|Photo by Digital Agent|http://www.flickr.com/photos/specialagent/2241064739|
It was at this time a year ago that I made the trip to Keene, New Hampshire to teach my final weekend Change Models class of the semester at Antioch New England. Just a few days prior, the entire region had been rocked by an ice storm for the ages. When the storm hit I was in Maine. Driving home the next day I heard reports about the worst damage being concentrated in western Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. All that had slipped my mind when I got up early on Sunday morning to drive to Keene. It came rushing back when I got off of Route 2 heading north and the world turned dark and quiet. Everything in sight was cocooned in ice. Trees sagged. Homes along the roadside for miles were without lights. Businesses were shuttered. The awesome force of nature really began to sink in.
“What’s love got to do with it?” This is a question that gets raised with increasing frequency in our work at IISC. Recently, while training a group of health care reformers from around the state of Maine, I presented what we call our “Profile of a Collaborative Change Agent,” which outlines the core attributes of those who, in our experience, are able to maintain a win-win outlook even in the most trying of circumstances. Sitting conspicuously at the heart of the Profile (see below) is “the L word.” Nodding heads and knowing smiles, in Maine and elsewhere, are an indication of the growing willingness to seriously consider the role of love in social change work. Read More
“What does Twitter do to our relationship with Creation?” This was the final question in a wonderful conversation the other day with Liz Parsons, Co-Director of Contextual Education at the Boston University School of Theology. Our free-ranging dialogue ended on this note as we were exploring potential win-win formats for field placements for BU students at social change agencies. What would be in it for the agencies? Stating my belief that many students bring with them more natural collaborative inclinations and social media savvy than “seasoned’ social change leaders, I posited this as a value proposition inherent in members of the younger generation. Which got us firmly down the Twitter path . . .
When Liz’s provocative question popped, my mind split. On the one hand, I could see the case being made that Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools provide an additional and unhelpful buffer between us and the world. Too much reliance on the technology can, as essayist Bill Holm writes, “separate and deracinate us from nature and one another” removing “any sense of from-ness or connection.” The question looms whether we need any more mediation of our experience when so much suffering seemingly stems from disconnection. In a follow-up message, Liz mentioned that when her husband purchased a laptop, it came with an ongoing slide show of nature photos. “As if we have to be reminded,” she wrote, taking the words out of my mouth.
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
I, for one, could not be happier that we have as our President a man with such apparent capacity of careful thought, measured analysis, and poetic expression. The other day I reread a passage from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and was bowled over by its insight and beauty. The passage comes at a point when Obama is reflecting upon his work as a community organizer in Chicago, which became all consuming as he often spent his social time with community leaders and residents, immersing himself in their lives. He writes:
If you have not yet read the LaPiana Associates report Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector, I highly recommend that you do. If you are interested in the future of social change, it’s for you. Skim through it over Thanksgiving break. Share tidbits with friends and family at the dinner table. It’s a relatively concise piece that puts into clear language what many of us are experiencing and intuiting, and it just might give you something to get through those awkward holiday moments.
The report basically makes the case that post our current economic crisis, the nonprofit sector, along with the public and private sectors, will not be going back to their pre-crisis standing. Rather, there is a convergence of forces fundamentally reshaping the way we think and work that will make any kind of return impossible (and undesirable). These trends include:
Demographic shifts that redefine participation
Abundant technological advances
Networks that enable work to be organized in new ways
Rising interest in civic engagement and volunteerism
If you have not yet read the LaPiana Associates report Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector, I highly recommend that you do. If you are interested in the future of social change, it’s for you. Skim through it over Thanksgiving break. Share tidbits with friends and family at the dinner table. It’s a relatively concise piece that puts into clear language what many of us are experiencing and intuiting, and it just might give you something to get through those awkward holiday moments.
The report basically makes the case that post our current economic crisis, the nonprofit sector, along with the public and private sectors, will not be going back to their pre-crisis standing. Rather, there is a convergence of forces fundamentally reshaping the way we think and work that will make any kind of return impossible (and undesirable). These trends include:
Demographic shifts that redefine participation
Abundant technological advances
Networks that enable work to be organized in new ways
Rising interest in civic engagement and volunteerism
One of the core models of IISC’s practice (for both our training and consulting work) is something we call the R-P-R Triangle, which basically makes the case that success in collaborative efforts is a multi-dimensional affair, not solely defined by “results” (goal or task accomplished), but also by “process” (the way or spirit in which work is carried out) and “relationship” (the quality of the connections between the people engaged in the work). Our Executive Director, Marianne Hughes, has called this “the spine of collaboration,” suggesting that if we are not thinking in terms of all dimensions, we are not really serious about seeking win-win solutions with others. And indeed experience really proves that these dimensions are intimately linked and dependent upon one another when diverse stakeholders come together to realize a shared vision.
A twist was given to this triangle the other day when a Facilitative Leadership workshop participant said he was struggling, not because he did not find value in this notion of “multiple dimensions of success,” but because of his concern that even in this model, process and relationships might appear to be subservient, or the “so that,” to results. He went on to say that he is part of an organization/community in which relationships are really paramount. They are an end in and of themselves and in a way synonymous with results. How then, do we account for this in this model he wondered. Read More
Thanks first of all to Margaret Benefiel of Executive Soul for turning me on to this video. It times beautifully with a lot of thinking, writing, and experimenting we’ve been doing here at IISC about/with the power of design, and specifically the design of experiences that can change behavior and bring out the best in individuals and groups. Check out this clip from The Fun Theory, an initiative of Volkswagen, that aims to show that fun is one of the best ways to change behavior for the better.
In the collaborative leadership trainings we do, inevitably we get to a point where people talk about the dry, frustrating, “deadening” and even pointless meetings and gatherings they often attend. Many are at a loss for what to do. One response on my part is to ask, “What has brought you to life at meetings that have been particularly engaging?” And when the answer comes, to say, “Do that!” If it brings us to life, there is a good chance it will do the same for others. To paraphrase innovation guru Marty Neumeier, in order to “focus minds and intoxicate hearts” many more of us will need to think and act like (process and experience) designers. So what are you doing to throw a little fun into the mix?
It has been quite a week or so on the climate action/activism/advocacy front. From the 350.org global day of action to the Bioneers conferences happening around the country, to some interesting personal conversations I’ve had with staff members of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Conservation International (CI), to ongoing preparations for the upcoming UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagan, it seems clear that momentum is gathering towards taking serious and significant steps to help mitigate and adapt to changes in our global climate that have already begun.
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)
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.).
