Essential Practices

The Essential Practices support individual learning on subjects critical for transformational change. They guide everyone — stakeholders, conveners, coordinators and facilitators — in the “how” of working together to create systemic change.

When taken as a whole and practiced, the Essential Practices give the multi-stakeholder effort the best chance of transforming the desired system. These practices are used both explicitly (to build the skills and capacity of the Backbone Support team and stakeholders) and implicitly (in how the process of collaboration is coordinated and designed, for example in dialogue design or partnership negotiations).

 

 

What are the Essential Practices?

For each Building Block, we share four essential practices that work together to build the right mindset, heartset and action orientation for Effective Collaborative Action.

We highlight these practices to call attention to the importance of the “how” when transforming systems. There are many tools that can support these practices, and we encourage you to discover your own favorites. For each practice, we have included a few of our go-to resources to get you started.