City of Lund Urban Lab Workshop 2
About the event
In August 2019, Urban Lab Lund organised their second workshop which was facilitated by Natalia Lombardo of The Hum organisation. The session engaged a range of local partners including; Stenkrossen, Science Village Scandinavia, Mejeriet working together with Future by Lund/Lunds Kommun to discuss a core theme of ‘Decision-making & Multi-stakeholder Governance’.
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The Lab’s aim is to observe policies and how organisations can share, collaborate and learn together to make a better impact. Set in this context, Natalia worked with 25 participants during the workshop and demonstrated some different ways to make decisions, including many people or stakeholders.
What do you do when you can’t decide on your own? How can we be strong together? How can you solve big challenges with many stakeholders?
These were some of the questions that the organisations in the Urban Lab Lund are dealing with. In the Lab, Stenkrossen, Science Village Scandinavia and Mejeriet are working together with Future by Lund/Lunds Kommun to find new ways of collaborating, using the work with young people as an example.
Natalia explains the importance of collaboration:
‘When you bring more voices together, you are actually making better decisions, When you get to hear the different perspectives of multiple people and multiple stakeholders you can be more creative and more innovative.’
‘Today I was talking a bit about the different modes of decision making that you can have in a collaborative endeavour. I mentioned some of the different methods that you can use to make decisions that are just not a traditional Mandate in a hierarchical structure or the very well-known Consensus decision making when you try to make decisions all together on everything. There are some other spaces in between and there are some other methodologies that can be a little bit faster, also including the voices of many perspectives’.
‘The participants were shown how to use Consent, when nobody has a strong objection to the proposal or Advice, when you can make a decision after listening to experts or people that are affected by the decision’.
‘The participants were also shown that there are different levels of engagement – and knowing that makes it easier to be engaged. Normal is that 1% are activators or creators, 9 % are collaborators or curators and 90% are supporters or consumers’.
‘We did an exercise where people were standing in different areas of engagement in different networks. This gave the possibility of everyone to see the system from the top, being able to see that there are different people in other places, that there are different multiple stakeholders and that people have different needs. When everyone can hear the needs of the others, they can create something that works for everyone.’
Follow-up activities
Between August and September, Future by Lund held several meetings and workshops alongside representatives of Lund University and the faculties of entrepreneurship and cultural communication. The Urban Lab organised several study visits from 120 students to Mejeriet and Stenkrossen and 25 members of the student incubator Venture Lab visiting Stenkrossen.