Large scale community and regional attempts at collaboration present a full array of wicked problems. It's often a field of landmines and goldmines. In the old conversations, people believed, or at least hoped, that setting big agendas, infusing big moneys, assembling big groups, commissioning big studies and establishing big leaders could make authentic collaboration for new outcomes possible. What these can be good at is scaling business as usual.
For business not as usual, it takes new models of collaboration. None of the big strategies have the power to substitute for new models. New models are new ways of people doing inclusion, conversation, learning, innovation and entrepreneurship. New models are particularly vital in civic efforts where we lack all the big things and where people need to come together as peers working for each other rather than subordinates working for others in positions of power or authority.
The Agile Canvas we use in these contexts is a new model of collaboration that works with and without big anything. As it turns out, new is the new big.
