I love the fact that the mainstream can’t get its head around what #occupy is all about. I am glad the movement does not fit a pre-existing paradigm.
I love the fact that occupiers themselves find no consensus on what #occupy is all about. It means the movement is still emergent and therefore most alive.
Leave a comment
Beth O’Neill, of Interaction Associates recently led a session on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). It’s the only thing she has seen in her many years as a coach and consultant that actually helps people change beliefs. NLP gets at the deep structure of what we’re trying to communicate, rather than focusing on what comes out at surface structure of our communication. It explores how our thoughts, actions and feelings work together right now to produce our experience. It’s a practical way to get at the unconscious, looking at what’s running our patterns, and creating opportunities for us to make conscious changes that bring forth the outcomes we seek.
Leave a comment
There is nothing wrong with strategic planning – except when we believe that strategy unfolds as planned. A good strategic planning process is one that crystalizes our intention. It is the process through which we articulate a clear vision of where we want to go. And it is how we come to a clear agreement on which direction we are going to take. It is not insurance on the future. The map can never be the territory.
7 Comments
|Image from Anders Sandberg|http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/273180669|
Yesterday I posted a bit of a summary of Carter Phipps’ provocative new book, Evolutionaries, which included the suggested trajectories from a variety of evolutionary thinkers and observers, including greater (and increasing rates of) external and internal complexity, convergence, creativity and change. The implications I left off with included a call for a stronger embrace of our creative self-starting (entrepreneurial) potential and also the necessity of engaging in more intentional and skillful collective (cooperative or collaborative) effort.
To take this another step, there is much in the evolutionary (biological/physical and philosophical/spiritual) literature that validates and extends our thinking about how to work with life and dynamic systems to steward change in broadly desirable, just, and life-affirming directions.
Leave a comment
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.
Leave a comment
From a world where words like “strategy” and “planning” still convey an air of seriousness and rigor, it can be hard to transition to a world defined by emergence. But VUCA is here to stay – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity will continue to define our age.
Leave a comment
In this post, Jeremy Liu (an esteemed IISC Board member) encourages the community development field “to figure out how to embrace the strengths of our past as a movement, even more so than becoming more established as an industry.” I think this is wise advice for many fields in the nonprofit sector, where so many organizations and institutions emerged from resistance movements and have passed through various stages of institutionalization and even bureaucratization. Jeremy ends with an important invitation for the community development field that could easily be for all of us: “it will continue to be important for our field to question itself, to ask itself what we want to create for our communities, to ask ourselves how to best achieve that vision for the future. We must be prepared to put aside past industrial practices and perhaps embrace emergence and people once again.”
Leave a comment
We spend a lot of time at IISC thinking about how to talk about and practice love as a force for social change. Mike Edwards claimed in 2003 that “that the future of our world depends on how successful we are in developing and applying a new social science of love… applied in and through the systems that are essential to the functioning of all successful societies…[This kind of love is best illuminated by Rev. Dr.] Martin Luther King’s philosophy of the “love that does justice”, signifying the deliberate cultivation of mutually-reinforcing cycles of personal and systemic change…
Leave a comment
Last Thursday we celebrated almost 20 years of visionary leadership by our founding executive director, Marianne Hughes. Today we welcome Ceasar McDowell as the new President of the Interaction Institute for Social Change.
Leave a comment
Last week we started to take a look at Kevin Kelly’s take on the benefits of swarm systems. We are wondering what are the implications for movement builders. We looked at how important it is for us to be adaptable.
Kelly also says that swarm systems are evolvable. He says that these are:
Leave a comment
You’ve heard that “it takes a village to raise a child.” It also takes a village to make an IISC engagement happen. I want to raise up a shout out and express my grateful for the excellence with which our colleagues do the detailed behind-the-scenes work that makes IISC’s practice possible.
Leave a comment
I’m just coming out of a mind bending, heart expanding retreat with Orland Bishop, Rachel Bagby and the Barr Fellows Network. It was one of those experiences that is hard to put into words. For lack of a better word, and I hope Orland doesn’t mind this, it was more like being with a shaman than with a facilitator.
Orland led us in an exploration of intention and attention as he invited us to question how we relate to reality itself. He led with the idea that our relationships – and therefore our human experience – can be radically redefined if we make it our purpose to truly understand the other; and to do it with radical acceptance.
Leave a comment