The Collaboration Response: Eight Axioms that Elicit Collaborative Action for A Whole Organization A Whole Community A Whole Society

There are extraordinary moments when people set aside their self-interest to take action that will benefit something larger than themselves: their extended family, company, community, or country. These moments are enormously important; they result from a deep and natural response to challenging conditions, a response that leads to solutions better than compromise.From Silicon Valley to villages in rural Asia, author Gil Steil has employed this natural collaboration response in leading summit meetings of all shapes and sizes for three decades. Within this book Gil presents eight simple axioms, which, when employed by leaders, enable the emergence of agreement and effective action in even the most horrendous of times.Stories that are true and surprisingly readable educate the reader about the social psychology of collaboration, and then the author shares genuinely practical tools for leading your own strategic planning meetings that elicit the collaboration response.

Mathematician, Software Engineer, Senior Executive, and then... Social Psychologist (!?) Gil Steil loved mathematics, computer software development, and leading engineering teams, but higher management-not so much. In taking a leap into higher management Gil left environments where collaboration was the norm and joined an environment characterized more by organizational warfare. There were strategy wars, budget wars, and space wars (office space, not outer space). Fascinated by this difference, Gil became a serious student of organization dynamics and psychology. Out of this emerged an understanding that the life of a senior executive can be a life of living in the human fight-flight response, while working as part of a close-knit team involves the joy of something different - the human collaboration response. Gil lives in Ryegate, Vermont with his artist wife Cynthia. His business, Gil Steil Associates, specializes in whole-systems strategic planning and consulting - for organizations and communities where effective results require system-wide collaboration. Although headquartered in rural northern Vermont Gil Steil Associates has served clients in the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Malawi, the United States, and Canada. Gil holds degrees from Case Institute of Technology (mathematics) and American University (organization development). He taught for a decade in the MBA program of Rivier University, and was named Honorary Professor by the Nanjing Tech University in Nanjing, China.