This may be the best 14 minutes of your day (and the best TED talk ever). Watch it! Go Green Bronx Machine! Si se puede!

Photo by cambodia4kids.org

A year ago I blogged about the critical role of convening in collaborative multi-stakeholder change work, particularly as it plays out through a funder.  Having been in Michigan last week working with a group of diverse foundations in a customized Facilitative Leadership session, I have additional thoughts to offer stemming from a very productive and provocative conversation about how to address and manage power dynamics when one attempts to initiate a partnership or collaborative effort and one is holding the purse strings or a significant portion thereof.  In a brainstorm exercise and subsequent conversation, participants prioritized the following considerations and “best practices” to ensure that there is appropriate and effective wielding of one’s power.

• Manage and be explicit about expectations regarding the desired outcomes and process of the convening
• Meet people where they are, both physically and in terms of their knowledge
• Make sure to co-create ground rules/working agreements for meetings
• Be mindful of language and reduce barriers by eliminating jargon and culturally-biased terminology
• Name the power dynamics – acknowledge that they exist
• Define “value” broadly in terms of what different stakeholders bring to the process
• Engage in “social leveling” by going beyond formal roles, being real, breaking bread together
• Be clear about who needs to be at the table and don’t default to titles and the usual suspects
• Allow for the expertise of people’s diverse experiences
• Explicitly define key words – “power,” “partnership,” “collaboration”
• Be present, physically and spiritually – exercise one’s right as a stakeholder

Certainly all of this will continue to be discussed during the upcoming convening hosted by the Council of Michigan Foundations on the current opportunity gap.  And curious to hear your thoughts of other ways to responsibly and effectively work with power in the fine art of convening.

This post comes courtesy of our friends at the National Bitter Melon Council (NBMC) – Jeremy Liu (also a board member here at IISC) and Hiroko Kikuchi.  NBMC is devoted to the cultivation of a vibrant, diverse community through the promotion and distribution of Bitter Melon. Its projects, events, and festivals celebrate the health, social, culinary, and creative possibilities of this underappreciated vegetable and of embracing bitterness as a key to personal and community change.

Everyone experiences bitterness. We all deal with it; often in ways that are counter to addressing the bitterness, by denying, rejecting, or repressing the emotions, and/or our loss and our attachment to loss that create our bitterness. The need to actively address our bitterness is profound.

Bitterness is nacreous, creeping, pervasive, consuming because, as strong an emotion as it is, we get used to it. It bleeds into our conscious and subconscious mind influencing our behaviors, our actions, our perceptions. Because we tend to “swallow it,” we tend to ignore it and to deny its existence.

Bitterness comes to define us. It is a nefarious emotion in that it surreptitiously becomes something that we feel is “who we are.” We see ourselves in our bitterness and our bitterness becomes us. Bitterness is alluring. It is a strong emotion that often serves as replacement for another emotion we might have once felt–love, anger, fear. Often it is a “stand in” for these other strong emotions that have the same “strength of feeling” as the others. But is not the same because, perhaps, the other emotions are no longer available to us (in the case of love), or because the post-traumatic stress no longer sustains fear, but replaces it with bitterness.

Bitterness is intensely personal, so unique to each of us. So much so that our bitterness sometimes feels like something that no one else in the world could possibly share, something that no one else could conceivably understand. We believe in publicly sharing “which and what makes us bitter,” so that we can come to an exchange in understanding of those beliefs, experiences, and values that we hold dear. These are the same beliefs, experiences and values, when we experience their loss and become attached to this experience of loss–we give birth to bitterness.

A feeling of bitterness accumulates over time exacerbated by a sense of hopelessness, a lack of time to forgive and forget, a lack of agency and influence over anything meaningful, changes that you feel no ownership over, and an attachment to something that you just cannot let go of. The feeling of bitterness that is “untouched” literally leads to: a stress that prevents you from being happy; to a disillusionment with the world making the whole world seem like it is against you; to feel very lonely. Our bitterness prevents our active imagination from engaging, and this feeling of bitterness pulls you back from where you are trying to go.

The Betterness of facing our Bitterness is the belief and the practice of allowing oneself to naturally and gradually reveal and share vulnerability; we all have the ability to do so, but are often incapacitated by our bitterness and this is often the obstacle for creating a healthy individual-being and community. We’ve experienced that working with one’s bitterness leads us to believe in possibilities that empower us to listen to, connect with, and care for others differently, positively.

So, how can we become capable, adept and fearless in developing an appreciation for and a way of dealing with bitterness? Because bitterness is inevitable, we will not be able to work on creating community and changing the world and our societies around us, unless we do so. So the Betterness of facing our Bitterness is about coming to terms with our own bitterness; if we can, possibilities for our communities open up.

The following post is reblogged from Seth’s Blog. We hope that it will enrich your life and much as it has ours.

“We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between.”

–David Chang

He’s serious. Lots of people say this, but few are willing to put themselves at risk, which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of in between.

I asked my colleagues for suggestions about grassroots leaders and organizations doing great things in the world. One suggestion was Boston-based Reflect & Strengthen, which turned ten in 2011.

They describe themselves as “a grassroots collective of young working class women from the urban neighborhoods of Boston who take a holistic approach to organizing in order to create personal and social transformation. Our programming focuses are political education, healing from trauma, creative expression, community building, and organizing to end racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.”

What I find beautiful is that they got started because they needed a community in which to heal and think critically about their lives and communities and they didn’t see many resources that spoke to them. “[T]he founding members were determined to maintain a space where we could be our whole selves and process the violence, lack of access, incarceration, self-hatred, and trauma we experienced because of our race, class, gender, orientation, and citizenship status.” Ten years later, they’re still maintaining that space. All I want to say is “you go!”

Check out their vision, values, herstory, events and programs at Reflect & Strengthen.

It has been a heartening return to my home state these past couple of days while delivering a two-day Facilitative Leadership workshop with members of Michigan’s philanthropic community.  Yesterday, we spent some time in the afternoon talking about power and how it plays out in different kinds of change initiatives.  The point was made a number of times that those who are most impacted by the issues we are trying to solve must be in on the solutions, including the design and carrying out of the processes of problem-analysis, opportunity identification, and vision creation.  To drive this point home, I relayed a story Melinda and I heard from a community organizer with whom we are working who conducted some vision sessions in her community around what it would look like if there were equitable educational opportunities for all children in the state.  The audience with whom she conducted this session included various kinds of professionals in the field and parents.  What she reported back was that overwhelmingly parents’ visions actually included the children, while the professionals tended to focus mostly on infrastructure.  Where we sit impacts what we see.

Having spent some time these last couple of days talking about the current state of affairs in places like Detroit, Grand Rapids, and my hometown of Flint, and the need to lift up examples of community action/innovation and build on these, I thought it was poetic synergy to come across the piece below by Peter Putnam, that was written in response to the Grace Lee Boggs “On Being” interview Cynthia blogged about a couple of days ago.

Detroit Jesus

Time, Inc., buys a house in Detroit
and tries to track him for a year.
But he’s invisible to those looking for a
blue-eyed dude in a white robe
or for a city gone completely to hell.

He is the cinnamon of my son’s skin
with a green thumb and a Tigers cap
and my daughter’s dove-grey eyes.
He prays into Blair’s guitar,
hangs out on Field St.,
bakes bread at Avalon
and plants tomatoes on the East side.
He rides his old-school bike down the heart
of Grand River,
paints a mural in the Corridor,
shoots hoop in the Valley
with priests and pimps and lean young men
trying to jump their way to heaven.

At night,
while the Border Patrol counts cars,
he walks across the water
to Windsor,
grabs a bite to eat,
walks back.

Like Grace,
born in Providence,
he lives so simply,
he could live anywhere:
Dublin, Palestine, Malibu.
But Detroit is his home.
It was here one Sunday
a boy invited him down
off the cross
and into his house
for a glass of Faygo red pop.

That was centuries ago, it seems,
and how far he’s come,
reinventing himself more times than Malcolm.
He’s been to prison,
been to college,
has a tattoo of Mary Magdalene on one arm,
Judas on the other,
and knows every Stevie Wonder song by heart.

He’s Jimmy, he’s Invincible, he’s Eminem.
He’s the girls at Catherine Ferguson
and their babies,
and he’s the deepest part of Kwame
still innocent as a baby.

The incinerator is hell,
but he walks right in,
burns it up with love,
comes out the other side,
walks on.

He can say Amen in twelve religions,
believes school is any place
where head and heart and hands
meet,
and wears a gold timepiece around his neck
with no numbers, just a question:
What time is it on the clock of the world?

And every second of every day
he answers that question
with a smile wide as the Ambassador
and a heart as big as Belle Isle,
hugging this city in his arms
and whispering to each soul
words no one else dares to say:
You are Jesus,
this is your Beloved Community,
and the time
on the clock of the world
is Now.

Photo from xinem

Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them.

With respect to stories, Gibran and I mentioned a few in passing about which we have blogged in the past, and so I wanted to turn readers to these posts for more information, if you have not seen them:

• Barr Fellows Network
• LIO Network
• RI Food Policy Council (community food security)
• Right from the Start (early childhood development)

I also want to echo Gibran’s caution that we not mistake the raft for the shore by exhalting collective leadership for its own sake.  As we mentioned in our opening comments during the webinar, there seem to be a variety of drivers (complexity, distributed networks, and the systemic nature of social and environmental  issues) encouraging us to look at more collective models of leading, at tapping what Kevin Kelley calls “hive mind,” engaging diverse systemic perspectives to make better sense of the world around us, shaping compelling images of our shared future, and ensuring that there are enough hands to do the work.   And there are plenty of instances where issues are not so complex and more of an individualistic or perhaps “expert” approach can suit the situation (for more on this, check out David Snowden’s very helpful Cynefin Framework).

That said, we can certainly default (and inappropriately or ineffectively so) to more individualistic ways of seeing, being, and doing.  This begs the question, What gets in the way of adopting a more collective lens or approach? And How to we get beyond or remove these barriers? So far as Gibran and I can assess it (no doubt incompletely), we have this to offer:

• Habits and narratives of separation. Mainstream American culture continues to validate the lone ranger, the heroic leader, and more often than not the (white) man with a plan.  As a counter point, embracing more of a “group selection,” diversity-honoring, and network-centric balancing narrative to history could be helpful.  A couple of great resources in this direction are The Global Brain by Howard Bloom and The Hidden Connections by Fritjof Capra.
• Lack of a big picture mindset. Our mainstream education system, at least in the United States, is sorely lacking in basic grounding in such critical perspectives as systems thinking and eco-literacy.  I am constantly trying to make up for this deficiency on a personal front by absorbing resources from the likes of The Center for Ecoliteracy, Kirwan Institute, and Pegasus Communications.  Each of these has helpful exercises that can be used with groups to help shift perspective.  
• Our egos want validation . . . and sometimes at the expense of collective well-being.  Mindfulness practice is a wonderful resource for loosening our grip a bit on knee-jerk and self-centered tendencies.  Various wisdom traditions have long worked to temper our sometimes voracious egos through contemplative practice, and more contemporary resources that help in this direction include the work of Daniel Siegel on what we calls “mindsight.”  From a facilitator’s or convenor’s practice, repeating the message that we are all in this together and that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole can help.  A few other tips can be found here.
• Lack of desire. It can be hard to turn away from what we think others want of us to what drives us deep down.  As Gibran mentioned in the webinar, authentic desire can be a powerful driver of collective leadership when it is expressed and joined. We’ve engaged in coaching with others where we have simply asked the question of one another, “What do you want?” over and over again and seen the layers of “I don’t knows” and “shoulds” melt away.  And the wonderful practitioners at the Center for Whole Communities have demonstrated the power of story-based techniques to reveal what we most value in our lives, even when we cannot explicitly name it.
• Negativity. Readers of our blog know that I have found the work of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and her proteges around “positivity” very compelling and resonant. Their research shows how we can limit our ability to see systemically, accept and work with others, and discover new possibilities, when our overarching approach is fraught with negative emotion.  Her research partner Marcial Losada has even statistically found a tipping point for group innovation and flourishing in a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative experiences.  Negativity certainly does serve us, but in moderation.  More on this can be found here. 
  
• Structures that impede or limit collective approaches. By structure we mean institutional arrangements and social processes that privilege certain ways of being and doing.  Examples of limiting forms include silos within organizations, hub-and-spoke communication forms, “talking heads”/only presenting/talking at, etc.  Antidotes to these include bringing down walls (literally and figuratively), knitting what is otherwise the periphery so that it can communicate with itself and the rest of the network, and creating space for open self-directed dialogue, all of which speaks to what can sometimes emerge as a barrier in . . .
• Lack of skill. There are some key competencies that can certainly help to create and support new structures, including process design and facilitation, hosting, convening, curating (content) and network weaving.  Resources for developing and honing these can be found at the Interaction Institute for Social Change (see our training schedule, including our upcoming Facilitative Leadership, Pathway to Change, and Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work sessions), Berkana Institute (The Art of Hosting), Center for Whole Communities (see Whole Thinking and Whole Measures), and Netcentric Campaigns, to name a few.

Certainly there is much more to discover as we continue to explore new frontiers and possibilities of collective intelligence and action.  Thanks again to the Leadership Learning Community for this opportunity and we look forward to continued conversation!

Last Tuesday, Curtis Ogden and I had the privilege of hosting an LLC webinar on collective leadership.  Much of what we did was point to observable patterns in ways of working together and how these tend to open up possibilities for shared leadership.  The metaphor of tilling the soil is most appropriate precisely because we have run up against the limitations of industrial implementation.  The appropriate response to increasing complexity is one that can get beyond linear causality and into a mindset of ecosystems.

However, it is important to note that collective leadership is not an end in itself.  Those of us who seek social transformation are actively seeking better ways of responding to the seemingly intractable challenges of our day.  Physicist Amit Goswami charmingly speaks about the interplay between doing and being, as do-be-do-be-do.  An evolution towards collective leadership demands our capacity to simultaneously tend to both – how we are and what we do.

The bold proposition is that “together we can do what we could not do alone.”  We are talking about a doing that does not happen by itself – it is a doing that demands leadership, a doing that has a clear direction and set of clearly perceptible outcomes – a world that is qualitatively different.  When we talk about emergence we can be tempted to place it in some sort of metaphysical space where all that matters is bearing witness, but we are talking about an emergence that demands our full engagement.

This is why we emphasize tools like stakeholder analysis and the high threshold invitation.  We emphasize the need to engage individuals who come in with a sense of purpose.  And we emphasize roles like that of convening, designing and facilitating.   We are talking about a very real sort of tilling, it is work that happens within a defined environment but it is also work that affects and is affected by ecosystems that necessarily extend beyond that environment.

We are talking about a way of paying attention, a way of being together and a way of doing – a way of moving – towards a future that we can not quite see, but may of us can sense.

“In the 1960s all hell broke loose… The media called it a “riot.” The black community called it a revolution… Rebellion was an explosion of anger. Revolution was a tremendous leap forward, a tremendous evolution of consciousness and responsibility; a whole new way of thinking…We have the opportunity to change our thinking and our philosophy by understanding what is really happening; what time it is on the clock of the world.”

Listen to how Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher and activist and members of the Detroit community are “Becoming Detriot” – redefining what it means to face up to the challenges confronting us as individuals, cities, states, a nation and even as a world community and figure out “how to use the negative to advance the positive.”