During my summer holiday with the family in Austria, we saw the mountains in different conditions. Ranging from rainy, cloudy up to full open and clear weather. This reminded me of one of the techniques for successful collaboration I describe in my book Win-Winnovation: the “Sunny day” technique. I often use it when building collaboration or consortia, it’s a great approach to bring partners together and co-create a joined vision of the future.

Why is this approach special or even why do you need a special approach to create the vision together?

Well, if you start designing the future vision on you own, you will encounter several issues:

• Your own knowledge is limited: technologies, approaches, business models, etc.
• You are limited by your own imagination; it might be big but still a limit
• There is a great change that when you present your vision to the partners it can be perceived as an overly dominant approach which can discourage others to participate.
• Future scenario’s that are too crisp and clear when presented the first time, prevent partners to think for themselves and accept/reject what you present instead of contributing to the vision

In short: you’ll miss many opportunities if you don’t use the approach.

During the past decades of collaboration projects, I’ve encountered all above issues: building visions on your own and presenting them a finished proposals to the group of potential partners is a certain way to limit the collaboration possibilities, or even just kill the collaboration before it started.

So, what is the Sunny Day approach?

It is about creating a bright future vision.

Not just dreaming of the sunny days but really imagining the results, feeling the collaboration successes and describing what you see on that day.

You and your consortium partners picture a vision of a sunny day in the future: your project has ended, all results are there, all technology works flawlessly, everybody is using it.

Next you and the team start co-creating the Sunny Day Scenario: what will this future be like? How will your solution be used? How will it work? What will it do? What will be its effect? What will the users say or experience?

Two things are very important during this exercise:

• Everybody remains in the Sunny Day state (no “yes, but problems”)
• Every partner participates and contributes

As a Sunny Day exercise facilitator, you need to be constantly aware of the participant interaction: what is (not) being said, which words are being used, dominant vs non-contributors, etc. These skills are some of the key elements you’ll learn and practice during our Deep Dive Win Win Collaboration training sessions.

By the end of the exercise, you’ll have a story board, a description of a bright future vision which is supported by all partners. If done properly there will be a benefit, a win, for all partners somewhere in the Sunny Day scenario.

The description can act as joined vision for the collaboration. In fact, your collaboration has already started, the partnership is already bonding, even before the formal project budgets have been approved. This will further ease your road to realizing the Win-Win collaboration

During your collaboration the Sunny Day scenario can be elaborated further into a Cloudy Day or even Rainy Day scenario, but that’s for another post.

Do you want to know more on how to build strong consortia and partnerships? Check out my upcoming Masterclass Win-Win-Collaboration.