Collaborators

Collaboration is potent because you give of your greatest gifts and skills and also receive of the greatest gifts and skills of others.

There is a quantum leap in collaboration inherent in a movement toward world peace. Each previous increase in collaboration marked a radical shift for humanity: agricultural, industrial, and technological knowledge economy (the Internet). Today, massive global collaboration requires constructive conflict.

Wars are not fought alone. We get war when people collaborate on violence, many times under the guise of higher ideals—for protection of human rights, for cultural and religious freedom. Humanity is a meta-organization and our huge leaps forward happen from people collaborating. Now we can collaborate to organize our international agreements to prevent war and engage in active peace-as-safety practices.

When you understand the importance of collaboration, you can actively usher in a new era for humanity. You need to know this because it is already happening one way or another. P:5Y is just speeding it up. The practice of collaboration makes your organization more effective because it builds trust, knowledge, and communication.

Fundamentally, collaboration produces exponential results for your personal commitment and mission that you could not accomplish alone. It simultaneously produces exponential results for the mission of your organization. Leading-edge businesses have known and practiced this for years. The engine of prosperity is human ingenuity; the engine of innovation is collaboration; and collaboration requires safety. Safety creates a global environment where we can collaborate to meet everyone's needs.

Most likely you are already collaborating if you're part of a business, group, community, church, synagogue, mosque, prayer circle, school, university, Little League team, or activist group. One attribute of P:5Y is that we are approaching peace from the perspective of aligning one's life with core values and innate strengths to foster effective collaboration among private, governmental, and corporate organizations for world peace. You may be thinking about how your organization can contribute to peace by 2014. Organizations, religious groups, communities, schools, counties, and states can all become part of our campaign.

You've already discovered the roles of peace buddies and peace teams in creating world peace. As we progress toward our goal, we must learn to collaborate not only with individuals and small groups but with larger groups as well. Collaboration is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult, but it is always essential for peace. While asking the world to give up war and adopt a more collaborative and cooperative attitude toward conflict resolution, we must be prepared to collaborate and cooperate with a great number of diverse organizations as we learn to work together for peace.

The organizations you are part of can be a vital part of this movement for one obvious reason: They bring together people who tend to be of like mind and similar passions. One person who belongs to a church, a large civic organization like Kiwanis International or Rotary International, or a political group like the Green Party can inspire an entire organization to strive for world peace by 2014.

A few highly motivated people can change the course of a large organization. For instance, in 2008 a group of fourth-graders in Watertown, Massachusetts, were assigned a task by their teacher: Take charge of a project to contribute to the fight against global warming by getting the city to reduce the size of the margins on their computer printouts. The class calculated that if everyone in the United States did so, it would save more than six million trees per year. The result was a letter-writing campaign to the city, a commitment from their school to change their margins, a lobbying effort at the Massachusetts State House, and a feature story on NPR. It's not directly related to peace, but this story shows that a small group of passionate activists can change the attitudes and behaviors of large organizations.

This website could not have been built without collaboration, the advice of dozens of multidisciplinary experts, each offering diverse experiences. P:5Y already has collaborators ranging from Internet marketers, broadcast stations, and micro-lenders to journalists and stand-up comedians working with artists.

Become a Successful Peace Collaborator

On the surface, collaboration may seem challenging, but it is actually easier and more efficient than working from your strengths and passion alone. Independent-minded individuals are powerful collaborators who make distinct, strong contributions. The best way to collaborate is to do it. Collaboration starts with an invitation. Collaborate with people you trust and from whom you can learn. Complement each other's strengths. Great collaboration takes delegating, trusting, forgiving, changing what hasn't worked in the past, communicating, and  following up—regularly. Most of us collaborate in some way or another every day. For example, we collaborate on school projects, car pools, neighborhood block parties, and work projects. Successful collaborations bring improved results for all the parties involved

The elements needed for successful collaboration include what Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, two senior McKinsey and Company partners, identified for high-performing groups in their book The Wisdom of Teams:

• Common purposes for working
• Specific performance goals that are commonly agreed upon
• Complementary skills in group members
• Mutual accountability among all members
• Shared working approaches
• Small numbers of people—typically fewer than twelve

For high-performance collaboration you also need trust, transparency, and an infrastructure for shared communication and follow-up. Once you have learned how successful collaborations work, you can begin to work on your own to expand the P:5Y campaign for world peace.

You Are Leading the Way

Let's take a moment to apply this by considering the organizations you participate in. As you go through the following exercise, consider how you can work with others within the organization to launch a truly collaborative effort for world peace.

Organizations—What groups and organizations are you a part of?

Here are some vital questions you can ask yourself as you launch a collaborative effort with your organization:

• What kind of potential peacemaker is this group/organization? What are its strengths, and in what areas can it contribute?
• In what effective and fun ways can you see this group getting involved with P:5Y?
• How committed is the organization to world peace?
• What leadership role might you take on?
• What actions could you take?

One of the most important things to consider is the political dimension of any collaboration. To make a collaboration work, you must understand the organizational structure that will be collaborating. Get to know the decision makers within the organizations and familiarize yourself with the systems that support the organization. Do the organizations have a history of collaboration? They may be experts at internal collaboration yet this may be their first time collaborating with another organization, business, NGO, or individual. Know your strengths and communicate up front what you are willing to contribute.

If you are moved to get your organization to collaborate with P:5Y, convene a meeting of your group and let them know beforehand that you want to share the possibility of working on a potential project. Prepare well for this meeting to help guarantee its success. Here is a list of things you should do before the meeting:

• Consider fun ways your organization might get involved that are aligned with its purpose.
• Write an effective invitation for people to attend, especially key leaders.
• Make sure you have a good place to meet, one that is quiet and convenient.
• Prepare handouts with key information.
• Consider making a presentation with your peace buddy or a partner.
• Share what you're doing with P:5Y and what you've taken on as your personal commitment to peace.
• Consider what your group, and the people in it, can gain from P:5Y.
• Have a specific project suggestion ready that outlines these benefits.
• Plan to explore with the group what they would be most excited to do for peace by 2014.
• Plan to wrap up your meeting by asking for and promising next steps. What are the next steps? Decide what the best outcome of your presentation would be.

Schedule a follow-up meeting soon after the initial meeting. Set a deadline for making a decision about collaborating on P:5Y and make sure that your organization holds to that deadline. Work hard to secure this collaboration. You cannot overestimate the importance of collaborating even with one organization.

The Power of One Organization in the World

Just consider, for example, one Unitarian church with a congregation of about five hundred people. This community has the ability to reach out to thousands more among family and friends. It has a built-in fund-raising capacity. It has a cross-section of skills and professional training ranging from lawyers and physicians to craftspeople, teachers, law enforcement officers, and political officeholders. It has a mailing list. It has a built-in infrastructure for peace teams and peace buddies. Most important, it has clear values and a mission that align with world peace. A traditional strength of religious groups is to uphold the highest values of humanity. Churches are just one example of an organization that can collaborate with P:5Y. Every organization has particular strengths to offer peace by 2014.

Some organizations are collaborating publicly with P:5Y and some privately. For instance, ideocore, a Santa Barbara–based branding company, offered to collaborate with branding the P:5Y movement. Media One of San Francisco has taken on P:5Y as their core cause. DharmaMix media is making voice-over music available free online of the message of this book. Numerous diplomats and international political advisers are publicly and quietly collaborating with P:5Y.

Actions Your Organization Can Take

The best way to keep the organization engaged with world peace is to act. Once your organization has agreed to collaborate with our campaign to create world peace in five years, start work immediately. Capture the enthusiasm of your organization for world peace and never let it waver. Remember that this is a multiyear project, and to maintain your organization's enthusiasm for collaboration throughout that time, create early success and celebrate milestones. Design activities suitable for your organization that deliver anticipated outcomes according to a definite time frame. Such activities will of course depend on the kind of organization you are working with, and the types of activities that it normally undertakes.

If you are working on collaboration with a religious or spiritual group, register prayers, meditations, contemplations, candles, ceremonies, and spiritual studies for peace. Measure the number of prayers, hours, etc., and put it in as a project. There is an increasing body of research that suggests that the mental intention of groups of people can affect the material world in measurable ways. For example, author Lynne McTaggart, working with Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona, has conducted an ongoing series of "intention experiments" to test the effect of human intention on everything from plant seeds to the molecular structure of water. In her book, The Intention Experiment, McTaggart discusses this intention experiment involving seeds:

"Human intention appears to have made a group of seeds grow eight millimeters more than a control group of seeds . . . The odds of that happening by chance are approximately one in one million. Intention really can affect the outside world, so intensely committed groups sending intentions of peace can accomplish wonders."

An effective action for any organization collaborating with P:5Y is to create displays. Put up "Peace by 2014" or "I promise peace" signs around your locales. Give out stickers, T-shirts, bumper stickers, posters, and flyers that say "I promise peace." No matter what your organization does, you can create a physical structure or display in your office or building that reminds people of your commitment to world peace by 2014 and to help spread the word about P:5Y. Your organization can provide volunteers, skills, communication networks, co-branding, updates in your newsletter, and specific projects within national plans for peace.

Collaborating with other organizations can be an effective way for your organization to pool resources. The following are some examples of how organizations can collaborate with other organizations: a steel-manufacturing company can collaborate with effective NGOs working under the P:5Y plan to provide materials to build bridges; a textile manufacturer can collaborate with clothing designers; and business adviser groups can offer high-level strategic involvement with local groups working within the national plans for peace.

Finding an existing organization to get behind P:5Y in a practical manner is an efficient way to create peace. Groups have power and resources to get things done. Your organization standing for peace by 2014 can serve as a beacon to the whole community in which it is located. As we learn to collaborate with organizations all over the world, we will build a base for a world at peace.

Everyone wants to be effective. People do not have to agree on religion, politics,  or how they live their lives in order to collaborate. Collaboration is the antidote to the ills of specialization: lack of communication, conflicting agendas, mistrust, jargon, and defended expertise. The present situation is a nadir of those ills: uncoordinated policies, agendas, projects, budgets, and goals. We have the resources now to create world peace: processes, skills, money, goodwill, brainpower, and all the answers except for effective collaboration—the piece that is missing but will make all the difference in the world.

The most fundamental cooperation is for every country that needs it to have a comprehensive plan for creating a functioning government, with all of the NGOs and foreign aid in that country conforming to make it effective.

Collaboration for peace requires a mature human willingness to put aside differences voluntarily; fortunately we have millions of world citizens doing just that today. Increasing collaboration decreases the possibility of war in the future, so your act of collaboration is an act of peace.