Leverage Week

Why 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.

I’m doing this because I just got back from Chiapas and facilitating the experience of 30 of Boston’s most successful civic leaders – because we brought them together to be disrupted and we succeeded, and now they are interconnected. I’m doing this because my job includes witnessing the encounter between Executive Directors and Zapatistas, and because it includes bringing school committee members to talks on de-schooling society.

I’m doing this because I’m the kind of person who would join an online “90 Day Meditation Challenge,” and because I agree with Dr. King that love is the supreme unifying principle of life, and because he asked me to build beloved community, and because I do. Because I bothered to ask the Barr Fellows whether they had heightened experiences of vivid dreaming and déjà-vous in Chiapas, and because they did. Because this magical life includes spending my last birthday at the Great Pyramid in Cairo and this Spring solstice at the Mayan Pyramids and I planned neither that way – I was there because of my job – and because it is my vocation to do the work that I do.

I’m doing this because I get to facilitate “Web of Change,” at the intersection of Social Media and Social Change, and I get to facilitate “Creative Change,” at the intersection of arts, culture and social change and I get great reviews for both. I’m doing this because I’m a thought leader on the application of network theory to social change and because I intuitively get it, and I do it. I am committed to authenticity, and the power of real relationships, and I have them, with powerful, influential and beautiful people doing the work of social transformation.

I’m doing this because I’m cracking my head and my heart open to understand the phenomenon of emergence and find the best ways to create the conditions for self-organization in our social movements. And because I get to do this with people like Debbie Frieze from Berkana, which is Meg Wheatley’s outfit, and Adrienne Maree Brown of the Ruckus Society and the US Social Forum and Doyle Canning of smartMeme and story based strategies – and this is my tribe!

I’m doing this because one of my blog posts is required reading for a round table on Emergence, and it was there along with the great Grace Lee Boggs and Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster. I’m doing this because I believe ours to be precisely the sort of organization that can help make big change happen, we are here with a big upgrade to your operating system. And my space at IISC is as empowered as Seth has described and that is what makes us thrive, because my boss is exactly the type of boss that would create a place like this and invite others of us make a platform of it. We live in the world we are trying to build.