New ideas, especially world-changing ideas, can be tender.
Like baby chicks, they need a lot of nurturing before they blossom into full-grown birds that can safely leave the nest. Occasionally the folks who are hatching an idea have everything they need to help their idea soar. But more often, teams with a great business idea and/or a status-quo challenging enterprise need help from the insights, wisdom, and encouragement of others.
As feminists building world-changing products, services, and enterprises, we want support that will help our ideas flourish. At the same time, we want to protect our ideas. We want to ask for honest advice without worrying that our ideas will get stolen, our innovations will be duplicated, or our insights will be plagiarized. And as feminists, we share values that urge us to go beyond worries about protecting our ideas and towards situations reflecting collaboration, trust, and mutual benefit.
To help startup teams and entrepreneurs who are nurturing tender, world-changing ideas, I’ve developed a process I call the Feminist Collaboration Agreement (CFA). A feminist collaboration agreement helps us set expectations for how we’ll contribute to each other’s’ work. It helps us organize interactions where we’ll be sharing emerging ideas, inviting constructive feedback, and offering each other suggestions. A feminist collaboration agreement invites us to rethink the power dynamics of these idea-sharing situations by focusing us on mutuality and trust. It assumes that every participant has something to offer and some way to benefit, while acknowledging that some kinds of participation can make us vulnerable. With an FCA, we take shared responsibility for caring for each other and making sure the collaboration experience helps everyone flourish.
Groups can build their own Feminist Collaboration Agreement in seven steps.
Your group can clarify how you’ll achieve each of these steps by answering a few questions. Your specific agreements will depend on who is participating, what kinds of ideas they want to share, what sorts of support that might be offered, and the kinds of vulnerability that participants’ ideas and relationships involve.
- Set protective boundaries.
Ask: How can we protect what will be shared and those who share it, especially if they might feel vulnerable?
- Adopt a generative orientation.
Ask: What attitude do we want to take towards this interaction and the relationships here?
- Share what needs to be shared.
Ask: What do we need to share about our idea so that people can help us? How can we invite their help?
- Bring forward your gifts.
Ask: What do we have that can help them? How can we use our similarities and differences to offer support?
- Replace transaction with mutually supportive interaction, the kind that builds relationships.
Ask: How can we offer help in a way that feels generous, valuable, and unique? How might we make this help-sharing reciprocal, to benefit all participants?
- Be open about our needs as helpers, so that our needs are also likely to be met.
Ask: What needs do we have that might be met through this collaboration conversation?
- Keep learning and adjusting, mutually.
Ask: How might we need to adjust our expectations as we go along? How will we know when or if we need to revisit our agreement?
A Feminist Collaboration Agreement (example)
We agree that we will:
- Set protective boundaries.
We agree that we will keep each other’s ideas and concerns private, discussing them only within this group.
- Bring a generative orientation.
We agree that, in what we offer to each other, we will treat each other and our ideas with care and tenderness. We will be critical and positive, with the overall goal of being helpful.
- Share what needs to be shared.
We agree that we will not only share enough about our ideas and challenges that others can see what we need, but also we’ll share in ways that invite others’ feedback.
- Bring forward our gifts.
We agree that we will draw from our foundational strengths and offer our unique insights, so that we can give generously and in a genuine way.
- Replace transaction with mutually supportive interaction, the kind that builds relationships.
We agree to offer constructive, candid, and caring feedback. We don’t have to share only positive things, but we will only share in positive ways. We agree to offer feedback as a gift, without specific strings. For example, we won’t expect to be compensated financially for offering support. Instead, we will demonstrate mutuality — we will receive support from others as we offer support to others.
- Be open about our needs as helpers, so that our needs are also likely to be met.
We agree to tell each other what we might need, and what we’d like to be offered, to help make it easier to share value throughout our relationships.
- Keep learning and adjusting, mutually.
We agree to continue to discuss our relationships within this program, so that we can adjust expectations as needed.
Each FCA will be unique to the group that creates it.
Your groups’ agreement will depend on who is participating, the kinds of ideas you’ll want to share, the kinds of support that might be offered, and the tenderness of the ideas and relationships involved.
Once you’ve discussed how you want to approach your collaboration, you can capture your CFA with simple statements of these seven principles, like the example offered above. Consider modifying this example to fit your circumstances, decorate it with evocative imagery, add your names, signatures, thumbprints, or avatars — whatever it takes to make this “yours”.
As you establish and begin to follow your Feminist Collaboration Agreements, your group should notice that you are:
- Shifting the power dynamics of asking for and offering business help
- Practicing a feminist process that’s indispensable for leaders and teams who want to challenge the status quo
- Helping to create a community of support around feminist ideas and the people who are moving these ideas forward
- Helping valuable resources get to folks who can put them to work
- Strengthening yourselves, your relationships, and your community
Please be aware: The FCA may feel normatively and morally binding, but it isn’t legally binding. If you are in a situation where the stakes around your idea are so high that you think you need legal protection to share the idea with others, you should consider using a conventional Non-Disclosure Agreement. Or, you can create a “conscious contract®” (see note below), a legally binding agreement that incorporates feminist principles.
Finally, a note about the role of culture.
Every culture has different norms and expectations around sharing ideas, exchanging help, and offering thanks. Some of the elements I mention here might seem completely obvious in your culture and might not even seem worthy of discussion. Other elements might seem offensive to ask for or even to discuss publicly.
One commitment in a multicultural environment is to walk into any situation expecting that cultural norms will be active and that cultural differences will present themselves.
Thus, this conversation should also surface cultural norms and even cultural differences. That means that we need to be gentle with and respectful of each other’s cultures as we participate in these collaboration conversations.
Please feel free to use this Feminist Collaboration Agreement with your groups. And, please share your insights and experiences with the FCA, by emailing me at cv@feministsatwork.com.
©cvharquail 2018
The Conscious Contracts® model, co-created by Alalá Linda and J. Kim Wright, integrates principles of restorative practices, conscious business, and many other approaches that are consonant with feminisms. https://www.cuttingedgelaw.com/conscious-contracts/
