Seth’s blog this morning reminded me of an ongoing joke that I have with Linda Guinee, my colleague here at IISC.
Seth’s main question is: “Who is in charge of the magic?”
During my early days at IISC, Linda brought me into design and facilitation of an “Innovation Lab” for one of our biggest clients at the time. It was big break, and I took it seriously. Linda, who is quite magical herself, kept reminding me of practical things that I still tend to overlook. At one point she had to remind me that it was important to give the participants a bathroom break!
Last week I represented IISC as a presenter/facilitator in a “deep dive” session at the Council on Foundations Conference for Community Foundations. The title of the session was “Complete Capital”and was inspired by an SSIR article by the same title written by Antony Bugg-Levine of the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF). Briefly, complete capital is a framework to help funders and other investors develop a fuller picture of the assets required to address complex social challenges: financial, intellectual, human, and social.
After presentations by Alison Gold of Living Cities (intellectual capital), Lisa Spinali (human capital) and Jessica LaBarbera of NFF (financial capital), and in the light of a couple of helpful case studies presented by Alison and Jessica, I offered a view of social capital that is more complex than what appears in the SSIR article. Read More
I always describe IISC as a “Collaboration Shop.” The founder of Interaction Associates, David Strauss, authored the seminal book “How to Make Collaboration Work.” I’m all for people working together to achieve a common goal. I make a living helping them do that.
Shout out to our colleagues at Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center for their Youth Racial Healing Project—making the connections between health, social determinants of health and racism; making the connections between what folks know, see and feel; and making the deep connections between young people across racial differences.
IISC would like to share our Top 5 most influential post of 2012! Join us until the New Years Eve when we reveal our number 1 blog post!
The following post began as a response to FSG’s lastest contribution to its work around “collective impact” on the Standford Social Innovations Review blog. There is much value in the additional details of this cross-sectoral approach to creating change, and I especially appreciate what is highlighted in this most recent piece regarding the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of “backbone organizations” to support and steer the work. In the ensuing conversation on the SSIR blog, there is a comment from an FSG staff person about the importance of building trust in launching these efforts, and it was from this point that I picked up . . .
With deep appreciation for the good work of FSG in helping to codify this important approach, I wanted to add that from our experience at the Interaction Institute for Social Change, helping people develop the skills of process design and facilitation is of paramount importance in cultivating trust and ultimately realizing the promise of large-scale multi-stakeholder collaborative efforts. Read More
Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run. And here’s the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast–the road map and model that will define the next era–no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.
I’ve been meaning to tell you about Creative Change; the powerful intersection of artists and activists that has been taking place for the last four years. The Opportunity Agenda convenes the retreat, and I have had the privilege of designing and facilitating since its inception. This last retreat was the best one yet.
I learned recently about the work of HASTAC and Cathy Davidson, and appreciate what she raises here about the importance of designing for divergence and difference. And I would also take her up on her third question and ask what she might be missing. For me, it is one thing to distinguish between experts and novices, and another thing to altogether redefine “expertise,” understanding that academic/formal educational training is not the sole source of valuable knowing. Let’s lift lived experience to that level as well! Read More
We have had the privilege of working with Year Up since 2008, when they launched a diversity and inclusion process. That learning journey has built a broad-based understanding and commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion as central to achieving Year Up’s mission of bridging and closing the “opportunity divide” that prevents so many urban young people from connecting to educational and economic opportunities.
The following post was re-blogged from Working Wikily written by Dana O’Donovan. We hope that you find it as inspiring and enriching as we did.
The key themes of the 2012 Social Impact Exchange were all about collaboration. Collective intelligence. Community solutions. Needle-moving collaborations. Collective impact. Much has been made of this new brand of collaboration and it was clear at SIEX12 that many of us who spend our days (and nights) looking for ways to scale solutions to our most vexing social problems see enormous potential in this approach.
It often emerges as a core tension in our complex multi-stakeholder change work. It’s embodied in comments such as, “Let’s stop all this talking and start doing something!” Or, “I’m not a big process person, I just want to get to action.”
In the New England Regional Food Summit two weeks ago, speaker Rich Pirog raised the importance of trying to find, in an ongoing fashion, a balance between process and action. This he has learned from doing many years of building regional food networks in the Midwest. It is certainly the case that we can over-talk, over-think and over-process together, driving one another crazy and/or from the room. And we can also jump blindly, prematurely, and harmfully to action.
So how do we strike an artful balance and keep differently oriented people in the game? A few thoughts:
|Photo by Social Innovation Camp|http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicamp/4078247284|
Another offering here in the spirit of simplicity and how we can get a lot from doing little things differently. Yesterday I blogged about “working agreements” to set groups and collaborative efforts up for success. Today, I want to lift up the power of planning meetings, convenings, and longer term collaborative endeavors with the end in mind. Often we find that people have the tendency to jump into doing and talking about doing without working backwards from the intended outcomes. There is an art and science to crafting “desired outcomes statements,” which we teach in our workshops (see Facilitative Leadership and Essential Facilitation), and a starting point is to imagine your stakeholders leaving said meeting or collaborative process and asking yourself:
What shared understanding is it important/imperative for us to have achieved?
What agreements is it important/imperative for us to have built?
What commitments do we want people to have made?
What products do we want/need to have generated?
What feeling/spirit do we want to carried forward out of this experience?
