Our last Co-Session was held on the headquarters of Bodegas Torres, one of Co-Society Fellows and a wines and brandies producer whose products can now be found in more than 140 countries.  Inspired by the wonderful landscape and vineyards around us, we put in practice collaboration to get several first prototypes for a Summer School on collaboration we want to make a reality this 2014. This is going to be a several days event where people from different organizations will “immerse” in a context in which learning and improving the skills needed to collaborate more efficiently inside and outside their organizations.

So we asked Co-Session participants to work in different teams and answer the question: How should the Collaboration Summer School of your dreams be?

For this activity we provided the teams with a tool called Business Origami. It uses paper cut-outs of people, buildings, vehicles, computers and other technology on a horizontal whiteboard to create a miniature model of a system and, more importantly, its interactions.

The result: Lots of good ideas to work with during next months. Outputs, as we expected, were most of them quite interesting and worth considering. But, for start, we should focus on the most repeated concepts, those getting the most coincidence among different teams:

1. Main objective should be formative: Learning by doing based on solving real business challenges

2. Create a space / time for socializing

3. Create a system (competition, committee, etc..) in order to filter out the most suitable people/profiles for participation in Summer School. Participants should, first of all, be willing to participate (it seems obvious, but it does not always happen in every event).

4.  After its conclusion, Summer School should continue with some sort of  post-event activity or process

5. Human Resources and/or Management involvement of organizations participating in Summer School is a must.

Business Origami