Sophie Fasshauer

Communicate clearly to collaborate You can't do everything on your own. But that's neither desirable nor effective. Collaboration is fun. It can be such a wonderful feeling to believe in something together, to work towards something and to support each other. This applies not only to your own team, but also to collaborations between organisations. However, I learned quite quickly that you should communicate clearly. Let me share an example: I was planning a webinar with a well-known organisation. I was so excited that they agreed to collaborate with us, a relatively small, new and "emerging" organisation. The person in charge and I quickly agreed on the content. However, we both remained vague about the actual organisational details (time, date, platform, etc.). Discussing these details took an unnecessary amount of time and could easily have been resolved through clear communication. However, the ‘confusion’ created a certain amount of unease, which has since been resolved. Nevertheless, I learned from this situation that it is important to talk openly about all (!) the details and communicate clearly with each other. At the beginning of this year, we planned a similar collaboration with another organisation: preliminary discussions by mail, due diligence before the actual call, an excellent preliminary meeting within six minutes and a direct follow-up on the same day. What I want to make clear with the following example: It is normal to be a little awkward when you first try to collaborate. The important thing is to learn from it. For me, it was particularly important to communicate openly. For another person, it might be something else. But that is precisely why I want to share this experience openly and hopefully, it will help someone within our INSPIRED community.

’𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒐?‘ 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒐𝒇 ‘𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒗𝒔. 𝒀𝒐𝒖’ Dear INSPIRED community, last year, I learned something very important. It started with my growing desire to develop a new, more sustainable recycling method for electronic waste. However, starting something new, starting something planet-positive can be intimidating. It can even give the impression that you are alone on a journey that is way too long. To start something ‘new’, you have to believe in ‘this new thing’ before it even exists and have a vision of ‘this new thing’ before anyone else is willing to understand what you mean by it. However, that does not mean you have to be alone on this journey. For me, it was so helpful to be part of a community of innovators & entrepreneurs who also had a planet-positive project and faced very similar problems to mine. It was of great help to openly share challenges, exchange ideas and co-create something together. I can only encourage everyone to ask more often who you can work with, instead of trying too much and too hard to do everything on your own. At the end, I hope that this learning is helpful for someone else in this community. Please remember: Who you can work with may be more important than one initially assumes.