Our friend Larry Dressler just published a book titled “Standing in the Fire” it’s about “leading high-heat meetings with clarity, calm and courage.” Curtis wrote an earlier post inspired by the book. Larry interviewed a wide number of experienced facilitators and I was particularly appreciative of the way he high-lighted the words of our Executive Director, Marianne Hughes.
Referring to what I like to call “the inner condition of the intervener,” Larry says:
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Sharing an inspiring vision is one of the seven practices of Facilitative Leadership. Here at the Interaction Institute for Social Change we are fond of saying that “a leader must share an inspiring vision in order to inspire a shared vision.” If you are reading this blog you probably have a vision. You are interested in social change, you want to believe that indeed another world is possible – and you have a role in making it happen. You have a vision of the world you want to see. Read More
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In her essay, hooks reminds us of the very purpose of struggle as Dr. King himself defined it: “the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of beloved community.” She herself states that “we best learn love as the practice of freedom in the context of community.” We are not alone in this struggle, and there is no aspect of freedom that implies the loosening of our accountability to one another, the call to accountability is actually heightened by freedom.
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|Photo by LadyDragonflyCC|http://www.flickr.com/photos/19646481@N06/4332176853/|
Love as the practice of freedom has been on my mind these days. My good friend Cyndi Suarez, who is the co-director of Northeast Action, recently shared a bell hooks essay by the same title – I appreciated Cyndi’s e-mail:
“I was thinking today on just how much social change movements reflect the dominant culture. I just finished rereading an old-time favorite essay by bell hooks and had to share it with you. I feel it is as pertinent now as when I first read it 15 years ago. I wonder what would change if at least some of us focused on building love rather power.” Read More
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I know I’m coming late to the party, but I saw the Vagina Monologues for the first time this weekend and I was blown away by it. Rather than writing yet another raving review of what evidently is a deeply moving work of art, I want to make a comment on the movement that it has unleashed.
I saw the play as produced by MIT undergraduate students who did it in concert with thousands of others around the world – I think it most appropriate to let V-Day speak for itself: Read More
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|Photo by Portable Church|http://www.flickr.com/photos/portablechurch/3789838110/|
It sounds simple, but I increasingly find the idea that “happiness matters” an important principle to remember. Understanding that happiness matters gives us a great lens with which to evaluate our efforts. As I go about the work of social transformation – am I happy? Are the people I work with happy? I hope it’s obvious that I’m not equating happiness with the cheap thrills that are abundantly available to us in this age of hyper-capitalism. I’m talking about the happiness that is defined by a sustainable sense of contentment.
I am talking about being happy even as we engage the often challenging work of social transformation in a world that desperately needs it. I often say to activists that miserable faces of martyred frustration often are, in and of themselves, the best argument against being in movement with those that want a better world. I contrast this experience to the abundance of song and dance that defined the struggle to put an end to South African Apartheid.
Leave a commentIf you don’t have four minutes, make them! Here is one of the simplest explanations of the Cynefin framework and it is one of the most useful ways to understand the shift that we must make in the social sector. I start most of my client work by arguing that the problem we are facing in the sector is that our system has been developed to address complex problems as if they were complicated. For example, our urban public schools are trying to teach many kids who might be facing hunger, trauma, violence, lack of documentation and a myriad other social ills, but we are spending our time arguing about curricula and standardized tests.
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I was intrigued by the title of Mark Danner’s recent opinion in the New York Times, “To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature.” And I could not help making a connection to the recent “Che” movie I just watched. The Cuban and Haitian revolutions took place during very different historical periods, but both victories were a refusal to accept destiny as prescribed by the ruling world order of their time.
And each time the dominant world order responded with the same strategy – a policy of isolation.
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I was intrigued by the title of Mark Danner’s recent opinion in the New York Times, “To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature.” And I could not help making a connection to the recent “Che” movie I just watched. The Cuban and Haitian revolutions took place during very different historical periods, but both victories were a refusal to accept destiny as prescribed by the ruling world order of their time.
And each time the dominant world order responded with the same strategy – a policy of isolation.
Leave a commentMartin Luther King has been on my mind over the last few days. I’ve been contemplating his prophetic voice, and how every age needs its prophets. I’ve been contemplating the relationship between his belief that “the vision of where we’re going is the reality we have to claim,” Joseph Campbell’s work on the power of myth, and @EmergentCulture’s recent tweet proposing that “we need a new myth for our time, a story that will serve us as we encounter a time period unlike any before.” It is all coming together in ways I’m not fully ready to define. Read More
Leave a commentThanks to the Harvard Bookstore, I had the pleasure of joining some of my IISC colleagues at a Daniel Pink talk last week at the Brattle. In Drive, his latest book, Pink argues that aside from the commonly understood motivators of need and desire for reward, we are specially motivated by our desire for autonomy, purpose and mastery. In his talk, Pink pointed out that the baby boomers are now reaching a stage in life that is defined by purpose, the desire to do something meaningful, to contribute to something grater than their selves.
I suspect that many boomers reading this blog have devoted much of their lives to the work of social change and so they might not be dealing with the same angst. Nevertheless it is worth noting that since boomers comprise the largest population bubble, they are the ones that have defined the last few decades. Read More
Leave a commentI am just returning from two weeks in Europe, the longest I’ve spent there. If you’ve ever been to Paris you know how strikingly glorious it is. Geneva and Amsterdam are also special places, with their own distinctive beauty, their own way about them. While there I had the opportunity to visit some amazing museums and I’m truly moved by the experience.
I’m struck by the thought that so much of the intentional beauty that I witnessed emerged out of social movements, intentional social projects – they were proposals for looking at the world, for ways of being in it. Paris seems to have evolved through multiple story lines about its destiny and its place in humanity. The shift from the art of the Louvre to the modern art of the Pompidou, and the biographical development of Van Gogh’s art all make movement very obvious. We can see the developmental shifts, the exploration, the experimentation and the provocation, the passionate search for meaning or definition, the eternal question. Read More
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