In an increasingly adversarial and mean-spirited era, optimism about the potential for collaboration can be hard to find. However, we should take collaboration seriously, because collaboration can foster profound improvements in community health and well-being. Collaboration only works when designed in a way that generates high levels of emotional commitment and sustains that commitment long enough for it to be contiguous. Drawing on twenty years of field research across public and education contexts, Hicks will discuss three common ingredients of successful collaboration: the presence of an open and credible process motivating social cooperation, a feeling of authentic power that generates and sustains stakeholder commitment, and the use of platforms that engender emotional contagion.

As well as teaching, Hicks is the director of debate and president of the faculty senate at the University of Denver. His teaching and research focus on community collaboration, political argumentation, and debate. Hicks’ scholarship in these areas has been widely published in academic journals and books. He works closely with several state and federal agencies as well as nonprofit groups on the design and evaluation of collaborative decision-making processes.