Network-Inspired Questions for Change

Curtis Ogden

Senior Associate

Picking up on the spirit of yesterday’s post about asking “beautiful questions” and inspired by a staff challenge to articulate lines of inquiry stemming from IISC’s core lenses, I offer this post.  It distills some of the underlying questions that adopting a “network lens” inspires for social change work.  Please add, adjust, edit, and rift!

• How does your organization/network/change initiative strive to add value to (rather than duplicate) existing efforts?  What do you do best, and how might you then connect to the rest?
• What are you doing to support and strengthen connections and alignment within and beyond your organization/network/change initiative?

• What current patterns of connection characterize your organization/network/change effort? How do these further or inhibit the change that you are trying to bring about?
• What current definitions of value (determinations of what and who matters) characterize your organization/network/change effort?  How do these align with the change that you are trying to bring about?
• Who sits at the core of (decision-making, communication, coordination) in your network/ change initiative?  Who is more peripheral?  How does this arrangement help to bring about (or not) the kind of change you hope to see?
• What would happen if you drew in those currently on the periphery?  How might this be achieved?
• How do you currently engage with one another in your organization/network/change initiative?  What constitutes “legitimate” modes of knowing, sharing, and interacting?  What does this make possible?  What does prevent?
• How might you engage with one another in your organization/network/change initiative to facilitate the best of what everyone has to offer?
• How are you balancing collaboration and cooperation in your organization/network/ change initiative?  When is it most strategic for all or most participants to coordinate (collaborate) around a given action? When and around what is it best to keep things diffuse and self-directed (cooperation)?
• How have you created opportunities for mutual and continuous exchange in your organization/network/change initiative?
• What is the role of empathy in your organization/network/change initiative?  What are you doing to nurture deeper understanding, connection, and trust?
• What is the role of gratitude and generosity in your work?  What are you doing to nurture and encourage greater abundance?  
• How are you creating space for people to articulate requests and offers and to match these?
• What structures (governance, decision-making, communication) support the focus and functions of your network/change initiative?