“The World went mad and now we need to learn to live in it “.  So says Brian Condon, Director of the Centre for Creative Collaboration.

Brian is right. The world is changing, in ways few people imagined, as a result of social, economic and environmental factors. The traditional economic powerhouses, USA, Japan and Europe are struggling, while the new kids on the block, China, India, Russia and Brazil are developing at an astonishing rate.

Businesses are going under and the cuts in the public sector mean that the Government is relying on the private sector to create new opportunities and new economic growth.  This is going to be very difficult if we continue to work in the same way.  If we keep doing the same things, we get the same results.

So what is the solution? There needs to be a new approach to doing business. The experts all say that collaboration is the way forward.  I wrote recently about collaborating in teams and using the individual qualities of team members. That is a good starting point but, to be truly successful as business people, we need to go one stage further.  We need to collaborate with people we wouldn’t usually engage with.  People we don’t even know yet.

Last year I helped organise an event with The Thinking Hotel called Change Play Business.  The idea was to bring together business people from different industries and see what would happen when they collaborated.  What would happen, for example, if a fashion designer, travel agent and an ice cream maker worked together?  What new enterprise could they create?

The best outcome for the participants of Change Play Business was that, as the game played out, they learned the value of working together in ways they would never have considered. The concept of play is very important in creativity, as is the opportunity to meet new people and engage with new ideas.  

But why should you collaborate when others may steal your ideas?

In my view we have to lose the fear of competition if we want our businesses to succeed in future.  Instead, we have to look for all opportunities to combine and extend our existing networks, and that includes people who are in the same line of business as we are.

 
If you would like to learn more about this new way of collaborating just get in touch here.