Summary:

Growing research on individual collaborative strengths emphasizes the need to reconsider traditional approaches to development. This exercise presents an experiential learning opportunity that reveals insights on students’ abilities and those of their collaborative partners. The contemporary emphasis on collaboration presents both opportunities and challenges. Collaboration across organizations and sectors offers, for instance: the opportunity to stretch limited resources, the opportunity to identify better solutions to intractable problems, the opportunity to generate additional organizational capacity, the opportunity for improved learning, and the opportunity to jointly create public value. While these opportunities are valuable, the challenges associated with collaboration must also be considered. In this sense this exercise is designed to help students better understand their strengths and the ways in which individual collaboration styles impact group processes and outcomes.