Tag Archive: transformation
September 21, 2012
The following is a letter by Akaya Windwood, President of the Rockwood Leadership Institute and member of the IISC Board of Directors.
About a week ago I was in my car on my way home, and traveling toward me on the busy sidewalk was a young man (20-ish) on a skateboard. It took a moment for me to register that he had a toddler-aged girl on his shoulders. Neither of them had helmets or shin pads or any protection whatsoever.
My first thought was “Stop! Get that child off his shoulders — they could both be killed if he hits a rock! This is child endangerment!!!” All my alarms started clanging, and I was on HIGH alert.
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September 17, 2012
Beth O’Neill, of Interaction Associates recently led a session on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). It’s the only thing she has seen in her many years as a coach and consultant that actually helps people change beliefs. NLP gets at the deep structure of what we’re trying to communicate, rather than focusing on what comes out at surface structure of our communication. It explores how our thoughts, actions and feelings work together right now to produce our experience. It’s a practical way to get at the unconscious, looking at what’s running our patterns, and creating opportunities for us to make conscious changes that bring forth the outcomes we seek.
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September 14, 2012
Facilitative Leadership® is a model of leadership rooted in a whole systems approach, shared power and decision-making, and collaborative skill. It is informed by some of the most important drivers of social change including a commitment to equity and inclusion and networks as levers for change, and a belief in love as a force for social transformation.
At the heart of the workshop are seven powerful leadership practices that will help you create a work environment distinguished by outstanding performance and personal satisfaction.
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September 14, 2012
Facilitative Leadership® is a model of leadership rooted in a whole systems approach, shared power and decision-making, and collaborative skill. It is informed by some of the most important drivers of social change including a commitment to equity and inclusion and networks as levers for change, and a belief in love as a force for social transformation.
At the heart of the workshop are seven powerful leadership practices that will help you create a work environment distinguished by outstanding performance and personal satisfaction.
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September 11, 2012
There is nothing wrong with strategic planning – except when we believe that strategy unfolds as planned. A good strategic planning process is one that crystalizes our intention. It is the process through which we articulate a clear vision of where we want to go. And it is how we come to a clear agreement on which direction we are going to take. It is not insurance on the future. The map can never be the territory.
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September 7, 2012
If you’ve been reading Curtis’ blog posts this week, you might be considering what it means to be an evolutionary. If you live in or near Boston, you should join us as we deepen this conversation.
Our friends at EnlightenNext Boston are hosting a dialogue between Amy Edelstein, senior teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment and myself this Friday, September 21, 7:15pm – 9:30pm at Samadhi Integral in Newton Centre.
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September 3, 2012
Happy 130th Birthday, [Organized] Labor Day!
On this Labor Day, let’s remember its origins in the ranks of organized labor. But first, a look at which workers we’re celebrating today.
Who’s unionized now? (Source: Huffington Post: Labor Day History: 11 Facts You Need to Know)
Service station attendants 96,000
Musicians, singers and related workers 179,000
Bakers 183,000
Pharmacists 232,000
Firefighters: 258,000
Chefs and head cooks: 281,000
Taxi drivers and chauffeurs 286,000
Hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists: 718,000
Farmers and ranchers 825,000
Teachers 6.5 million
Not to mention health care workers, police and many other professions.
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August 14, 2012
From a world where words like “strategy” and “planning” still convey an air of seriousness and rigor, it can be hard to transition to a world defined by emergence. But VUCA is here to stay – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity will continue to define our age.
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July 24, 2012
I met Katya Fels Smyth about four years ago at the Opportunity Collaboration, I remember sitting next to her on the bus to the conference site and being immediately intrigued by her passion and by the very idea of a Full Frame Initiative. It so happens that Ceasar McDowell, our new IISC President is on the Board of the Full Frame Initiative. We are truly proud to have him be our “Fearless Leader.” The following blogpost was written by Katya for the Case Foundation’s Fearless Campaign. Here is my favorite line: “be agnostic as to ‘issue’ but laser focused on people”
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July 17, 2012
Marty Kearns, our friend at Netcentric Advocacy, tackles an important distinction and invites us to strategize with the difference in mind. I found this this to be an excellent piece for advocates.
Organizing and Mobilizing – 2 Distinct Strategies in Your Advocacy Effort.
I have been struggling lately to get more clarity on the concepts of organizing and mobilizing. These are terms of art in my world but often see the concepts mashed together. These terms do not mean the same thing in an advocacy context and BOTH are very important.
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July 16, 2012
In this post, Jeremy Liu (an esteemed IISC Board member) encourages the community development field “to figure out how to embrace the strengths of our past as a movement, even more so than becoming more established as an industry.” I think this is wise advice for many fields in the nonprofit sector, where so many organizations and institutions emerged from resistance movements and have passed through various stages of institutionalization and even bureaucratization. Jeremy ends with an important invitation for the community development field that could easily be for all of us: “it will continue to be important for our field to question itself, to ask itself what we want to create for our communities, to ask ourselves how to best achieve that vision for the future. We must be prepared to put aside past industrial practices and perhaps embrace emergence and people once again.”
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July 9, 2012
We spend a lot of time at IISC thinking about how to talk about and practice love as a force for social change. Mike Edwards claimed in 2003 that “that the future of our world depends on how successful we are in developing and applying a new social science of love… applied in and through the systems that are essential to the functioning of all successful societies…[This kind of love is best illuminated by Rev. Dr.] Martin Luther King’s philosophy of the “love that does justice”, signifying the deliberate cultivation of mutually-reinforcing cycles of personal and systemic change…
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