This is a guest post sent in by Ben Ziegler!
Ben Ziegler
Collaboration is about people working together. The real success stories of our time are about good collaboration: businesses, political campaigns, sports teams, social causes…
UNCITRAL and regional ODR initiatives that operate in a spirit of collaboration increase their chance for success. While this may seem a no-brainer, given the stakeholders involved, a collaborative foundation improves the odds.
Good collaboration between stakeholders is required to standardize on ODR principles, guidelines, rules… and design solutions that can be implemented on a broad scale, and increase confidence in e-commerce, for both business and consumers.
David Bilinsky previously outlined valuable Implementation Considerations for ODR.
Given its early in the UNCITRAL process, here are ten collaborative maxims, principles, I’d hold up, as a guide for working together:
- Think systems. Is everybody who cares in the ODR initiative involved? Is there diversity of stakeholders? How is stakeholder creativity being engaged, and contributions welcomed? What framework is in place to deal with future uncertainties?
- Tell a story. What’s the story that connects the dots into sort of whole, that will motivate stakeholders, and their constituents, and get them to commit to a new ODR system?
- Structure for behaviour. Is the initiative physically structured to facilitate the type of behaviour desired from the stakeholders; e.g., collaborative, creative, innovative? How will the stakeholder team(s) work best together – especially given the diversity of stakeholders, cultures…?
- Appreciate. Given appreciation may be our strongest psychological need, how will stakeholders/participants in the initiative know they are being listened to, involved, valued?
- Transform through conversations. Its conversations that change us. Does the initiative provide effective mechanisms for those conversations to happen?
- Make it safe to fail. Is the initiative set up so that stakeholders feel safe to have authentic conversations, explore ideas, build consensus, risk failure?
- Integrate thinking and doing. Are stakeholders working together in ways that allows for timely feedback, and allows for iterative/adaptive learning?
- Link sustainability to long-term relationships. A long-term view makes it easier to deal with the ebb and flow common to relationships. In what ways are the stakeholders committed to the long-term, to a path of sustainability?
- Invest the community’s knowledge. How will the knowledge gained through the ODR system initiative be incorporated into broader ODR community-of-practice, and made available to those who need it, down the road? Is an open source approach possible – where participants have a “right-to-fork”, at any time, with the group’s knowledge?
- Appropriate Dispute Resolution. How will disputes, between stakeholders, be resolved? This one should be easy!
I hope these are useful. I’m not sure there is agreement, from country to country, on what good collaboration looks like and/or its benefits. What do you think? What basic principles for working together would you advocate for the UNCITRAL initiative?
This article was written by Ben Ziegler. He is a collaboration consultant, civil/commercial (including online) mediator, and blogger (www.collaborativejourneys.com), based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
[...] in order for a Global System to be not only possible, but also successful. Ben Ziegler’s 10 collaborative principles and David Bilinsky´s Three steps for implementation I think might be considered precious examples [...]