The following is a letter by Akaya Windwood, President of the Rockwood Leadership Institute and member of the IISC Board of Directors.
As you can see from my new photo, I’ve decided to stop dyeing my hair. I am now officially a gray-haired woman. When I turned 55 last year, I made a deeper commitment to authenticity, and that included looking in the actual mirror (and not just the mirror of my conscience).
Leave a comment
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections
– Stowe Boyd
Today, Curtis Odgen and I will be hosting an LLC Webinar on Collective Leadership. We are talking about a significant shift in how we organize our work for social transformation. Stowe Boyd, the net’s social anthropologist, recently posted what he calls the beginnings of an elevator pitch on “New Mutualism.” I found it resonant, relevant and tremendously exciting; here it goes:
4 Comments
Next Tuesday, my colleague Gibran Rivera and I are excited to lead a webinar hosted by our friends at the Leadership Learning Community called “If You Till It They Will Come: Nurturing Collective Leadership.” The above slide is a bit of a sneak peak, and certainly one of the headier, nonetheless important, elements we will cover. The idea behind this graphic comes from the work of Carol Sanford, who has highlighted the fact that our leadership and change methodologies are always grounded in an underlying belief system about what we hold to be true about the world and humanity. Not being aware of or transparent about this can get us into difficulty when we are mixing and matching techniques/methods that may contradict one another, or when we are not operating from the same system of beliefs as others. So here is how we are tracing the roots of our approach to cultivating collective leadership for social change: Read More
Leave a comment
|Image by Dionne Hartnett|http://www.flickr.com/photos/dionnehartnett/6289336176|
I spent time over the break reading through Howard Bloom’s robust Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. Described as a “lusty tome” by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, the book is an exploration of history through the lens of group rather than simply individual selection. Bloom’s concept of collective information processing is eye-opening, provocative, and possibility-inspiring. It is also very timely given the growing emphasis on networks and collective approaches to change. Here is a taste, found in the opening pages: Read More
Leave a comment
Last week, Melinda Weekes and I participated in the Presencing Institute’s Global Presencing Forum. It was an excellent experience at the edge of social innovation. It was great to be in the presence of Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge (see Scharmer’s reflections here). And even better to in the company of a global community of people seeking to advance social technologies that can actually address the challenges we face.
Comments Off on Entering the Field of the Future
The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do
when things are falling apart? You’re either going to become
more fundamentalist and try to hold things together or you’re
going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an
experiment, making it up as you go along.
-Pema Chödrön
I’m blown away by #occupywallstreet. And I am thrilled by the conversation it has unleashed – sometimes amused, sometimes frustrated and often moved. I’ll be at Liberty Plaza this Friday.
I’m appreciating the political discussion, the strategic questions, the desire for racial inclusion in this emergent process. However this turns out, it is way bigger than a protest. Something is changing, Kevin Kelly points to it: Read More
Leave a comment
The great Kevin Kelly recently wrote a post titled “Cities are Immortal, Companies Die.” He states that
Both are types of networks, with different destinies. There are two basic network forms: organisms or ecosystems. Companies are like organisms, while cities are like ecosystems.
This is a phenomenally helpful distinction. Our work here at IISC includes network building as well as leadership and organizational development, and we don’t find these to be mutually exclusive.
Leave a comment
Our first son was born on Saturday, he came two months early and he is AMAZING. Clearly I am gushing with joy, excitement and love! I have spent very little time with our baby (who hasn’t yet told us his name), but I am already enraptured by him – bonded, mightily connected. And isn’t that so much of what we talk about here on the IISC Blog? Love, connection – life, evolution. Read More
Leave a comment
|Photo by SidPix|http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidm/4813665260|
I’ve been sitting with a story I just heard relayed by Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, systems and evolutionary biologist. (If you are interested in a great and uplifting podcast, check out the full interview, entitled “From Caterpillars to Butterflies.”)
Dr. Sahtouris was attending a basketball game in China and was seated next to a Chinese man who cheered wildly after the first basket of the game was scored. When the other team scored its first basket, he cheered with equal enthusiasm. He continued to do this for each basket scored by either team. Finally, Dr. Sahtouris turned to the man and asked, “Which team is yours?” The man replied, “What do you mean?” Dr. Sahtouris said, “Well, which team do you want to win?” He replied, “What difference does it make?” To which she replied, “Well, why are you pitting two teams against one another?” He responded, “To drive excellence. We applaud the excellence wherever it happens.”
Same game, different frame . . .
One of the guiding mantras here at the Interaction Institute is the idea that “the success of an intervention is directly proportional to the inner condition of the intervener.” This idea and our commitment to “the love that does justice,” help us to uphold those practices that nurture our inner condition and facilitate our capacity to love. It is with this commitment in mind that I share the following review:
Sally Kempton has written a wonderful book. Meditation for the Love of It is a breath of fresh air in this current wave of meditation literature. Pleased as I am by the booming interest in the practice of meditation, I am often frustrated by what feels like a one sided perspective of a beautifully multi-faceted tradition. A masterful teacher, a great writer who is able to transmit her own direct experience of the Self, Sally Kempton makes accessible a rich meditation tradition that could otherwise be relegated to the inaccessible realms of esoterica. Read More
6 Comments