The Social Change Agent of American Politics
I read this column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and thought it appropriate to share. Enjoy!
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Accentuate the Positivity
Been looking for the answer to unlocking your group’s/team’s potential? Look no further than a complex chaotic attractor! According to researcher Marcial Losada, this is what underlies the dynamics of high performing groups and produces novel and outstanding results. Integral to chaos theory, a complex chaotic attractor, when it emerges in a group, is what leads to innovation, bringing a system to new levels of insight and possibility. The question is how can we create the conditions for the attractor to emerge?
Losada has an answer, based on intense observation and statistical analysis of high and low functioning groups. What he has to say has an interesting parallel to what we at IISC have been pointing to as essential elements of the facilitative leader or collaborative change agent who is able to effectively tap into the participation of others. The core elements we have listed in our “Profile of a Facilitative Leader” include being:
- collaborative (interested in working with others, seeking win-win solutions)
- strategic (keeping one’s eyes on the big picture and different possible paths of action)
- receptive and flexible (actively soliciting others’ ideas, changing course when necessary)
Scooter Reflections on Social Media #4
This morning on the way to work, I was reflecting on the incredibly successful National Equality March that happened a couple of weeks ago – and which I observed from friends’ posts online and on TV.? This was a march organized quickly with very little money. It apparently took much less money and much less time than previous marches have required thanks to the use of social media.? It was organized through social media organizing by groups like Stonewall 2.0 – using all the latest approaches to organizing – and counts were that about 200,000 people showed up, most of them young and energized and calling for equality at a Federal level, calling for Obama to make good on his promises to the LGBTQ community.
There are some great videos (friends reported that there were a HUGE number of flipcams at the march – and a look at youtube proves that to be true – as well as large numbers of slideshows put to music). So not only was the organizing done online, but the march itself went viral right away.
Leave a commentThe Unconference
I’m writing from the Opportunity Collaboration, and anti-poverty convening in Ixtapa, Mexico. It has been quite an experience and while we are working with powerful content, I want to write about process. This has not been a conference! About 260 delegates have been convened in a beautiful resort to tackle the problem of poverty from a relatively diverse set of approaches and outlooks, ranging from philanthropy to micro-finance, nonprofits and other social ventures.
Groups of 20 delegates come together 2 hours each morning in what has been titled the Colloquium for the Common Good. This is the common conversation we are having throughout the convening as we are invited to reflect on our values and why we do this work. I have been honored to serve as facilitator for one of these groups and I am quite impressed by the depth of our conversations.
Leave a commentGreen Faith
Still vibing on the fact that yesterday was Blog Action Day, I want to share about this very cool documentary about the growing faith-based environmental justice movement in the United States, entitled Renewal.
A description of the film is as follows:
RENEWAL is the first feature-length documentary film to capture the vitality and diversity of today’s religious-environmental activists. From within their Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim traditions, Americans are becoming caretakers of the Earth. With great courage, these women, men and children are re-examining what it means to be human and how we live on this planet. Their stories of combating global warming and the devastation of mountaintop removal, of promoting food security, environmental justice, recycling, land preservation, and of teaching love and respect for life on Earth are the heart of RENEWAL.
Leave a comment“Maximum Contemplation, Minimum Action”
It’s Blog Action Day, and thus, we write with others on climate change. Be sure to check out the other blogs too!!
I am always interested to see parallel worldviews evolving across different fields. Lately I’ve been thinking about the connections between the burgeoning enthusiasm about networks in social science and social change efforts and the growing interest I’ve been noticing in Permaculture, partly owing to the Transition Town movement and conversations about mitigating and adapting to impending climate change.
Permaculture was developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s as an answer to unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. It entails creating robust, flexible, living systems that integrate ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agroforestry. The focus of Permaculture is not on the individual elements in a garden, but rather on the relationships between them (just as networks are all about the links). For example, with the Permaculture lens, one is always thinking about how one plant relates to others (could it cast shade or serve as a natural pesticide for others) and how different “zones” might serve one another (a pond stocked with fish can cut down on mosquitoes, eaves on a house can catch rain water that is siphoned into a garden, etc.). 
"Maximum Contemplation, Minimum Action"
It’s Blog Action Day, and thus, we write with others on climate change. Be sure to check out the other blogs too!!
I am always interested to see parallel worldviews evolving across different fields. Lately I’ve been thinking about the connections between the burgeoning enthusiasm about networks in social science and social change efforts and the growing interest I’ve been noticing in Permaculture, partly owing to the Transition Town movement and conversations about mitigating and adapting to impending climate change.
Permaculture was developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s as an answer to unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. It entails creating robust, flexible, living systems that integrate ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agroforestry. The focus of Permaculture is not on the individual elements in a garden, but rather on the relationships between them (just as networks are all about the links). For example, with the Permaculture lens, one is always thinking about how one plant relates to others (could it cast shade or serve as a natural pesticide for others) and how different “zones” might serve one another (a pond stocked with fish can cut down on mosquitoes, eaves on a house can catch rain water that is siphoned into a garden, etc.).
Rethinking Stakeholder Analyses
Earlier this week, I had the great fortune of hearing Rinku Sen (Applied Research Center), Ellen Gurzinsky (Funders for LGBTQ Issues) and Lori Villarosa (Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity) present on “Catalyzing Change and Deepening Racial Justice Impacts” at the Neighborhood Funders Group Annual Conference in New Orleans. It was an exciting session in which they talked about the current racial context in the US and ideas about how grantmaking can be done with a racial justice lens – including real stories about work some specific foundations and groups of foundations are doing. I’ll likely be sharing more over my next few blog posts about grantmaking with a racial justice lens, but wanted to start with some reflections about group processes that came up for me based on their presentation.
As a non-funder, I was listening with an ear toward things that might be applicable to group process as well. Rinku talked about the difference between using a diversity approach and using a racial equity approach to grantmaking, which started me thinking about the difference between these two approaches in stakeholder analyses of multi-stakeholder processes. A diversity approach, as she described it, would be one in which what matters is what the group of people assembled “looks” like – if there are representatives from all the groups affected, etc. – while a racial equity approach might lead one to assemble an entirely different group.
Leave a commentCongratulations!
Congratulations to Louise, Stevie, Sharon and the IISC Ireland Team!! The group was presented a National Training Award for “Partnership and Collaboration” in Northern Ireland. According to the NTA website, the “NTA identify and celebrate organisations and individuals that achieved really outstanding business and personal success through investment in training.”
From left to right, Sharon Duffy, Louise O’Meara, Stevie Johnston.
See(d)ing the Whole
Thinking of the fall harvest, the other day I was picking through David Ehrenfeld’s essays in Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology, when I came across an amazing story about a team of Russian plant biologists. In the first half of the last century, Nikolai Vavilov, who is known as the father of modern crop plant protection, traveled far and wide, gathering samples of crop seeds from all over the world for his Institute of Plant Industry in what is now St. Petersburg. His collection made him the chief preserver of global agricultural diversity.
Vavilov was an outspoken critic of Trofim Lysenko, the chief agronomist under Stalin who subscribed to a non-Mendelian approach to plant genetics. Though Lysenko’s theories were later discredited, Vavilov was arrested for his criticism and imprisoned in a Siberian gulag. In his absence (he eventually died in Siberia), and in the face of the German armies marching on Leningrad in 1941, Vavilov’s dedicated assistants scrambled to preserve the Institute’s seed collections. They prepared duplicates of samples, shipped some to other parts of the country, and secretly planted others in nearby fields. Ironically and tragically, several of these scientists died of malnutrition. They literally chose to starve to death rather than consume the edible seeds that surrounded them.
Leave a commentInvestment Shift
I had dinner with one of my closest friends the other night, he has become extremely successful in the world of finance, but he is not your traditional investment banker. He works for a relatively small boutique shop that specializes in buying (not selling!) other investment groups. Now, I’m not one of those nonprofit consultants that think our sector should behave more like the business world – by now we all know where that gets us! But I do think there are many lessons to be learned, especially from those who are successful in business by carving out their own rules.
When my friend is about to buy a firm their main focus is on the culture of that firm:
- Is it a culture that successfully unlocks the talent and self-motivation of its people?
- What is the leadership like and what do they really want?
Living with Complexity
In last week’s New Yorker, John Cassidy wrote a must-read article entitled “Rational Irrationality – The real reason that capitalism is crash-prone”. It is about the complexity of the financial market and brings to mind another classic book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Black Swan – The impact of the highly improbable“.
Both the article and the book deal with what Nassim Taleb describes as the characteristics of a black swan (i.e. a highly improbable event), which are: it is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact and after the fact we concoct an explanation that makes it more predictable than it was. The near financial collapse (saved from complete collapse by government intervention), the astonishing success of Google and 9/11 are all black swans. Both authors speak directly to our human limitations in explaining our inability to see what’s coming whether opportunity or disaster. A major reason according to Taleb is that humans are hard-wired to focus on specifics when we should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on what we know and simplify, narrate and categorize. And, we simply do not reward those who can imagine the impossible. Read More
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