I am a big fan of Seth Godin. But this particular post seems to be extra relevant! Those of us that are working for justice too often get caught up in the dead-end negativity he describes. But thankfully we are also at a moment of transition! And more and more of us are stepping boldly into the future with a passionate and resounding YES!
See what you think.
Last week Seth wrote a blog post titled When execution gets cheaper, so should planning. Provocative statement, specially when planning is at the score of your business!
Here is how he concludes:
The goal should be to have the minimum number of meetings and scenarios and documentation necessary to maximize the value of execution. As it gets faster and easier to actually build the thing, go ahead and make sure the planning (or lack of it) keeps pace.
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I caught this drawing posted among many other charts in IISC Learning Center. It caught my attention. I have long been familiar with the idea that silence equals complicity. But I always applied it to movement and our work for justice. I never quite thought of it as applying to organizational dynamics.
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Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing
-T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Dante’s Inferno.
Our friend and colleague Roberto Cremonini recently shared the above quote with a budding community of practice coming together around networks. It is the epigraph to Imagine, Jonah Lehrer’s latest book on creativity. It seems to make more sense today than ever before. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We are social animals. Makes me think of the definition of Ubuntu – I am because we are.
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“We are all called to be warriors of love for transformation.” That’s how Billy Wimsatt closed the Transforming Race conference. “If we’re transforming race, gender, America, we’re doing it from the place of fiercest love.” This is a love for one’s community, oneself, one’s planet and all people that can’t stand idle while people are suffering. A love that won’t tolerate the exclusion or marginalization or degradation of others.
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At Transforming Race, Dr. Vandana Shiva started her talk with a provocative comment. “I don’t know why the love for monoculture and the love for power are so intimately connected.” She went on to detail the calculated efforts of the British to subjugate the Indian people, in part by imposing the production of cash crops, destroying their ability to produce food and destroying their markets.
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“From honeybee swarms we’ve learned that groups can reliably make good decisions in a timely matter as long as they seek diversity of knowledge. By studying termite mounds we’ve seen how even small contributions to a shared project can create something useful. Finally, flocks of starlings have shown us how, without direction from a single leader, members of a group can coordinate their behavior with amazing precision simply by paying attention to their nearest neighbor.”
– Peter Miller, The Smart Swarm
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Last night we came together as IISC to bid farewell to the great Melinda Weekes; we are proud that she is moving on to be the Managing Director of the Applied Research Center. But today’s is not a post about Melinda. It is a post about community.
Leave a comment“ What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.”
-Excerpt from The New Jim Crow
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Our country is at a crossroads. We have a choice to make. Greater wealth for a few or opportunity for many. Tax breaks for the richest or a fair shot for the rest of us. A government that can be bought by the highest bidder, or a democracy that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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Sometimes you fall in love with a client. There is a sweet spot where your own heart’s purpose is fully aligned with what your client is trying to do in the world. In that sweet spot they are no longer really a client – you become true partners.
I’ve just wrapped up the contracted part of our work with Urban Bush Women, but I’m certain that ours is a partnership that will continue.
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I asked my colleagues for suggestions about grassroots leaders and organizations doing great things in the world. One suggestion was Boston-based Reflect & Strengthen, which turned ten in 2011.
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