Newsroom
Co-Creating Cyber Solutions in Ukraine: The Hunger Games
The USAID/New Partnership Initiative (NPI) recently featured our work with DAI on the USAID/Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure in Ukraine Activity in the latest NPI August 2020 Newsletter! We worked with DAI to bring implementing partners...
Faith & Trust in Our Lives and Organizations: 7 Key Takeaways on How Religious Traditions Can Close Institutional and Personal Trust Deficits
Our world requires trusted, well-functioning institutions, backed by interpersonal trust, to allow us to solve the most pressing challenges of our day. And there are many such challenges at the moment: the COVID-19 pandemic; its economic fallout; growing social unrest...
Most Virtual Meetings Suck. Here’s How to Make Them Better!
If COVID-19 enforced working-from-home means endless badly run teleconferences, I quit. Fortunately, virtual meetings don’t actually all have to be “A Conference Call in Real Life” (which if you haven’t seen, stop reading now and watch it and “A Video Conference in...
Collaboration in Quarantine – Eight Ways to Collaborate Virtually
Like many people, I’ve spent the last few days wading through a cavalcade of potentially cancelled meetings as travel restrictions and quarantines extend around the world. Rather than out-right cancel or postpone to some indefinite point in the future, at...
4 Things “Big Tobacco” can Teach us About Controversial Conversations at the Holidays
Recently, several friends and colleagues have said some version to me of, “This isn’t who I am, Richard. I’m not that kind of person, but honestly, I just don’t have any friends anymore who voted for [fill in the blank]. I just don’t know how to talk to them.” During...
Making Backbone Organizations Work
Getting people from across the public, private, and civil sectors to effectively work together comes down to one fundamental question: how do you get people to work with you who don’t work for you? Humans excel at getting people to work with us who do work for us....
Enough with all the Cost-Plus Contracting Already
Tackling 3 Myths Around Cost-Plus Contracting from our CEO and Master Collaborator, Richard Crespin I’ve worked in government contracting on-and-off for nearly three decades, supporting federal defense, intel, and civilian agencies. And in all that time, I...
Co-Creation, the BAA, and the Nature of Humanity
Four Tips for Unlocking Creativity without Short-Circuiting Your Brain from our CEO & Master Collaborator, Richard Crespin Imagine you had lived your whole life up to this point under a benign dictatorship. You live under the dictator’s strict regimen of rules...
Not-So-Passionate about Passion Voting
A Small Change to Avoid Big Mistakes from Groupthink by Beth Skorochod, CollaborateUp's Director of Practice The meeting is the most fundamental form of human collaboration. You really can’t get anything significant done that involves more than one...
Collaboration vs. Consensus
Most organizations are not democracies. Some are flatter or more hierarchical than others, but almost all reserve certain decisions to a small group — managers or leaders. In a multi-stakeholder collaboration, though, is this also true? Many people seem to think the...