• Highlighting our motivations when building partnerships
• Learning from our previous experiences, weighing what satisfied us and what didn’t in our past cooperation in order to improve the next ones
• Allowing everyone to express, including the people who are not so comfortable with speaking their mind in a big group
• Encouraging collective intelligence

Duration : 45 minutes - 1 hour

Invite the participants to consider their last partnership experience (or if they don’t have any experience, to imagine the partnership they would like to build). Encourage them to remember: How it began; Who was involved; What was the purpose of it.

Then ask them to take position on 2 axes. The first axis (vertical) will represent the way the partnership was built ; the second (horizontal) will express how satisfied they were with it.

First axis: Take position regarding how your last partnership was built. Was it based on opportunities (one end) or on a common vision / shared objectives (opposite end)?

Second axis: Keeping your position on the first axis, add a dimension with the second, which represents how satisfied you are/were with the choice you made. At one end, you are/were not satisfied at all, on the opposite end, you are/were very satisfied.

When everybody took position, ask 3 volunteers to explain theirs.

First axis: Why did you decide to join the partnership? Was it because of your interest in the project in itself and its objectives (one end) or because of the confidence you had in the people you were about to work with (opposite end)?

Second axis: Keeping your position on the first axis, express your satisfaction about the choice you made with the second: At one end, you are/were not satisfied at all, on the opposite end, you are/were very satisfied.

When everybody took position, ask 3 volunteers to explain theirs.

This exercise allows reflecting on past experiences and looking at the same time at the facts and at the feelings they led to. It will first bring to light the hidden (on purpose or not) reason(s) for a person or an organization to join a partnership and to speak about those early motivations with its partners. This acknowledgement will offer the opportunity to reassess the work together: Did we start working together for the same reasons? Even if they diverge, do they still match? Or should we split?

The second axis shows the level of satisfaction of the counterparts. It therefore shows the willingness of each partner to make a change, or not, in their way of entering in a future partnership, or in the way they work with their current partners now that they expressed their initial goals and feelings.

For example: if an organization initially joined the project for personal interest (access to a new network, to extra financial resources, to knowledge…) and expresses its non-satisfaction regarding this choice, their partners, after maybe being at first irritated by their hidden strategy, could appreciate that they would like to change and actually commit to the project, and keep their cooperation going on.

• A few A4 to specify the meaning of each axes’ end.
• A big room, for the participants to take position.