Relational Coordination Collaborative
October Cafe Presenters Thursday Dec. 8, 2022, 3-4:00 PM ET

Featuring

  • Bram Hendriks, Solve Consulting; Innovation Partners
  • Harold Alvarez, Royal Dutch Shell; Erasmus University School of Management
  • Ina Sebastian, MIT Center for Information Systems Research

Facilitator

  • Jody Hoffer Gittell, RCC, Brandeis University

Our social systems and organizational structures are under stress as they struggle to address the increasingly complex and interdependent challenges such as the transition from fossil to renewable energy. New structures such as inter-organizational collaborations emerge to overcome these grand challenges, where internal and external knowledge is integrated to develop and implement new technologies or products. However, this organizational diversity is like a double-edged sword - while it can be a fountain of creativity and knowledge creation, it can also be a hotbed of coordinating challenges that can fuel conflict and cause projects to fail. 

In this Cafe, Harold Alvarez, Digital Integration Lead at Royal Dutch Shell, will share about the need for relational ecosystems to coordinate the transition to clean energy, based on two live cases. Then Bram Hendriks, Innovation Consultant from Innovation Boosters, will show how the highly practical theory of Relational Coordination can support coordination of the relational dynamics of collaborative knowledge creation based on his preliminary work with diverse stakeholders in the energy transition.  His findings are outlined in detail in Accelerating the Energy Transition - The Power of Relational CoordinationIna Sebastian, Research Scientist at MIT Center for Information Research, will use Relational Ecosystems and the Relational Model of Change to comment on the work of Harold and Bram, and to show how we can apply the learning to other complex challenges.

Then we will open up for discussion!  Please come and help us figure out how to address complex multi-stakeholder coordination challenges and how Relational Coordination might help. 

Free for members. Please register here, and feel free to register one or more guests.

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