Week Notes: week beginning 5th October

John Hitchin, Renaisi’s CEO writes week notes to capture and reflect on the realities of running a social enterprise.

Prep and writing

This was a week of trying to catch up with myself, fleshing out ideas, writing lots of proposals and reports. We have our all-team away day on the 13th (online, of course) so I also prepared a presentation for that, which is about the whole company and everything that’s going on. A challenge!

Collaboration

A lovely experience this week was observing and talking to colleagues across the procurement teams of the Hackney Anchors Collaborative. We explored shared interests and opportunities to ensure that procurement was supportive of an inclusive economy. There were big ambitious ideas and small, practical steps. I’m excited about this.

That led to a conversation with my colleagues about the role of collaboration and how it is different to partnership.

I’ve been using the phrase, “collaboration is a muscle”, quite a lot recently, and I keep seeing evidence of it. The more you work together as parts of a wider system, the more you get good at working together in that way. The more you think of yourselves as individual teams/ organisations that sometimes partner with each other, the more that you behave in that way.

The other thought is that there are no hero organisations in collaboration, and we sometimes struggle to remember that.

Reading, listening and watching

My friend Jenny sent me this, and it is glorious:

I’ve also started watching the Playbook on Netflix, about coaches. Doc Rivers talked about the concept of Ubuntu, or ‘I am because you are’. That resonated with my thinking on collaboration earlier in the week.