Interesting reads this week:
- DeAnna Martin on a design for using Dynamic Facilitation with large groups
- Worldchanging Canada has a great post about art derived from the complexity of nature
- Metafilter link of an insane film about fishing for Great White Sharks. From a beach. Surfing is involved.
- Rob Bailey on the perfect crab curry
- Ravi Tangri on innovation in the service industry in hard times
- Nancy White, with palpable delight wraps up her take on Northern Voice
- Sheri Herndon emailed an interesting link about how Obama communicates by George Lakoff
- Dustin Rivers takes his blog to new digs. Get the new feed and follow along with the Sḵwxwú7mesh resurgence.
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Myriam Laberge posted a link to a video of David Gershon talking about what it takes to take change to scale. What struck me about the video was not so much his message as what it actually is. It’s a “trailer” for a 2007 conference sponsored by the Omega Institute.
As an artful act of invitation, this is briliant. How many of us outside the movie industry consider making trailers to gatherings? Putting audio and video to work in this way is a fantastic way to get the message out, introduce people to ideas that will be bandied around at your gathering, and it becomes a great way to have people with blogs – like me! – link to your invitation.
How else are you pushing the boundaries of invitation?
UPDATE: Geoff Brown chimes in.
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Just returned from an event in Victoria to raise money and awareness for the first ever Authentic Leadership in Action Institute (ALIA) on the West Coast (May 19-22 at Royal Roads University, if you’re interested). Last evening, 120 people packed in to hear Meg Wheatley talking about leadership in uncertain times. She spoke mostly about the capacity for fearlessness, or a leadership stance that operates beyond hope and fear. It is something that she has been talking about for a long time, and in fact, she has a recent piece in the Shambhala Sun on this very topic.
Following her presentation, my colleague Jennifer Charlesworth and I hosted a cafe on three questions to deepen the exploration of fearlessness. We were working off of Meg’s presentation, but also an excellent article of Meg’s describing Eight Fearless Questions.
So if you read these two articles you can follow along at home and engage in the three questions that we threw into the cafe. Round one was conversation around the question of “When have I been fearless in my life?” Participants were invited to find a story of fearlessness, anchoring it as a touchstone to a deeper inqury.
For the second round we asked: “Who am I called to be for these times?” This is about finding the bigger you that is called into the world to face the challenges of systemic collapse and bringing the future into being.
Finally, we ended with the question “What name do I call myself?” THis question comes directly from Meg’s eight fearless questions, and it invites us to choose a name for ourselves that can hold our whole life. THis is a name beyond who we are and who we have been – it is a name that we tremble to live into. Here’s what Meg says about that question:
I have a colleague who first suggested this to me. And he said, “So many of us choose names that are too small for a whole life.” So, we call ourselves, ‘cancer survivors;’ that seems to be a very bold name, but is it big enough to hold a life? Or, ‘children of abuse.’ Or, we call ourselves ‘orphans,’ or ‘widows,’ or ‘martyrs’…. are these names big enough to hold your life?
And the second question that just occurred to me as I was doing this is, Are we choosing names that demand fearlessness? You’re a coach. You’re an executive. You’re a consultant. You’re a teacher. You’re a minister. You’re a hospital administrator. You’re a civil servant. Are those names demanding fearlessness of us? I don’t know what the names are that would create fearlessness, but I think this is a very important question.
The last movement of the Cafe was an invitation to find a question that you could live into for the next 30 days that would keep these insights alive as a little learning journey for you.
It was a lovely evening, good to see many friends new and old, even though I barely had time to connect with any of them, and it was a delight to see Meg again and work with Jennifer.
We’d love for you to consider joining us at ALIA in May.
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Things to chew on from the last weeks newsfeeds.
- Viv McWaters writes a great piece on the role of facilitators in disastery recovery.
- Christopher Gohl‘s new blog, diagoal.
- Rob Ballentyne will take you to see the solar eclipse of a lifetime this summer (he’ll also show you a comet for free!)
- Jack Ricchiuto on using a moleskin to manage to do lists.
- Nancy White and others launch the Community and Networks Connection.
- Viv McWaters blogs about the community site for facilitators helping with the bushfire tragedy in Australia.
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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, and it often results in Boards spending a lot of time designing statements that are too high minded, and largely forgotten. It also constrains the process and uses valuable time to talk about abstract notions that might be over kill for an organization that just does one thing well. Sometimes “providing quality child care at an affordable price” is all you need to say.
So I’m thinking about what IS essential for Board planning in small organizations, and here are some of the things that make good sense to address:
What’s going on out there? A conversation about what is going on in the world and how it effects the work of the organization. This could take the form of a reflective Board meeting, a presentation on demographics or other social trends, understanding the political forces that shape their funding and operations and so on. Could be as simple as a conversation, or as involved as a learning journey. Regardless it grounds the work of the organization in the world that it serves.
What’s happening in here? What has heart and meaning for us? What do we love about the work we do in the world? What needs to be said about our contribution? Also, what is the current state of play here? What pressing issues do we have within the organization in terms of staff, funding, capital and service? This is a look at our mission and vision but also raises awareness of the important governance issues for a Board. Keeping this conversation high level has the added benefit of resulting in only the big things making the radar, meaning that the staff can concentrate on the day to day operations without being micromanaged.
What are the scenarios that might unfold? What is possible in the next five years? How might we react to things? I find scenario planning to be a fun and creative activity, and the deeper you can go into it, the more ownership people take over their futures. This kind of exercise can involve others as well, including staff, stakeholders, clients and supporters. Everyone can be involved in imagining scenarios for the future.
What decisions do we need to make? Really, all planning comes down to making decisions. Some of these are big and others are small, but if you can get a handled on the key decisions that you will be facing in the next five years, it helps to focus the work of a Board on gathering information and preparing to choose between options. So what decisions will we be faced with? A new site? New program offerings? Changing the funding model? Capital decisions? The best planning is directed at being able to make these decisions in a timely and wise fashion.
These are four main areas to focus on. Each could be the focus of a Board meeting that drives the planning process. What other simple instructions can we use to streamline the process of strategic planning for small Boards and organizations?