For collaboration to work well, we need to evolve in 2 fundamentally discontiguous domains:
- inter-personal principles and practices (teamwork)
- intra-personal principles and practices (integrity)
- I declare that we want to Do Good in the world.
- I will make explicit WHAT we want to do
- I will make explicit HOW we want to do the what
- I will periodically (frequently preferred) hold myself accountable with retrospectives
- Held with trusted peers – trusted enough to be direct and authentic (constructively) with their assessments of each others’ results (the reality that is manifest by living the WHAT according to the HOW
- Recorded as high-fidelity as possible (audio, written notes, action items, etc)
- Shared within the Circle of Trust
- With such feedback directly informing revisions in WHAT and HOW of each individual
No amount of teamwork (extra-personal principles and practices) can fix situations that arise when the INTRA-personal integrity of collaborating team members is awry. To attempt this is to formalize rules of engagement to an Nth degree that flexibility, agility, responsiveness, creativity, tolerance, differences, are damaged by the restrictions and controls that must be put in place to account for this.
No one is expected to be perfect in any sense; proper practices need to accommodate honest mistakes – these will of course happen.
We Amigos each seek to model the following principles and practices
When we have a community of such individuals who share these principles and practices, the Circle of Trust is the Community of Impact.
Each member of the COI can feel assured that to some degree, with accountability, each other member is Doing Good in good faith, with accountability to each other.