organizations in the urban lab Lund in the CCSC-project is dealing with. In the lab Stenkrossen, Science Village Scandinavia and Mejeriet are working together with Future by Lund/Lunds kommun to find new ways of collaborating, using the work with young people as an example. The CCSC project is led by Trans Europe Halles and in the project, there are seven urban labs in total.
Natalia Lombardo from The Hum was talking about the importance of collaboration.
- When you bring more voices together, you are actually making better decisions, she said. When you get to hear the different perspectives of multiple people and multiple stakeholders you can be more creative and more innovative.
Natalia Lombardo was leading the workshop, and was talking about different ways of decision-making.
- Today I was talking a bit about the different modes of decision making that you can have in a collaborative endeavour. I mentioned some of the different methods that you can use to make decisions that are just not a traditional Mandate in a hierarchal structure or the very well-known Consensus decision making when you try to make decisions all together on everything. There are some other spaces in between and there are some other methodologies that can be a little bit faster, also including the voices of many perspectives.
The participants were shown how to use Consent, when nobody has a strong objection to the proposal or Advice, when you can make a decision after listening to experts or people that are affected by the decision.
The participants were also shown that there are different levels of engagement – and knowing that makes it easier to be engaged. Normal is that 1% are activator or creator, 9 % are collaborators or curators and 90% are supporters or consumers.
- We did an exercise where people were standing in different areas of engagement in different networks, said Natalia. This gave the possibility of everyone to see the system from the top, being able to see that there are different people in other places, that there are different multiple stakeholders and that people have different needs. When everyone can hear the needs of the others, they can create something that works for everyone.
