What could you come up with in just 2 days working in a group of people from all around the world that you have never met before?

This week we came across a brilliant example of the phenomenal work that can be achieved in a very short space of time through openness, trust and co-responsible collaboratories.

The City Resilience Challenge was a 2-day workshop based initiative in which participants came together to address the real life challenges faced by cities, collaborating to establish a vision for city resilience alongside a strategy for achieving it. The exercise was lead by Professor Peter Head of The Ecological Sequestration Trust and focussed on the challenges posed to cities around the globe by the stresses of mass urbanisation, climate change, and other unexpected shocks to the system. Cities contributing data to inform the design of the workshops include: Manchester, Melbourne, Glasgow, New York, Barcelona, Chennai, Bristol and Rio de Janeiro.

This report was produced over just 2 days by a team of 60 people from 12 different countries - who had never met before - who worked collaboratively to formulate solutions and recommendations.

View the document here

The success of this collaboratory comes as a timely reminder that great steps forward as people, organisations and as a planet can and do happen when we step out of our silos and into new innovative partnerships. What a fantastic job this team have done!