|Photo by Sam Ilic|http://www.flickr.com/photos/stage88/3650502444|
I shared the following Wislawa Szymborska poem with faculty in an academic department at a university with whom I was working this week. We read it as we were about to launch our final day of discussions about collaborative leadership and team building.
Leave a commentFor the better part of the last year and a half, my colleagues Ashley Welch and John McGah and I have been moving forward an IA/IISC cross-sectoral practice to bring Interaction methods + to the support of sustainability endeavors. Our early meetings around this budding practice included conversations about how best to frame leadership development for sustainability. We arrived at the graphic above, which combines what we see as the core elements needed for leadership to embrace and enroll others in sustainable pursuits.
With a foundation (watermark, if you will) of content knowledge about what sustainability is, the three elements are as follows:
• Systems Thinking (Seeing) – This is all about helping individual leaders and collective leadership see the whole, to understand that nothing stands in isolation, and that we must have a deeply felt sense of the interconnectedness of phenomena in order to make truly informed decisions. We take both our inspiration and instruction in this realm from the likes of the Sustainability Institute, the Center for Whole Communities, and The Elumenati.
• Self-Awareness (Being) – What we do is informed by who and how we are in the world. Awareness of our own beliefs, mental maps, and inherent tendencies is a powerful lever for making the sustainability shift, for aligning thought behind action. Self-awareness might also be cast as mindfulness, or the ability to be present to what is. Here we build upon our existing work around the inner side of leadership with the contributions of the Pachamama Alliance and John Milton.
• Collaborative Capacity (Doing) – With the whole in mind and awareness of our inner state, leadership will have a greater understanding of the need to work collectively toward more sustainable lifestyles and ways of doing business. Collaborative skill is key, including knowing how to frame sustainability efforts, create the right conditions for innovation, build agreement, structure decision-making, and design life-affirming experiences for diverse stakeholders. This is the heart and soul of the Interaction Method, and it is supplemented by the work of Keith Sawyer, CRED, and the many pioneers of large group methods and network-building.
Another key element and overlay for all of these is leadership’s ability to understand and navigate power dynamics as they play out in systems, in ourselves, and in our chosen methods for working together.
Eager to hear your reactions, tweaks, and additions.
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|World of Oddy|http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldofoddy/146446352/sizes/s/|
I wanted to share this link to a short discussion by Pema Chödrön about the importance of staying with the hard stuff – not the story we create about a situation, but the underlying feeling itself – to create change. This follows along with previous posts I’ve made about the importance of “staying” – with conflict, in situations of privilege. The message being the same – the importance of learning to stay! And so I wonder how this applies to organizations and movements. I hear it this way – rather than trying to fix a situation too quickly, stay with it, learn about it, learn to live with the tension while we look for ways to create change. What do you think?
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Are you amazing? Are you one of those people who are working to define the next phase of movement? Are you connected to a crew of local organizers, activists, innovators, dreamers? If you are an amazing movement builder then I want to be able to follow you on Twitter and I want to be your Facebook friend.
I find myself travelling from place to place and meeting some truly amazing people, I keep getting hip to really interesting projects and innovative approaches to the work of social change. I’m connecting to my tribe; I’m getting to know the people who are actively redefining the way we do social change. Here is the problem though – I can’t keep up with all of them! And here is where I notice an important distinction. When these people are using social media tools I can at least have a sense of what they are up to, I can get a glimpse of how their work evolves – but if they are not, then I’m left with hearsay. Read More
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|Photo by joi|http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2941559903|
Our colleagues at Interaction Associates have done some wonderful work on the importance of trust in the workplace and what leaders can do to cultivate this, especially under uncertain circumstances the likes of which seem to be omnipresent these days. More recently, former IBMer Irving Wladawsky-Berger has taken this conversation to a new level in a post that looks at trust as “the most important operational resource in our society.” In our increasingly complex, interconnected, and distributed world, he says, one’s reputation as an individual or institution is foundational to what we might call success. This observation contributes to his sense that we are in the midst of a values-based generational transition as potentially profound as the sixties.
Without rehashing the entire post here (I encourage you to read it in its entirety by going to this link), I want to point out some of the more interesting parts and ask what folk engaged in the social sectors and social change work think Read More
Leave a comment“Collaboration drives creativity because innovation emerges from a series of sparks – not a single flash of insight.”
– Keith Sawyer, Group Genius
|Photo by Chris Denbow|http://www.flickr.com/photos/mojodenbowsphotostudio/2408750389|
Having last week blogged about when we might want to de-emphasize innovation and think about the small steps we can take towards change, today I embrace the “i word.” In doing so, I tip my hat to Keith Sawyer and to my Interaction colleague Andy Atkins for helping to clarify my thinking around the connection between collaboration and innovation for social change. Both are obviously quite popular concepts at the moment, and there is some discussion about how well they go together. For example, one of my colleagues had a conversation with a corporate leader last week during which this leader shared his deep belief that collaboration inhibits creativity and that flashes of insight occur in the individual’s mind. While the last part of that statement may be true, what leads to that flash and where one goes with it would seem to have everything 
to do with interaction with others.
|Photo by Lee Adcock|http://www.flickr.com/photos/leeadc/2821894989/sizes/m/|
A few of us at IISC have been talking recently about network governance – trying to gather what we’ve learned about what kinds of governance structures have worked with networks. It’s sparked a lot of questions – and I had the great fortune of meeting with the amazing Jessica Lipnack recently to ask her advice about what she would suggest. For those who don’t know Jessica, she and her husband Jeff Stamps have been working with and studying networks for over 30 years and have literally written the book (actually the BOOKS) on networks and working with virtual teams over these many years.
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Over the next three days I will have the privilege of training the Interaction Institute’s Facilitative Leadership® workshop. Just yesterday I was talking to my colleague Curtis Ogden and asking him for his latest tips on offering this workshop. As often happens with us, our conversation evolved into a very interesting inquiry. Read More
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It’s happening! Tens of thousands of people are just arriving in Detroit for what is an incredibly important and incredibly hopeful gathering – The United States Social Forum. It feels like all my friends are there and while conflicting responsibilities will keep me in Boston this week, I do want to send a blessing to all the courageous souls that are busy dreaming up new ways of being with each other. Read More
Leave a commentWith Father’s Day around the corner, my thoughts are focused on what it means to be a good father and a good man in this world. For those who have not yet heard, The Good Men Project has created a rich forum for these questions and has just launched a magazine delving into issues such as men’s health, relationships, sexuality, ethics, and boys/adolescence. From what I’ve seen so far, I appreciate the initiative’s willingness to go broad in eliciting a diversity of stories and perspectives. Furthermore, The Good Men Foundation has dedicated itself to helping organizations and efforts that provide educational, social, financial, and legal support to men and boys at risk.
Leave a comment“When you improve a little each day,
eventually big things happen.”
-The late John Wooden
|Photo by aldoaldoz|http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldoaldoz/2340226779|
Since February I’ve been experiencing back pain in a constant and distracting (though not quite incapacitating) way, a result of having poor posture at the computer, not taking enough breaks while sitting, lifting too many small children, and being another year older. A couple of months ago I went to a chiropractor and he did his best to wrench me back into alignment. This worked for a few days, and then things were back as they were. I enlisted the help of a “deep tissue” masseuse who went after my back muscles with steady steam rolling force. Again, for a few days I was on top of the world, and then it was back to square one. Then, about two weeks ago, I started seeing a physical therapist, who has given me some gentle stretches and postural shifts and done light massage on my left shoulder. Et voila, real progress! Small and subtle shifts have yielded major and lasting results.
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|Photo by hangdog|http://www.flickr.com/photos/hangdog/23172852/sizes/m/|
A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about the constructive engagement of conflict – called Stay! Stay! Stay! It was some thinking sparked by reading the beginning of Bernie Mayer‘s new book “Staying with Conflict“. I’ve been reading more of that book this week – and thinking as well about the work IISC is doing to become an anti-racist, anti-oppression, pro-liberation organization. (And yes, we do know that’s a mouthful!)
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