Archive for March, 2010

Mar/31/10//Linda Guinee//Networks

Networks for Social Change

Today, IISC and friends will be spending the day digging into how to advance the use of networks for social change.  We’ll post about it afterward – but if you want to check out the conversation as we go, follow #NTWK on twitter. See you there!

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Mar/30/10//Gibrán Rivera//Your Experiences

Leverage Week

gibraneinsteinWhy will I be selected to be a part of Seth Godin’s nano-MBA? Because it was made for me! Because the very essence of my job is to produce interactions that organizations care deeply about and because this is how change happens – there is a reason we are called the Interaction Institute for Social Change.

I’m doing this because my job is to help organizational leaders understand how to transcend organizational constraints. Because we are experimenting with ways to liberate the passion and the energy that are over-abundant in the social sector. Because the sector’s infrastructure has calcified and has become a constraint – and we are here to unlock it, and to set that energy free. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mar/25/10//Curtis Ogden//Collaboration

Getting Over Our Selves

“How do we help people move toward authentic inquiry when their default is aggressive inquisition?”  This question was offered up in a tweet by Larry Dressler a week ago and presaged my planned post today.  My departure was going to be a return to the work of Marcial Losada mentioned in a previous post, which shows that optimal group performance is attributed in part to members striking a balance between asking questions and promoting their own points of view.  Low performing groups tend to get caught up in self-absorbed advocacy.  “Aggressive inquisition” can simply be a form of advocacy, intended to attack and tear down other ideas.  This is not the spirit Losada is talking about.  And yet, it can be challenging for some to avoid simply campaigning for their own proposals.

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Mar/24/10//Linda Guinee//Liberation

Writing a Theory of Liberation

At the 2008 White Privilege Conference, I went to a workshop on Critical Liberation Theory, led by Barbara Love, Keri DeJong, Christopher Hughbanks, Joanna Kent Katz and Teeomm Williams.? I was re-reading the piece they gave out at that workshop, talking about the ways that we can each take daily actions toward liberation.? This, they suggested, requires first clearly articulating our own theory of liberation, through which we can then build a praxis of liberation – daily work that brings us in the direction of liberation itself.? They talked of the need to know fully where you’re coming from (understanding oppression), but to look forward toward liberation.  Otherwise, they described it as if one were leaving on a car trip from Massachusetts to drive to California while looking out the back window instead of looking at the road ahead.

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Mar/23/10//Gibrán Rivera//Featured, Learning Edge

World Café for the US Senate

If you have been paying any attention to the national political scene, you know that in these days of no compromise everything seems to balance on the mathematics of the US Senate.  Given the latest equation, it was no small deal to learn that Senator Evan Bayh will not be running for re-election.  About a month ago he wrote a New York Times opinion piece that has been on my mind since then – Why I’m Leaving the Senate.

The piece is worth reading in full, but here is the part that inspired this post:

Any improvement must begin by changing the personal chemistry among senators. More interaction in a non-adversarial atmosphere would help…  It shouldn’t take a constitutional crisis or an attack on the nation to create honest dialogue in the Senate. Let’s start with a simple proposal: why not have a monthly lunch of all 100 senators?

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