One of the tools we work with is referred to as a Contemplative Collaboration. This approach to holding the collaborative process involves a significant increase of the participant’s consciousness to include the full range of human sensory awareness. Feelings, sensations, sounds, ideas, patterns – both positive and negative -emerge in a field of perception, sustained for long durations, revealing deep and often hidden potential that is here-to-fore cloaked in the comfort zone of “normal group functioning.”
How this context of receptivity is achieved involves the cultivation of open awareness to include specific mental faculties of concentration, mindfulness, compassion and empathy. These qualities of individual attention inform the psycho-social context and maintains a climate of incubation for impulses and ideas to emerge. Not only does the individual hold and facilitate his or her own ideas and impulses – he or she includes the ideas and impulses of the other participants in an environment of consciousness.
“Two reasons innovation efforts fail are:
1) a failure to let ideas grow and
2) an unwillingness to take risks. In the first case, ideas are like plants – the seeds don’t look much like the final flower, and need time and nurturing to blossom. If there’s no incubator in an organization, there’s no way for new seeds to develop, and therefore, not much innovation is going to happen.”
(Perfetti, Christine. July 26, 2007. Debunking the Myths of Innovation: An Interview with Scott Berkun )