Peer reviews are an essential component for continuous improvement and accountability within any team. In a team working with Sociocracy 3.0 (S3.0), peer reviews can be particularly powerful as they align with the principles of collaboration, consent-based decision-making, and decentralised governance.

This’s a guide on how to conduct effective peer reviews in a team using Sociocracy 3.0.

Daphne Bucher looks back at seven successful years at collaboratio helvetica. In this blog post, she talks about her learnings regarding power dynamics, self-responsibility, and personal growth in a self-organised start-up environment.

Introducing a new, value-based pricing model for the fifth edition of the Catalyst Lab!

Collaboratio helvetica is self-organised and operates along the collaboration principles of Sociocracy 3.0. The collective decision was taken to embark on a learning journey and to explore the Conscious Leadership approach by the Conscious Leadership Group.

Organisational learning is important for all contexts, yet more important still for innovative, action research-based, prototype driven initiatives. Dedicated to catalysing social change in Switzerland, collaboratio helvetica designs and runs prototypes and experiments in order to find ways to achieve this goal, and often the learnings from these are the most valuable outcome of the projects.

Difficult conversations are an essential part of meaningful collaborations. A big part of changing the ways we work together implies changing the way how crucial conversations within an organisation take place. Many of the social tools we use at collaboratio helvetica, including dialogue, 4-levels of listening and liberating structures, among many many others offer different methods to have deep conversations that allow everyone to be heard, and any topic to be discussed. But are these conversations also successful in terms of outcome? Do we achieve what we gather for in the first place?

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Prototyping refers to building or creating a small but essential part of a larger project in order to see if it works as envisioned. It is rooted in ‘doing’ - development, testing, evaluating, reiterating. In the original framework of Theory U, it is the definitive step into concrete action, while staying closely connected to the deep mindset shift that happened in the previous steps of the Catalyst Lab journey and to the source of our intention.

At collaboratio helvetica we believe in catalysing change by bringing people together and sharing an inner and outer exploratory journey, as a necessary preparation for collective action. What happens in such a collective space, like a Social Innovation Lab?

What takes place in such spaces, including the Catalyst Lab itself, is individual and collective learning. But what is learning, and how can we create and cultivate an environment where it can take place?

Any collaboration has its ups and downs and, if we are paying attention, offers an abundance of learning opportunities for all involved. Even when all are trained in collaboration tools, such as Sociocracy 3.0, and have developed key skills, such as self-awareness and listening, things are bound to go awry at some point.

From sometimes being overly naive and just believing whatever people were telling me despite evidence to the contrary to being worried and criticised for not “trusting” someone - I’ve had all kinds of experiences related to trust. Do you trust people always?

Since the first lockdown in March 2020 I was struggling with a challenge: how to transfer my activities into the digital world so I can continue to develop Let’s Talk Waste. Let’s Talk Waste is an entrepreneurial project I created in 2018 to cut plastic pollution at its roots. I offer team building activities to my clients who want to promote better team cohesion while creating a culture of caring for the planet and the environment. One of the tools I developed consists of two card games aimed at triggering discussions on the impact of littering and on challenging the relevance of recycling to promote sustainable behaviors.

Dedicated attention to a personal and ongoing practice is more of a necessity than a luxury in these times of navigating unprecedented changes. In this blog, we share a 5-fold approach to personal care in order to nourish our inner wellsprings and maintain a sense of groundedness and calm during these times.

During the past year we have published an interview series with Gender and Diversity experts across sectors in Switzerland. Find here the key learnings out of our expert interviews. You can find the links to all the interviews at the end. Feel free to comment with your own tips!

Anyone can go through or host a u.lab journey, which is a 3 month process based on Theory U including an online MOOC complemented with the heart of it: offline deep and personal encounters with oneself and others.

Understanding human behavior in groups is highly useful in design experience based events since group dynamics play a role in any human interaction. FIRO® is a comprehensive and widely-used theory of interpersonal relations created by Will Schutz.

Especially when working with big groups, hand signs can be very useful to share information without interrupting the process or take decisions swiftly.

Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience, and is more specifically defined as "learning through reflection on doing". It is a very effective strategy to create sustainable and inclusive learning experiences.

In this blog we want to introduce a very simple and practical tool to measure your X on your internal abilities skills map. It shows you your strengths and your weak spots so that you can decide where to focus your next learning steps as a space holder on.

The Pareto principle, also called the 80/20 rule, states that roughly 80% of results come from only 20% of efforts or causes. In the best of cases, applying this principle allows us to achieve more with working less, because we are smarter about how we invest our time.