The benefits for strong collaboration in the LSP community
Background
My 18 years of being part of the LSP community now gives me the opportunity to look back and reflect on our collective efforts to grow – both our community, the regions and the local markets.
Scope
Words that comes to my mind again and again is words like collaboration, critical mass and transparency
The challenge
When we as trainers certify facilitators in LSP around the world, I see a clear pattern. Those communities where facilitators chose to collaborate grow faster, have more fun and earn more money than those who chose to compete in a small market.
The embedded challenge in all our trainings is, that some people might be local competitors, some might be internal consultants and others might be from a far distanced part of the world, who traveled far to get the certification, but live and work on another continent – but they are all trying to be successful in their job/business.
Observations
We try our best to create small communities and guidelines to help each other grow towards success.
The key drivers of the success of this community are all the local facilitators who struggle, not only for their own business, but also to create small groups where local facilitators meet up, share ideas, roadmap, materials etc. Sometimes Psychically – other times virtually.
Our job as trainers is first of all to give the best training we can provide, but secondly to encourage and support the local initiatives around the world, whenever we can to help build up strong communities. And we start seeing the fruit of this, listing to people attending Regional community meetings
Often this requires a certain critical mass in the countries or regions and it takes time to build this up. It can take years before the critical mass of great facilitators is present, but when it is – the growth rate will increase.
The past
All of this is seen from my personal perspective based on:
· Being in the community from the start since I was on the first certification program ever in 2001
· Having experienced the hard times of the community – when a community meeting was only 7 people!
· Having the enormous pleasure of being part of the recent successful Global community meetings
· And having the pleasure of meeting a lot of facilitators throughout my trainings and listening to their concerns around getting started.
My own journey was kick started by the fact that we were 5 people of our company that got certified within 6 month back in 2001. This increased our learning curve enormously, and I feel I still benefit from that rapid ramp up that allowed us to solve big complex problems together.
Learning points
· Reach out and collaborate
· Increase learning curve fast with others to ensure critical mass
· Have transparent dialogues
Don’t worry about competition – make your change in the world – We need itJ
Jens Rottbøll