Archive for What We Are Reading

Feb/08/10//Marianne Hughes//What We Are Reading

Breaking Ground

My colleagues and I went to see Daniel Pink when he came to speak in Cambridge. We had all read his book “A Whole New Mind- Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future,” and found that it gave us a framework and vocabulary to describe what we were finding in our work, which is that we are not only straddling era’s, we are straddling between the sides of our brains. We are discovering that in the work of social change most of the ideas, the data and the numbers are all available to solve many of our most intractable problems. What’s missing in our approach as outlined by Pink in “A Whole New Mind” resides in the right side of our brain: inventiveness; empathy; meaning and our capacity to design our way to wholeness.

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Jan/12/10//Gibrán Rivera//What We Are Reading

The Purpose Bubble

Thanks to the Harvard Bookstore, I had the pleasure of joining some of my IISC colleagues at a Daniel Pink talk last week at the Brattle.  In Drive, his latest book, Pink argues that aside from the commonly understood motivators of need and desire for reward, we are specially motivated by our desire for autonomy, purpose and mastery.  In his talk, Pink pointed out that the baby boomers are now reaching a stage in life that is defined by purpose, the desire to do something meaningful, to contribute to something grater than their selves.

I suspect that many boomers reading this blog have devoted much of their lives to the work of social change and so they might not be dealing with the same angst.  Nevertheless it is worth noting that since boomers comprise the largest population bubble, they are the ones that have defined the last few decades.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Jan/06/10//Linda Guinee//Featured, What We Are Reading

Thinking About Design

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 the rest of this entry »

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Nov/25/09//Linda Guinee//What We Are Reading

Stay! Stay! Stay!

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 the rest of this entry »

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Nov/19/09//Curtis Ogden//What We Are Reading

Sacred Stories

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

-William Stafford, from “A Ritual to Read to One Another”

I, for one, could not be happier that we have as our President a man with such apparent capacity of careful thought, measured analysis, and poetic expression.  The other day I reread a passage from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and was bowled over by its insight and beauty.  The passage comes at a point when Obama is reflecting upon his work as a community organizer in Chicago, which became all consuming as he often spent his social time with community leaders and residents, immersing himself in their lives.  He writes:

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