Articulating and co-developing shared purpose
Mobilization requires compelling purpose that others can connect to. Purpose becomes even more powerful when co-developed. Develop clear articulation of the team's purpose: what…
C5
Mobilization Skills
Inspiring and enabling others to engage in shared purposes and collective action.
Tools for this skill (17)
Co-Designing Transition Experiments
With a printable card deck and practical guidelines, teams co-design transition experiments — innovation projects that start from a societal challenge and treat learning as the…
Coordination across team boundaries
Most significant work requires coordination across team boundaries. Effective coordination multiplies the team's impact. Identify where cross-boundary coordination is needed: wh…
Leadership in Action
Teams of four or five take a series of timed challenges, fifteen minutes each, with a different member leading every round and nobody leading twice until everyone has led once.…
Operational Strategies
Looks at what makes a team's success last — the support systems, agreements and structures behind it — rather than at the initiative itself. The guide's closing activity, and th…
Public Narrative (Self / Us / Now)
Marshall Ganz's leadership storytelling craft: build a Story of Self (a choice point that shows why you are called), a Story of Us (shared values and experience of the community…
Shift & Share
A gallery of live demonstrations: innovators set up stations, small groups rotate through on a fixed rhythm, hear a short show-and-tell, and probe with questions. Spreads good i…
Social Diffusion
How new ideas actually spread through a social system: not to everyone at once, but from a small group inclined to adopt early, outward. Participants use the pattern to plan how…
Stakeholder engagement practices
Effective engagement with stakeholders builds support, surfaces important perspectives, and creates allies. Develop systematic approaches to stakeholder engagement: Identify key…
Stakeholder Mapping
Identifies who has to be engaged for a change initiative to succeed, sorts them by interest and influence, and turns that into a strategy for building and managing each relation…
The 3Cs (Coalitions, Collaboration, Consensus)
An activity built on Christiana Figueres' account of how the Paris Agreement was prepared: with your client, use every technique you have to list potential new collaborations fo…
The Capacity Trust
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Mobilization Skills (VCoL collection): When engaging someone in work or when they seem uncertain, express genuine confidence in their ca…
The Enrollment Game
Earth wants something real — to go full-time as a musician, to find a partner — and has two minutes to enrol Wind and Fire in helping, with the what, the why and the how; they s…
The Leader Game
One person on a higher chair has full control of the space for five to ten minutes and may do anything with it — spend it deciding, seek consensus, issue orders. Whatever happen…
The Meaning Connection
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Mobilization Skills (VCoL collection): When engaging others in work, briefly connect it to why it matters. Instead of just describing wh…
The Ownership Invitation
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Mobilization Skills (VCoL collection): Instead of telling people what to do, invite them into ownership. Frame challenges as shared prob…
The Power of Storytelling
Teams craft and deliver a compelling 90-second video pitch for their project, learning story structure, audience, and delivery — then face a playful market test (Monopoly money…
Also develops it (10)
25/10 Crowd Sourcing
The whole room generates bold ideas on cards ("if you were ten times bolder…"), then mills and swaps cards while scoring each passing idea 1–5 over five rounds. Scores add to 25…
9 Whys
Pairs interview each other about their work on a shared challenge, asking "why is that important to you?" again and again — up to nine times — until the answer reaches bedrock p…
Anatomy of a Good Climate Story
A template for building a reusable climate story: choose a topic that meets your audience where they are; draft the story at 400, 200 and 100 words so you can tell it confidentl…
Building and maintaining relationships across team boundaries
The quality of external relationships significantly affects the team's ability to accomplish its goals. Start by mapping the team's key external relationships. Which other teams…
Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)
A facilitated dialogue built on positive deviance: through seven fixed questions, a group discovers who among them is already solving a chronic problem against the odds, what th…
EPIC Communication
A four-part structure for a persuasive message — Engage, Problem, Inform, Call to action — taught one step at a time, with participants drafting their own on a topic they choose…
Open Space Technology
Self-organizing conference format for 5 to 2000 people around a question that matters: participants themselves post the sessions, form the agenda in the opening circle, and move…
Purposeful Storytelling
A longer arc from inner values to shared story: participants identify what drives them, find like-minded peers, formulate shared values together, and craft a story that communic…
Social Network Webbing
The group maps its informal web: who is already involved in the purpose, who is connected to whom, and who is missing — using color-coded sticky notes that grow into a living ne…
Strategy Knotworking (SKW)
A whole strategy process as one composed arc (~6 hours, or split over days): the group works through six questions — purpose, honest baseline, shifting context, competing challe…