Archive for What We Are Reading

Jul/30/10//Curtis Ogden//What We Are Reading

3 Books and a Blog . . .

. . . or three blogs and a book.  That’s what I asked my fellow weekly IISC bloggers to recommend.  What are they finding particular value in reading or re-reading for our work supporting collaboration for social change?  Here’s what I got (not the complete list from everyone, as there was some overlap and vacations in there):
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May/14/10//Curtis Ogden//What We Are Reading

Future Present

“A bright green future begins when each of us, today,              decides to live as if that future were already here.”

- Alex Steffen, World Changing

Many of us here at IISC were taken with Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, and you have no doubt heard it referenced in other posts or ensuing conversations on our blog.  At this point our couple of office copies have been through many hands, bookmarked, underlined, and are readily referenced in work with partners and clients.  One of the most profound parts of the book for me is where Block makes the point that we often think of the future as this far off thing, and subsequently make our meetings and community gatherings all about planning for that eventuality.  What we miss is the opportunity to manifest a piece of that future now.

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Mar/16/10//Gibrán Rivera//What We Are Reading

Standing in the Fire

Standing in the Fire

Our friend Larry Dressler just published a book titled “Standing in the Fire” it’s about “leading high-heat meetings with clarity, calm and courage.”  Curtis wrote an earlier post inspired by the book.  Larry interviewed a wide number of experienced facilitators and I was particularly appreciative of the way he high-lighted the words of our Executive Director, Marianne Hughes.

Referring to what I like to call “the inner condition of the intervener,” Larry says:

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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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