@tinfoiling shared this, maybe some folks from CoSocial want to attend as a group?
Mini-Executive Education: Thriving Together - Strengthening Co-operative Networks
The Co-operative Management Education Co-operative invites members and the broader co-operative community to join a free 2-hour virtual mini-executive education training offered by the International Centre for Co-operative Management at Saint Mary’s University.
Join us for this engaging short course on intercooperation. We will explore practical strategies, big and small, that create tangible value for your co-operative and reinforce the co-operative ecosystem.
Join us for this engaging short course on intercooperation. We will explore practical strategies, big and small, that create tangible value for your co-operative or credit union and reinforce the co-operative ecosystem.
Effective intercooperation is grounded in trust and familiarity, and the resulting complex networks are strengthened by the presence of reinforcing links at multiple points of relationship. We will dig into the who, what, when, and how of complex network building and ask:
Are we familiar with the wealth of co-operatives outside of our co-operative’s industry and membership model?
Can we make visible points of convergence and congruence with other co-operatives?
Can we translate the power and potential of intercooperation to our co-operative, members, colleagues, and communities?
Whether new to co-operatives or an experienced co-operative professional, this short course will stretch your thinking.
Registration link (if you have trouble finding your existing registration – sent via email from Zoom)
Sounds neat. I won’t be able to make it (middle of the work day and there’s a chance of a meeting in the middle of the session), but please take notes!
Finally getting around to sharing my notes and key takeaways of the session:
The handout from @tinfoiling link above is a good quick summary
The report “Complex Networks for Cooperative Economies” and Summary notes it is based on are also interesting and a quick read, if the topic of like, how to create ecosystems / networks
They developed an assessment tool with principles to evaluated complex networks: Five Principles for Sustainable and Resilient Networks that assesses
Level of institutionalization of relationships
Diversity of agents
Presence of inter-generational infrastructure
Level of self-reliance
Level of embeddedness in a broader society
They identify good outcomes of networks (some things I think we’ve wanted / talked about):
pool resources
reduce costs
align strategically
achieve economies of scale
provide public goods
spread awareness
They name actors, think about levels of complexity as well:
The examples out of Mondragon were particularly fun, but still mulling over what a digital equivalent could be:
Create institutions and policies in common (key services the market does not provide)
venture capital fund
central services (legal, R&D)
pooling surpluses
no layoffs for economic reasons, find job transfers instead
Promoting C2C synergies
a little bit like a value-add situation
My takeaways for our coop, things that might be actionable:
We are at the informal collaborations level, AT BEST, so a step is to keep doing more of that
Otherwise, we can start to identify C2C business relationships (as a simple system a la Gall’s Law) along with those informal collaborations to lay the groundwork for something formal
Gall’s law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
