Empower Cociety

Abstract

In the last decade, European citizens had to overcome multiple severe disruptive events like Covid-19, extreme weather and war at the EU-boarder. With ongoing climate change and political instability, more crises are expected to arise. To deal with these crises an increased resilience of individuals, organisations and society is needed. One organisation eager to contribute to building resilience in Hamburg (Germany) is Cociety. The name is a contraction of a collaborative society.

To create resilience, multi-stakeholder knowledge and an interdisciplinary approach is needed, to be able to deal with the high interdependencies of the system within society. Cociety has the potential to collect and generate this diverse knowledge, as it is an umbrella organisation of over eight non-profit foundations, founded by Dr. Otto, that contribute to diverse aspects of social and environmental sustainability in Hamburg.

However, Cociety is in the start-up phase of an organisation. It still needs to develop a clear strategy to unlock the potential it has. This project clearly defines the potential of and strategy for Cociety, using systemic design and social innovation as theoretical background. Desk and field research, including interviews and a co-creative workshop, formed the basis for a gigamap, showing the system of Cociety and its perspectives. The rest of the project focuses on the internal perspective of Cociety, meaning the collaboration between the foundations and their employees. A Social network analysis (SNA) shows the interconnections and collaboration levels in the current network. From the insights generated in the SNA, a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis discovers the leveragepoints to design for the improvement of Cociety’s internal network.

The final design of this project is a strategy. An overall vision and a vision for the internal network of Cociety are formulated. A roadmap outlines the key actions need to achieve the vision, supported by three interventions to make the first steps, including an organigram to visualise and access the knowledge available in the network, a meeting format to share the knowledge with the network and an onboarding guide to keep the network active and alive.