You might have picked up that I’m down on too much process and too much meeting. It’s a funny place for someone that makes a living facilitating. It is part of a semi-conscious effort to look at the opposite of my core assumptions and seek the wisdom there.
Leave a commentCeasar McDowell, President of the Interaction Institute for Social Change and Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT brings the concept of a “Question Campaign” to our emerging work on Cities.
The question campaign is anchored by the premise that “asking questions invites people into conversation, rather than shutting down discussion by giving only answers.” Question campaigns “generate dialogue as a crucial first step in creating actual change on the ground.” Read More
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This post is a response to yesterday’s post by Cynthia Silva Parker.
I was truly moved by Cynthia’s heartfelt exploration of anger and its role in our quest for justice. I get angry. I get angry in some healthy ways, and in many unhealthy ways.
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Last week Darren Walker opened the Resilient Cities lunch reminding us that not only do we need to work to make cities resilient and sustainable, we must also work to make them just. As I listened to Xav Briggs, Joan Clos, Toni Griffin and others speak, I thought about my work at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and what working to make just cities means for planning and planners. How does one attend to the myriad issues facing cities: poverty, crumbling infrastructure, environmental sustainability and economic collapse? Read More
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I just finished reading Mila Baker’s Peer-to-Peer Leadership: Why the Network is the Leader, which adds to the growing case for more widespread network thinking, foregrounding of human relationships, and shifting traditional conceptions (and myths) of leadership in business and beyond. Much of what Baker writes about has been expressed in the writings of others, including Clay Shirky, Carol Sanford, Nilofer Merchant, Kevin Kelly, and Harold Jarche, and I appreciate how she couches much of her writing in the evolving leadership and organizational development literature and thinking. Read More
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8/14/14 Update: Sadly the list of names in this post has grown in the past week with the deaths of Eric Barnes and Mike Brown. In both cases it appears that aggressive policing of minor offenses escalated, resulting in deaths that did not need to happen. #blacklivesmatter
I find the fact that we need a conversation called #BlackLivesMatter disturbing. But it’s a badly needed conversation and one that needs to catalyze effective action. It’s urgent that we create a context where it’s no longer “understandable” that someone could be afraid enough of an unarmed black person to justify killing him or her.
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The following post has been written by Royve Holladay at The Adaptive Action. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Can three questions really change the world? Well, maybe. Let’s think about it for a minute. One thing we know about schools is that nothing stays the same for long. Each year brings the latest “best practice.” Each week brings a new procedure and its paperwork. Each day, our students pose new challenges. Each hour, the media bombards us with news about the latest crisis. What might possibly help us keep our balance as the world shifts beneath us?
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The following post has been reblogged from our friend August Turak. Check out more of August’s amazing work!
The industrial age led to the compartmentalization of life. We turned everything into a silo. We even siloed ourselves. Here I am spiritual, here I am fun, here I work… We have been looking at personal development through that limited lens. But August Turak points us in a different direction. He invites us to make “personal development” the central purpose of our lives. When we make our own evolution a central purpose in our lives we become active contributors to the evolution of consciousness and culture as well as the material changes we want to see in the world. I hope you enjoy this post from August Turak as much as we did.
2 Comments“Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.”
-Susan Cain
“How Not to Manage an Introvert” (by Nguyen Hung Vu)
For several months I’ve been meaning to read Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking. Having completed it this past weekend, I have both a sense of validation (being one of ever-more introverted tendencies as the years pass) and being able to see with new eyes. IMHO, it is well worth the read, and if the thought of tackling the 300 pages is daunting, you might enjoy a taste via Cain’s TED Talk.
Here I wanted to reflect on some of the insights Cain’s work has to offer collaboration and “net work” for change. Read More
9 CommentsCheck out this relaxed conversation between Dr. King and Merv Griffin. Dr. King reflects on the political context in Atlanta, which he called the most progressive city in the South—and the opportunities it afforded for progress for civil rights. Toward the end, Dr. King reflects on the progress to date in civil rights.
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“We have to rid ourselves of the notion that innovation relies on the genius of an individual. We produce and innovate together only in networks.”
– Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
This is our second post about the Social Justice Funders Network. Read the previous post here.
For those who read this blog on a somewhat regular basis, you know that we at IISC find and experience great promise in embracing network approaches to (and as) social change. So what happens when we truly see ourselves as and in networks; that is, appreciating how we are inextricably embodied through and embedded in interconnected flows of energy, material goods, ideas, intentions, etc.?
Ten thoughts, in no particular order, nor meant to be exhaustive: Read More
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