My mate Geoff Brown blogs his experience running a music festival using improvisation, trust and the gift economy as an operating system: Over the weekend, myself and Marty Maher and a bunch of other volunteers stage the 3rd annual Aireys Inlet Open Mic Music Festival. Apart from being an absolutely outrageous success, it was loads of fun and we designed and staged it all without a Steering Committee (yaaay) ” or a detailed strategic plan for that matter! Go read the results: The Fun & Improvisation of a Music Festival – the backstory | Yes and Space.
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Phil Cubeta poses a set of very good questions about the language we use to think about organizational worlds. He challenges us to see the living systems view with these questions: Questions When we adopt the language of social enterprise, or social investing, or a social capital markets do we embrace metaphors more sterile than those of the fox, loam, carrion, the crop, and the harvest? What is lost when our master metaphors are commercial? Can we engineer solutions to our ills, or can we only be cured? Might the cure be organic, from within, from sources that lie deep …
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Jack Ricchiuto on simplifying strategy: Every organization, and community, I work with on strategy is very relieved when I liberate them from the inane practice of traditional academic language in the process. I refuse to allow them to waste valuable time debating over the distinctions of: goal, objective, strategy, tactic, and night maneuvers. (I throw in the military reference to “night maneuvers” to inject humor into what is usually a very humorless and uninspired process – and it works.) What do we do instead? We replace these never-agreed-upon jargon with complex words like: where, why, how, and what. To be …
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A nice indictment – chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov on the submission of creativity to the dull incrementalisim of logic models: With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a …
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Meg Wheatley on great questions to ask as we think about measurement, especially in complex living systems (like human communities): Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others’ experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure. How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are …