The Interaction Institute for Social Change invites you to join a National Call to Action for Unity and Dialogue after the U.S. elections. From the moment the election is settled, we call for a peaceful response from Americans, and from people all over the globe, to the results.
We call for a national conversation in living rooms, workplaces, boardrooms, schools, and government offices to foster healingfrom the divisions that have been deepened by this election, and to explore the common ties that bind us.
We call on Americans to explore with honesty and empathy the role that race, gender, and immigrant status played in this election to create a powerful wedge in our communities. We ask for commitments and plans to remove this wedge, which for too long has deeply threatened, burdened, and dismantled our democracy. It has fostered violence and death and a loss of opportunity and personal dignity. It has constructed glass ceilings and prevented our children from realizing their full human potential.
We call on Americans to talk to each other and not at each other. The use of social media in this election has perpetuated the false notion that we cannot talk to one another or understand one another across differences or party affiliation. This is not true. In the right places with the right facilitation, we can have meaningful and healing dialogue. Unity is not agreement; it is a decision to stand firmly as Americans to embrace ideas and opinions different from our own, and to disagree peaceably in order to foster understanding and better solutions.
We call all Americans into “Big Democracy” – the belief that the public is fully capable of working together to create sustainable, just, and equitable communities. We can provide peaceful ways for the public to come together and – as professor and social activist Carl S. Moore says – “struggle with traditions that bind them and the interests that separate them so they can build a future that is an improvement on the past.” We can create these conditions with shared leadership and shared responsibility, and with the power of love that resides deeply within each one of us.
With this National Call to Action, we call on all Americans to shift the conversation about what is possible. We call on all Americans to communicate, demonstrate, and create places of experimentation to show that it is possible for the public to come together to solve problems and create change.
In light of a recent conversation with Jana Carp, an academic who has studied the underlying principles of the “slow movement” and how they connect to sustainability, place-making and livabily, I am revisiting, revising and reposting the piece below. Jana and I were connected by a mutual colleague with the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, given our mutual interests in public engagement, community-building and sustainability (inclusive of justice), and had an interesting conversation about slowness and networks.
At one point, the question came up as to whether networks might cut against slowness, especially when the emphasis is on rapid growth, diffusion, and trans-local connections. My thought at the time was that this certainly could be the case, and that is why it is important to think about both the breadth and depth dimensions of networks, as well linking different scaled networks (local, regional, global). The importance of networks for social change can certainly reside in their reach and rapid scaling. Their potential also resides in the nature and quality of connection, how deep the ties that bind are and what they help to create and circulate. And this brought me back to these reflections on how to think about “social velocity” in networks and collaborative work …
My friend Joel Glanzberg is a constant source of provocation and insight. The way he sees the world, through a living systems and pattern-seeking lens, is not only refreshing but unnerving in that it is evident how simultaneously critical and rare his perspective is. Joel is great at helping me and others to see beyond objects and structures to underlying patterns and processes, and how these are what animate living systems. Read More
It’s not too late for us to create a world that is better for future generations using collaborative change. To do this, we need everyday leaders who shift power dynamics towards justice, weave vibrant networks, and magnify love.
Our fate is shared and ALL voices must be empowered to realize our collective genius. Collaborative Change Agents ask, who is not here? What perspectives are missing?
Diversity and difference strengthen solutions. Collaborative change agents work skillfully with and through networks to make change.
Collaborative Change Agents practice treating themselves and those around them with dignity, respect, and the love that every person deserves.
Collaborative change increases trust. People can come together, resolve conflicts, and make the world a better place for all.
Through its myriad nodes and links, as well as the ongoing addition of participants and new pathways, a dense and intricate network can expand quickly and broadly. This can be critical for spreading information and other resources and mobilizing actors in ways that organizations simply cannot achieve.
Small World Reach
As a network adds connections, between and beyond organizations, and those connections in turn add their own connections, the overall reach of the network can easily shrink geographic and other forms of distance and separation. The subsequent ability of participants to discover and work with one another across expanses and barriers means that new partnerships and ideological convergences can happen, leading to greater efficiency, shared intelligence, and innovation.
Resilience
Provided a network (including a community or social movement) is not overly centralized and dependent upon a limited number of larger hubs (holding most of the connections to other nodes), it can stand up to certain pressures, including the loss of some of its nodes and links as it reorganizes around disruptions or bottlenecks. Furthermore, redundancy of and overlapping functions and knowledge enhance a network’s ability to absorb shocks without collapsing.
Adaptive Capacity
To the extent that it is intricately connected, diversely composed, with free flowing information, not to mention nimble/able to self-organize, a network can respond quickly to environmental shifts, assembling a variety of capacities/responses and disassembling them as needed.
Systemic Change
Though implied above, it is important to note that in a network it is not just the number and pattern of links that matter, but the quality and depth of the connections and what these can facilitate in terms of what flows through the various channels. Furthermore, it matters who is connected to whom, and what resources flow between these actors. As patterns of connection shift and strengthen and flows of resources are enhanced in different ways to different parts of a network, this can add up to systemic change.
“Systems change when new networks supplant the old.”
Create and use platforms (in-person convening and virtual sites) that allow people to find one another, create new connections, match interests and needs/offers and needs, and share information freely
Curate information/data to make it more accessible, attractive and digestible
So many great podcasts, so little time to talk about them with friends. Have a listening party!
Generation Listen invited IISC’s Senior Associate Cynthia Silva Parker to share some facilitation tips for conversations about racism and racial identity. The activities are tailored to help listeners unpack episodes of the cutting-edge podcast Code Switch. Right now, people across the country are hosting “listening parties” where the podcast is paired with a conversation.
In numerous social change networks that we support at IISC, racial equity has been put at the center of the work, whether or not that was the initial impetus for coming together. This is not seen as ancillary to the change effort, but now understood as foundational, in that systemic inequity around race is part and parcel of the water in which we swim. In a few of these networks where there is a majority of white participants, increasing numbers of people are asking what they can do about structural racism, and one response is that there is important work to be done around whiteness and white privilege. As Gita Gulati-Partee and Maggie Potapchuk point out, this is often a critical missing link in racial equity work. Read More
IISC works with clients to expand dimensions of success beyond results. For long-term change to take hold, we help groups understand process and relationships are key factors. In the Communications Unit, we have created a daily practice to keep track of results, process, and relationships in our work. We call this practice “Rays” and we’ve found it works in person, on video chat, over the phone, or even as text or Slack messages.
Rays / Tasks / Blocks
Rays is a 15 minute meeting each day where we briefly share a ray of light in our life, the tasks on our plate, and anything blocking production. Here’s the story of how we do it and what we’ve learned about its value.
Everything around us is designed. This stage, this auditorium fills 4,000 people and its sole design purpose is to have you focus on me. That’s how it’s structured. But there are other consequences of this design. So, for example, if you happen to be about six feet tall you’re probably hoping I’ll start talking so you can get your knees out of the front of the chair in front of you, right? Or if you happen to be, you know 4’5” or under you can’t wait to put your feet back on the ground. Those are the flaws in these designs because what we tend to do in this world is design for the middle and forget about the margins. What these new movements are saying to us is that it’s actually in the margins that we have to concentrate our design. And this feels a little counterintuitive, right, is that if you actually pay attention to the margin and design for them you actually cover the middle. It’s like a tent, right? If you take a tent and you stake it far out at the margins, well guess what, the middle is always covered. And the further out you stake it the stronger the structure you get. And why is that? Because in our systems and our social systems the people at the margins are actually living with the failures of the systems. And they are creating adaptive solutions to them. So when we design to take care of them we build stronger systems for everyone.
“Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the start-up and at transitional phases of network growth it is important for participants to get real about their constraints. Otherwise, what can happen is that people can start seeing one another as “blockers,” uncooperative, not good team players, etc.
A starting place is to ask people as they come to the collaborative table to start thinking about the constraints they have (real or imagined). These could be related to time, money, mental bandwidth, awareness, political pressure, organizational policy, comfort level with going certain places in the collective work, etc. If we define “value” holistically at the outset, we quickly come to understand that everyone has limitations and everyone has something to offer.
Trust-building is critical in helping people feel comfortable expressing certain constraints, so it is helpful to state preventatively that everyone has them, that some are perhaps not so easily spoken or may be beyond current awareness, and that it is important to get and remain curious about these, in addition to the gifts people have to offer!
There is a difference between being a network by default and being one by intention. Sometimes that can be a big difference. I encounter a fair number of networks that are networks in name and in standing, at least in that they are connected entities. But that is pretty much it. Experience shows there are any number of different ways to structure a network, and name it for that matter.
And what I find is most important is the underlying intention to maximize network effects, including: speeding the spread of resources, ensuring resources reach everyone in the network, ensuring everyone has the opportunity to share resources, growing the overall pie of resources, strengthening adaptive capacity and collective intelligence, growing abundance and equity in many different ways.
What this boils down to is a set of network ethics, which I would summarize (certainly incompletely, and to which I invite additions and alterations) in the following way: Read More
“Network entrepreneurs are keenly aware that they are few among many working across the larger system, and in this way they embody a special type of … leader[ship].”
Image from Taro Taylor – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tjt195/30916171
The concept of leadership has been undergoing an evolution. In this “network age” there appears to be both an expanding appreciation that leadership has always been about more than the singular heroic individual, and that going forward, leadership really must be much more of a shared endeavor.
In our collaborative consulting work at IISC, leadership (or what we often call Facilitative Leadership) is about “holding the whole,” thinking expansively about the state of a given complex system (community, economy, ecosystem, etc.) and paying attention to what will be required to ensure resiliency and/or change for more equitable and sustainable benefit. In these situations, the traditional top-down images of leadership fall far short.
Network leadership is at best a dynamic, diverse, more decentralized and multi-dimensional phenomenon. Many of those with whom we partner at IISC understand this implicitly, and we have found it important to help them be more explicit about this by clearly delineating the roles that leadership can embody in a collaborative/networked change endeavor. Read More
As we consider the changing socio-economic context in Europe and further afield, as the complexity of multi-faceted issues becomes ever more apparent and foundations try to figure out what to do to make change happen, one thing is certain. Conversations need to be started, understanding needs to be reached, agreements need to be built. This is where facilitation comes in. Facilitation creates the kind of safe spaces for people to discuss the most difficult and controversial issues. Our local work in Northern Ireland is a reminder of the need to engage in building peace and nurturing shared societies at local levels, group by group, community by community. At the core of this work is creating the conditions whereby people can begin to hear each other and be, to quote J P Lederach, ‘paradoxically curious’. Curious about each other, about how we see the world and about what drives us to hold – and defend – the positions we adopt.
In light of a recent conversation with 
