Etienne Wenger provides a useful set of principles for cultivating communities of practice as living, breathing things: Design for evolution. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives. Invite different levels of participation. Develop both public and private community spaces. Focus on value. Combine familiarity and excitement. Create a rhythm for the community. Read more at the link below. via Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge – Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice – HBS Working Knowledge.
Amanda Fenton provides a very useful reference that helps underscore the reasons why core teams are important. It turns out that having 10%of a population deeply committed to an idea will significantly contribute to that idea being widely adopted by the other 90%. I don’t know about the veracity of this claim in every context but it does point to the need to abandon the idea that everyone needs to be on board to make things happen. For steel real years I have been interested in helping groups create a topography of engagement whereby a core the holds a central …
Innovation does not come without discarding ideas, trying and failing. In complex systems with complex challenges, failure is inevitable and desired. If we need to prototype to sense our way forward we have to have a mindset that can handle failure. On Saturday at the Art of Participatory Leadership in Petaluma my new friend Shawn Berry convened a session on failure and through listening to stories ranging from small prototoyping failures to business breakdowns and even deaths, I noted a few patterns that are helpful for groups and people to address failure positively nd resourcefully Frame it up. In North …
This is a brilliant description of what it is like trying to govern indigenous communities on this continent: Going back to the Two Row Wampum, it says that we’re not supposed to steer each other’s boats. But the way that I perceive things is that the canoes have been hijacked and are actually aboard the settler ship. And we are basically trying to live our canoe way of life on top of that settler ship. So saying that I’m not supposed to steer the settler ship, well, you know what, my fucking canoe is sitting in that fucking settler ship. …