We use to say that leading multi-stakeholder collaboration is an ”art”. But how can we describe the competencies and skills that are required in multi-stakeholder collaboration? What are the differences compared to more "traditional" leadership skills that we know from leading within an organization?

We discuss topics like:
- The importance of embracing differences in knowledge, logic, perspectives etc. when meeting between different ”silos”
- How we need a specific understanding of group dynamics that is different from ”traditional” group theories
- How to navigate when working in the ”transitional space” that can be seen as an ”unknown territory” for everyone
- Why we need to talk a lot – for example about how we talk, how we do things, how we learn, how we collaborate, how we interpret what we are doing...
- Sensemaking and mobilization as crucial aspects of success
- The frustration that will occur in order to integrate our differences and create something new
- Trust as a precondition for getting anywhere, and as an ongoing process
- The role of the collaboration leader: Being a facilitator and a system architect
- A crucial reminder when considering the difficulty of multi-stakeholder collaboration: The great importance of being a collaboration leader for solving our worlds complex problems!

3. What are the competencies required in multi-stakeholder collaboration?

Art of Collaborating is a podcast produced by Länka Consulting. Länka was established in 2015 by Anna Zingmark and Karoline Bottheim with the mission to explore and develop the tricky "art" of multi-stakeholder-collaboration. When we meet between organizations, sectors and knowledge areas in order to find solutions for handling complex societal challenges, we need support from practical methods and ways of understanding how to collaborate more efficiently. After years of discussing this topic with experts, researchers and practitioners all over the world, we are quite sure that multi-stakeholder collaboration can be called an advanced "art", a specific way of working, it may even be seen as a specific "community of practice". With our podcast, we want to make this - really necessary - specific way of working accessible to more people who find themselves in complex processes with many stakeholders involved.