Tag Archive: values

May 3, 2013

What is Strategy

Photo provided by Alex Pelayo. Check out the rest of his amazing portfolio here!

This post is Part II in a series on Strategic Planning and Emergence.

It doesn’t make much sense to look at strategic planning without taking a look at what we mean by strategy.  There doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus on what people mean when they use the word strategy.  I like the way Thomas Rice, IISC’s founding board chair, talks about it here.  Thomas stresses that strategy is about how you choose to deploy scarce resources in order to achieve your goals.

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March 20, 2013

Network Gardening

gardening

|Photo by idleformat|http://www.flickr.com/photos/idleformat/2062534673|

An interesting innovation I’ve seen recently in the realm of network building for social change is the creation of what is being called, in one particular system with which I am working, the “Network Support Team.”  In the context of what has emerged to this point as an “alignment network” focused on state-wide food system development and addressing community food insecurity, this volunteer team has stepped forward to help “tend to the whole.”  It functions much as a good gardener would in her attempts to nurture abundance and flourishing.  As this network considers movement into a more action/production-oriented mode, here is how the NST is helping the garden to grow: Read More

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March 18, 2013

Got 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.”

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February 8, 2013

"We don't need to make it better"

The following post has been reblogged from our amazing friends at Seth’s Blog. We hope you like it as much as we did! 

Improvement comes with many costs.

It costs time and money to make something better. It’s risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.

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February 8, 2013

“We don’t need to make it better”

The following post has been reblogged from our amazing friends at Seth’s Blog. We hope you like it as much as we did! 

Improvement comes with many costs.

It costs time and money to make something better. It’s risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.

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February 5, 2013

Change 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.

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January 29, 2013

Seneca Falls, Selma, Stone Wall

Something BIG happened on Monday, January 21, 2013.  In his second inaugural address President Obama made an unapologetic link between the struggles for liberation and our nation’s evolutionary thrust.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.

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January 27, 2013

A Down-to-Earth Economy

The following post has been reblogged from our friends at yes! Magazine. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did! 

Nature surrounds us with expressions of the organizing principles that make possible life’s exceptional resilience, capacity for adaptation, creative innovation, and vibrant abundance.” Read on as David Korten outlines how paying attention to natural systems can help us develop human systems that will sustain us for the long haul.

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January 22, 2013

Clinton on Creative Networks

I keep making references to Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect.  That’s because I find it to be one of the best articulations of what has become possible in this networked world. I am seduced by the idea of peer progressivism.

I have long held the hypothesis that those of us who have committed our lives to social transformation should be able to find a significant competitive advantage in a world of networks.  Our ethos should be one of sharing, one of working together, one of catalyzing our collective power.  Our values resonate with what is possible today.  But the time to step into this opportunity is right now – right as it is emerging.

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