Over the years I’ve written about how convoluted strategic planning gets for most organizations. Most of the small non-profits I work with seem to think it’s wise to use mainstream business strategic planning frameworks to plot their way forward. Even though these frameworks are pursued with the best of intentions, for many volunteer Boards of small and meagerly funded organizations, it’s usually overkill to adopt highly technical frameworks for planning. It might just be too much. Even the process of vision, mission, goals and objectives is often too overbearing because it tends to force conversations into boxes, …
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Johnnie Moore has a great post today that discusses how people act within three distinct forms of networking. Along the way he points out that in the above diagram we have too much A and B masquerading as C. IN the discussion he praises the establishment of seemingly redundant links in a network, which is something I am heavily in favour of as well. The more ways you have to work between people, the more creative you can be and more truly community you are. Johnnie rolls this into his observation of how people behave in Open Space …
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Finally settling into Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago. In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation. These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting. In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook. Here is the list, with my thoughts attached. From John McKnight: Focus on gifts. …
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Jon Husband has been threatening to write his book on Wirearchy for as long as I’ve known him, and I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, he is posting what could well be a chapter from it in two parts over at his blog in a post he calls Perspectives on Designing and Managing Knowledge Work. (This is me nudging him to get it done so I can add it to my list of books by friends…:-) ) In a synchronous moment, also today George Por, a mutual friend of Jon and I published …
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Jon Husband: I’ve suggested that in networks we come together around a purpose and objectives, and then begin to discover appropriate skills sets and motivations amongst members of a given network .. after which we begin to negotiate what we are going to do and why, who’s going to do what,how and by when, and then make this strategic information available, in full view, to all who are participating in the conversations, exchanges of information and the actual work (which often consists of pointing each other to pertinent just-in-time information that will make achieving the negotiated objectives easier or more …