January 5, 2016
A couple of years ago, I was turned on to the work of Louise Diamond. Diamond has been bringing insights from the dynamics of complex systems to peace building work for many years. Her efforts connect to a growing number of practitioners and thinkers who see the need to approach social change with an ecological and evolutionary mindset. In one of her papers, she extracts some of the “simple rules” that yield core practices for working in this way. Here I have adapted and adjusted some of them in application to network building for change and resilience in food systems. Read More
July 11, 2012
It often emerges as a core tension in our complex multi-stakeholder change work. It’s embodied in comments such as, “Let’s stop all this talking and start doing something!” Or, “I’m not a big process person, I just want to get to action.”
In the New England Regional Food Summit two weeks ago, speaker Rich Pirog raised the importance of trying to find, in an ongoing fashion, a balance between process and action. This he has learned from doing many years of building regional food networks in the Midwest. It is certainly the case that we can over-talk, over-think and over-process together, driving one another crazy and/or from the room. And we can also jump blindly, prematurely, and harmfully to action.
So how do we strike an artful balance and keep differently oriented people in the game? A few thoughts:
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February 15, 2012
|Photo by Hans Poldoja|
Last week I was privileged to attend a gathering of practitioners from across sectors to discuss the successes and challenges of working in networked ways. The Northern New England Network Community of Practice met in Portsmouth, NH for a full day of conversations facilitated by members of Maine Network Partners. Throughout the day many critical questions were raised about and stemming from net work. No one pretended to necessarily have all of the answers to these, or to imagine that what works in one case will necessarily work in another. Nonetheless, we look forward to exploring any patterns that do show up across experiences in our respective network efforts, whether we are talking small or large scale, local or regional, within a sector or across sectors . . . Read More
