All right friends, it’s time. I’m going to write my first e-book. I’m going to do it in 30 days using the process outlined here. Today is day 1. I will be posting daily updates to my Facebook and twitter feeds.
I need your help. I want to write about “teams, work and complexity,” I don’t have a title yet. But it doesn’t matter what I want to write about if you don’t want to read about it! The first two days of the process are about asking you for a topic. See what copyblogger says:
All right friends, it’s time. I’m going to write my first e-book. I’m going to do it in 30 days using the process outlined here. Today is day 1. I will be posting daily updates to my Facebook and twitter feeds.
I need your help. I want to write about “teams, work and complexity,” I don’t have a title yet. But it doesn’t matter what I want to write about if you don’t want to read about it! The first two days of the process are about asking you for a topic. See what copyblogger says:
The Interaction Institute for Social Change remembers Margarita Muñiz, educator, leader, champion- as well as one of our beloved Barr Fellows. The following is reposted from the Boston Globe column written by Yvonne Abraham. We could not have said it better.
How do you turn an abandoned school in a crime-ridden neighborhood into a gleaming beacon drawing children and grateful parents from across the city?
“We can only have honest, effective hope if the frame through which we see is an accurate representation of how the world works.”
– Frances Moore Lappe
|Photo by Jim Bahn|http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcwest/6142854588|
With a warm welcome and opening offering of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Escape,” Danny Martin and I launched into our session last week at the Bioneers by the Bay Conference entitled, “Belonging and Becoming: Practices for Regenerative Leadership.” The framing of our 90 minutes was the call to connect more deeply with the ways of complex living systems, to align ourselves more fully with life so that we might thrive as a human community.
During the first half of our session we took the poet’s suggestion to escape the “glass bottles of our egos” and access “unlying life” by engaging in some paired storytelling focused on the values that have guided us in our lives. This was our effort to cultivate a deeper sense of belonging in the room, and we were amazed to hear how much people took from listening to one another for even 10 minutes. Read More
The following is a post from my friend and colleague Danny Martin, that appeared on his web page on Monday, following our joint workshop at Connecting for Change, a Bioneers Conference. Tomorrow I will extend this reflection with more details about our session and regenerative leadership practice.
So much to say this week but it all turns on the same theme of how to access the wisdom we need to move forward together into a more sustainable and just society. In a recent article about what he calls The New Economy Movement, Gar Alperovitz, a Professor of Political Economy in the University of Maryland, says that, instead of feeling confined to the binary paths of reforming the broken economic system or revolting to overthrow it, citizens are opting to create something new that will replace the current economic regime, making the old system obsolete in the process. He calls this third way ‘evolutionary reconstruction.’ Read More
More than one hundred Occupy Boston activists were arrested last night for acts of civil disobedience. We stand in solidarity with this local expression of the growing national effort to expose the economic injustices that have come to plague our democracy. Please contribute legal aid to Occupy Boston – donate here.
What do I want badly enough to investin pursuing it—in spite of the obstacles and competing claims on my time and attention, in spite of the risks and the guarantees of uncertainty, in spite of the risk of rejection and the possibility of failure?
I have asked this question for a couple of weeks running. I offered a few thoughts from a Barbara Kingsolver quote to get the conversation started: “elementary kindness…enough to eat, enough to go around… the possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
|Photo by umjanedoan|http://www.flickr.com/photos/umjanedoan/497411169/#|
In our Whole Measures workshop, we come to a point when participants realize that the promise of learning how to “measure what matters most” is not a case of digesting “best practices.” This is often a difficult moment, one fraught with frustration, but also the beginnings of insight (or a reminder) that we are each part of a gradual unfolding that is unique depending upon our particular context, and that to simply embrace some kind of cookie-cutter method of measuring health and wholeness is futile. This is so, in part, because before we measure what matters most, we must determine what matters most, and this changes from system to system. Furthermore, it is no easy task of discernment. Often people are good at setting goals, or talking abstractly about “values,” but this does not always equate with getting to heart of what is most meaningful to us, as demonstrated by the lives we actually live or our hearts’ deepest desires. One of the best processes we’ve found for doing this is to embrace storytelling. Read More
|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.”
|Photo by wwarby|http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/2310975386|
A friend recently relayed the following story about how some baby elephants are tamed, for cirucuses and other forms of work. As part of its training, the baby is tied it to a steel stake in the ground, strong enough to prevent it from breaking free when it tries to do so. Eventually, the elephant will give up and stop trying to escape. I imagine that this is not the complete story, but keeping with this trajectory . . . At a certain point, the trainer can replace the steel stake with a smaller wooden one, despite the fact that it would never hold the elephant if it tried to break free. An elephant trained to believe that the stake is strong will not try to break loose and run. Read More
I’ve really been enjoying reading The Dragonfly Effect, by husband and wife team Andy Smith and Jennifer Aaker. Having just recently shared the opening powerful story about Teams Vinay and Sameer with my wife, I was delighted to see this slide show come up via Twitter (how appropriate). Take a look (don’t be intimidated by the number of slides, you can move through them very quickly). It’s also a great example of how to tell a story with PowerPoint. Curious to know what thoughts and possibilities this inspires in you.
