“El Hielo” by La Santa Cecilia
It’s a big week for the immigration debate among our policy makers. If you watch one video today, let it be this one.
Leave a commentTag Archive: Sustainability
The Importance of Scheduling Nothing
The following post has been reblogged from Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner. We hope you enjoy this post along with some of his other blog posts!
If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.
2 CommentsIts going to be Alright
Collaboration for Discovery
In the early days, when “normal” people first started using the web, we saw websites that looked just like our pamphlets. We used the new technology to do the same thing we always did – until we dared to experiment.
Leave a commentGot Bias?
A big shout out to our colleagues at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Their recently released report “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013” reviews what science can tell us about what implicit bias is and how it works, why it matters and how to reduce it. Here’s a quick recap:
Implicit bias results from the way our brains process data and experience. We’re wired for pattern recognition and our brains use lots of shortcuts to make sense of the world around us. In and of itself, this isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing. But, so many of the implicit associations we make are laden with stereotypes—say, between women and family, vs. men and careers. (Check out the Project Implicit to explore your implicit biases.) We absorb these associations from the world around us and they become part of our unconscious “operating system.”
7 CommentsOctavia and Emergence
The following post was rebloged from our friend Adrienne Maree. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
If you are a frequent reader you know of my love and admiration for Adrienne Maree Brown. She is the one who introduced me to the work of Octavia Butler. Art, science fiction, futurism – these are powerful exploratory fields. Here Adrienne begins to capture what Octavia teaches us about emergence, and since we have been on the topic lately, I thought it important to share her post.
Leave a commentNetwork Organizing
Our colleague Bill Traynor describes essential inputs and outcomes of network organizing. See what you think!
In a recent presentation to the Ways and Means Staff of The Community Builders, we discussed the primary inputs and resulting added value that the Network Organizing practice can bring to a service environment. This slide captures the essence of this.
1 CommentConditions for Emergence
The following comments was posted by Gibran as a response to Curtis Ogden‘s Collective Impact and Emergence blog post. In it we are challenged to think beyond our institutions and think about how to truly impact the communities we work with.
This is excellent Curtis. It brings me back to one of our most important inquiries – how do you nurture the conditions for emergence? With this inquiry, we are not just saying that emergence happens; we are saying that our best approach is to nurture it. It is a significant shift from a more top-down technical approach.
Leave a commentChange is Hard
“Change is hard because people don’t only think on the surface level. Deep down people have mental maps of reality — embedded sets of assumptions, narratives and terms that organize thinking… People almost never change their underlying narratives or unconscious frameworks…”
This is David Brooks, focusing on the woes of a Republican Party that is struggling to reinvent itself. But the fact applies to all sorts of change.
Leave a commentReframing the Systems We Want
|Photo by Darrel Birkett|http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrelbirkett/6935043394/sizes/m/in/photostream|
I’ve been playing with different reflection questions lately to try and help various networks and multi-stakeholder collaborative change efforts put a clearer and more aligned frame around the kinds of systems (food, education, health, etc.) that would yield more equitable, sustainable, and enriching results. This is not to pretend that they can take control of the systems and command them to be different, but rather to create an image toward which they can nudge these systems via various leverage points. In one recent convening, I borrowed a page from critical systems heuristics, which asks us to identify and play with the existing systemic boundaries, including motivation, power, expertise and legitimacy. Read More
Leave a commentOPEN Summit
I’ve been on a whirlwind. And it began with my facilitation of OPEN Summit. The first ever leadership gathering of the world’s leading Online Progressive Engagement Networks. Think MoveOn.org as replicated in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Germany and Papua New Guinea. The great (and unbelievably sweet) Ben Brandzel had been dreaming this up for years!
Leave a comment“The World Needs Us to Be Fearless”
As they neared their 15th anniversary, the Case Foundation published “To be Fearless” as both a reflection on its work and a challenge to philanthropy and the social sector. The following are excerpts from this report, written by Cynthia Gibson and Brad Rourke for the Case Foundation. (“To Be Fearless,” The Case Foundation, 2012.)
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