Do you really understand what your fair trade partner thinks and why they think that way?
Is it important?
Should you care?
YES!! ABSOLUTELY…Imagine this…At last, your fair trade enterprise/project is starting to work? After years, months and weeks of what seems like 24/7 effort you’re nearly there. You have a great team. All the pieces are finally falling into place. It looks like you’re actually going to be able to make a ‘real’ contribution to fairer trading and a better world. You go to bed on Sunday night feeling satisfied, at peace with humanity.
Come Monday morning and you’re leisurely downloading your emails. Wait! What’s this? There in front of you is a message from your major supplier, your biggest investor, your campaign organiser, your most important customer, your most experienced advocate…or any number of other partners critical to your success.
The message reads, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ME, YOU DON’T CARE WHAT I WANT, I CAN’T WORK WITH YOU…IT’S OVER!!!!!” You stare in disbelieve, asking yourself again and again… “What went so wrong? How did this happen????”
Well, I would be prepared to bet that in 9 out of 10 cases those terrifying words are a direct result of one major error of judgement. You just weren’t into them enough. You were too into you. You spent too much time convincing your partners that you were right. You spend too much effort focused on your ideas, your thinking, what you wanted and how you wanted it. You were unable to move away from an exclusive focus on your own perspectives and spend the time to understand the perspectives of those you were in partnership with.
You just didn’t do ‘Other-Discovery’ well enough or often enough!
So yeah, spending time learning everything we can about ‘the other’ in our fair trade partnership IS important. You’re success depends on it!
Given the communication challenges fair trading partnerships often face (distance, language, culture, limited time), knowing everything, all the time, is a logistical impossibility. There are however, a number of crucial ‘other-discoveries’ we need to make and continually update!
Our top five partnership ‘Other-Discoveries’
- Partnership Purpose: Why are we in this partnership? What is it we want to achieve together?
- Partnership Expectations: What is it we individually and collectively expect from this partnership? How do we each expect this partnership to work? What will the outcomes be if the partnership is successful?
- Current Status: From where each of us sits in this partnership, what do we see happening now?
- Current Status Analysis: What aspects of the partnership do we think are working now? What aspects do we think are not working now? Why do we think that might be so?
- Options for Moving Forward: What options do we have to move forward to achieve our partnership purpose more completely or consistently? What do we need to do next?
(Important Note: Never assume you know! Remember our perspectives are in a state of constant change. Other-discovery and the development of shared understandings and shared agreements are continuous processes of exploration and confirmation.)
So if your not totally sure about what YOUR ‘others’ are thinking…don’t muck around.
Get into your ‘other-discovery’ today! Tomorrow might be just a day too late!
