From a great set of advice on writing: Creativity is inexhaustible. Experiment, play, throw away. Above all be confident enough about creativity to throw stuff out. If it isn’t working, don’t cut and paste – scrap it and begin again. – Jeanette Winterston Remind yourself, every day, that you’re doing this to try to find something out about yourself, about the world, about words and how they fit together. Writing is investigation. Just keep seeking. – Naomi Alderman.
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …