This course is based on Nobel Laureate Ruth Ostrom’s classic delineation of the core principles that underlie the altruistic, cooperative behaviour and efficacy of prosocial groups. Prosocial groups work together for the benefit of other groups in the system without seeking to selfishly exploit the situation for personal gain. In this workshop, your team will learn and apply the core design principles and tools for cultivating prosocial behaviours and unleash the team productivity and performance outcomes. Enculturating prosocial approaches will unite interrelated teams with a cohesive sense of purpose who will be guided by established norms of trust and reciprocity and the universal set of principles that reward cooperative and productive behaviours and sanction poor behaviours.

At the systems level, this entails aligning the many centres of decision making under an overarching set of prosocial norms, policies and procedures. This polycentric vision leverages the forms of self-governance and organisation that naturally result from stakeholder interactions as they constitute themselves into mutually respectful and working relationships. Leaders will learn to guide the establishment of such an overarching morally bound normative and regulatory environment as the various players in their system order their interactions in response to shared super-ordinate goals. It will become apparent how such normative contexts tend to persist through time and prevail, even under conditions of seeming chaos.

Topics to be covered:

• Build and sustain a strong team identity and purpose
• Establish norms of mutual trust and reciprocity
• Monitor and quality assure team behaviour and outputs
• Fairly and quickly resolve conflict – deal effectively with problem staff
• Cultivate local autonomy and empower team members to greater achievement
• Improve inter-team effectiveness and performance
• Guide the establishment of prosocial normative and regulatory systems of polycentric governance

Learning outcomes:

• Individuals more able to positively integrate their strengths and personal values with their bosses, peers and subordinates
• Identify and reinforce team goals and values
• Teams better able to set benchmarks for performance indicators
• Establish self-monitoring plus quick, fair and effective problem resolution mechanisms
• Empower localised decision-making and autonomy
• Consider approaches for generalising prosocial principles across a polycentrically governed system

Outcomes:

Participating individuals and organisations will be more adequately equipped to response to the challenges of this century. For example, in the areas of food, water and energy security while taking into consideration gender equity and social inclusion. The issues being faced by the public and associated sectors are complex and seeming intractable. An effective response, I believe, will necessarily be multi-disciplinary for those who rise to the challenge. Hence the design of the program – an accessible, well informed, deliberative process that catalyses innovative responses from individuals within nested and interrelated team and community arrangements to the challenges they face within their sphere of influence.

Anticipated behavioural and business impacts of the course include:

Participants will learn to:

• Analyse what is motivating and directing individual and team behaviours
• Clarify processes directed toward achieving key value propositions
• Review prevailing norms regulating team and inter-team behaviours
• Identify strengths and opportunities for innovation and improvement in team and inter-team performance
• Plan initial actions for designing, testing and prototyping new ideas and behaviours
• Review what is required to reinforce systems level inter-group cooperation

Who should attend?

Leaders and team members at any level in your organisation striving to enhance team and organisational performance.

Selected participants should hold a mid or senior-level policy, practice, research or reform role, in either government, civil society or the private sector. Ideally they should have completed at least an Undergraduate or Masters level tertiary qualification, have at least five years’ work experience at mid to senior levels, and have a good understanding of the discipline they are representing.