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Complexity and movements change culture

September 13, 2016 By Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Culture, Design, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation, Flow, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy

As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors.  They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context. This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts …

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The essence of learning as an artist

September 12, 2016 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Complexity, Learning One Comment

My friend Avril Orloff shared this beautiful quote on her facebook page. “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.  A lot of people never get past …

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Reconciliation

September 11, 2016 By First Nations 2 Comments

The number one job of settlers is to seek the places that unsettle you and just stay there, prepared to linger there a long time so that in your openness and vulnerability and confusion you might finally enter into relationship with the land and people you have unsettled. 

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Leadership traits for working in diverse contexts

September 6, 2016 By Leadership One Comment

Vu Le pays tribute today to his friend Bob Santos who was a leader in Seattle in the field of non-profit leadership and social change. To do so he listed nine key traits for leaders working in diversity, and the whole post is like an index to a life long curriculum on managing diverse teams in diverse contexts.  Leaders, especially those with traditional privilege in the non-profit sector, would do well to see these as basics rules to guide their leadership: See the strength in uncertainty Consider differing viewpoints Understand that everyone is affected by unjust systems Remember that we …

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Radical innovation is never acceptable

August 29, 2016 By Emergence, Featured, First Nations, Leadership, Organization, Philanthropy, Youth 9 Comments

My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change.  We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective.  I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest.  Here is one juicy line: This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest …

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