I’ve been really enjoying reading the book Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age by Juana Bordas. It’s a great read, in which she describes leadership based on African American, Latino and Native American leadership models in the US, while making a global connection. Bordas calls us to broaden beyond a single view of leadership and work toward
“an inclusive and adaptable style that cultivates the ability to bring out the best in our diverse workforce and to fashion a sense of community with people from many parts of the globe. This inclusive form of leadership is in sync with many cultures, enabling a wide spectrum of people to engage, contribute and tap their potential.”
I’ve recently seen a few videos that have made me think about whether collaboration is a “natural” thing. (I tend to run from this kind of thinking – usually finding discussions of what is “natural” or what is “human nature” ways of making room for all kinds of human constructs.) My brother recently shared this video of Bottlenose Dolphins working together in what’s called “mud ring” feeding:
I recently read an interesting New York Times article by Nancy Ancowitz that a friend sent me about the ways that extroverts are privileged in meeting processes and work environments. It’s something we talk about at IISC as well. What are the ways that we can design and facilitate meetings so as not to privilege extroverts over introverts – or people with different learning styles – or people with different abilities or aptitudes?
There’s a lot known. And there’s a lot still to discover. Much of generic group process (if not attending to these kinds of things) favors those who freely express ideas in groups. Day-long or multi-day meetings can be great for extroverts, who get energy being in groups – and challenging for introverts, who need alone time to recharge and process internally. Introverts will participate more fully if given time to consider material ahead of time. Extroverts tend to be exactly the opposite – or can quickly scan something in the room and go. Brainstorming is a natural thing for extroverts (who are comfortable putting forth ideas without necessarily knowing how fully “cooked” they are), but not so much for introverts (who tend to want to spend internal time thinking through an idea before putting it out).
I’ve spent a fair amount of time these last few days exploring the book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds. It’s an amazing book – and he spends quite a bit of time teaching about how to avoid “Death by PowerPoint.” I’m totally intrigued – and want to rethink (and perhaps more importantly, re-imagine and mess around with) some of the many ways we get information across in presentations – and in the written recordings we make of meetings.
Reynolds rightfully shows that what we do in PowerPoint is often driven by the software itself, rather than by thinking through the most important aspect of the idea we’re trying to get across. We follow the template and create slide after slide of bulleted lists of text that say what we’re already saying. But here’s the question: what is the most important thing we are trying to say? And how can we work with images to bring our words to life? Read More
Greetings and best wishes for the rest of this holiday season.? In the Northern Hemisphere, we’re now turning toward longer days and celebrating the return of the sun. Boston, like most of the eastern US, was blanketed in snow this past weekend.? And IISC will be on break the rest of this week and all of next week, holding to its commitment of balance, well-being and sustainability.
I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on all the things I’ve learned over the past year, the ways IISC has grown and shifted, and feel honored to be part of such a dynamic organization and group of people.
In the wee hours of the morning, I came across an amazing new project Seth Godin‘s been working on.? He pulled together 60 thinkers from around the world to answer the question “What Matters Now?” and created an e-book with their responses. Each person took a single word (sleep, re-capitalism, enrichment, nobody, meaning, ease, etc.) and used it to frame a short piece describing what they’re thinking about and working on for the coming year. And he’s hoping it will spread far and wide.
I thought I’d pass along a few short excerpts from this amazing piece.
One thing Elizabeth Gilbert describes in writing on the topic of ease:
“My radical suggestion? Cease participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.”
In the wee hours of the morning, I came across an amazing new project Seth Godin‘s been working on.? He pulled together 60 thinkers from around the world to answer the question “What Matters Now?” and created an e-book with their responses. Each person took a single word (sleep, re-capitalism, enrichment, nobody, meaning, ease, etc.) and used it to frame a short piece describing what they’re thinking about and working on for the coming year. And he’s hoping it will spread far and wide.
I thought I’d pass along a few short excerpts from this amazing piece.
One thing Elizabeth Gilbert describes in writing on the topic of ease:
“My radical suggestion? Cease participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.”
Fred Hampton, a charismatic African American activist and leader in the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, was killed in his sleep 40 years ago December 4th by the combined forces of the FBI, Chicago Police Department and Cook County, IL State’s Attorney’s Office. There have been some great articles written about him over the past week in Racewire and the Huffington Post.
In the days before he was killed, my dad met with Hampton and others from the Party to talk about the Free Breakfast Program the Black Panther Party had started to feed children going to school with empty stomachs. My dad was hoping to connect the food company he worked for with the Chicago program to get donations of breakfast cereal for the program. I was with my dad on the anniversary of Hampton’s death this year – and asked him to retell the story, hoping Alzheimer’s hadn’t taken this memory, though I’ve heard the story many times. Read More
I’m reflecting on World AIDS Day.? The World Health Organization established World AIDS Day in 1988, and it’s been observed on December 1st ever since to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic. In the early years, some museums would have “A Day Without Art,” shrouding artwork to demonstrate the impact of the epidemic.? And there were many other ways of observing – e.g., candlelight marches, displays of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, local awareness-raising or fundraising events around the globe. Read More
I’ve recently been reading Bernie Mayer‘s new and game-changing book, Staying With Conflict.? A frequent leader in the world of conflict engagement, Bernie Mayer has spent many years working on large scale collaborative change and conflict processes, many of them in the environmental field. He is also a strong proponent of the need to be clear and transparent about the assumptions behind practice. With John Paul Lederach and Leah Wing, Bernie Mayer is one of my favorite practitioners and thought leaders in the “conflict resolution” world.? A couple of years ago, Bernie came out with a book called Beyond Neutrality that loudly and strongly asked for those in the conflict engagement field and those facilitating collaborative processes to cease and desist with the concept that we practice as “third party neutrals.”? In this new book, Bernie is pushing forward, changing the basic understanding of “conflict resolution.” He calls us to understand that, in fact, much of what is needed is not resolution, is not decision-making, agreement-building to overcome deep seated conflicts, but rather approaches that help people build the adaptive capacity and platforms from which to act – to stay with the tensions and conflicts that are an essential part of the human experience, to engage in a way that brings human dignity and that allows us to really stay in the difference. Read More
I’ve been hearing a lot about collaborative art projects, including some that are happening right now in Boston (the location of one of IISC’s two offices). So wanted to write about one amazing project happening right now. Thanks to my neighbor Judith Leemann, I heard about a collaborative art project Mel Chin and Operation Paydirt have been creating to make safe lead-contaminated soil in the US.
Upon hearing that 86,000 properties in New Orleans are estimated to have unsafe lead contamination – and at least 30% of inner city children are affected with lead poisoning, Mel Chin started working. He learned that it would take $300 million to remediate the soil in New Orleans. Thinking he couldn’t raise that kind of money, he decided to make $300 million through a collaborative art project called Fundred, take it to the US Congress and ask for funding to remediate the soil. And so he has created Fundred, through which Operation Paydirt created blank templates for Fundred dollar bills. People are designing their own Fundred Dollar Bills, mailing them to Collection Centers to be counted and securely held – and they are then being taken by a special armored car to Congress, who is being asked to do an even exchange for funding to remediate the soil in New Orleans.
In this video, Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone looks at the structural nature of racism in the US and speaks about what it will take to overcome the legacy of unequal opportunity. Instead of putting people into the prison system, he advocates for rebuilding community, getting people reengaged by bringing communities together to solve their own problems.
