Hard on the heels of Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s new book Walk Out Walk On comes a commissioned single from my mates Tim Merry and Marc Durkee by the same name. Tim and Marc have beenmaking poems and music for the past five years or so about the work we all do in the world. THis is a great sounding track, and covers what it is we do in a beautiful and inspiring way.
Just off a call where we were discussing what it takes to shift paradigms in indigenous social development. We noted that we hear a lot from people that they are busy and challenged and they need clear paths forward otherwise they are wasting their time. I have a response to that. We don’t know what we are doing. Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in what we have now. The work of social change – paradigm shifting social innovation – is not easy, clear or efficient. If you are up for it you will confront some of …
Last week I was in a number of conversations about the role of governments and their relationships to citizens. I heard a common metaphor in these conversations, one which sounded familiar to me from my days working in the federal public service: people were speaking of citizens as customers. In their desire to provide good services and meet community needs, governments often consider citizens as customers. Big consulting firms, perhaps re-purposing their commercial processes, sell this idea. Conservative commentators and those who import business ideas into the realm of public administration are enamoured by the simplicity of the metaphor. The …
The new issue of Fieldnotes is out from ALIA and within it, Art Kleiner muses about the metaphor of the body’s systems as a way of understanding information flow in organizations: – The hierarchy is a circulatory system for messages of authority; specifically, for anything that can be expressed as a number. It is the means by which the organization seeks scale. It flows from and to the top: the CEO and then the shareholders or owners. It might be analogous to muscle coordination. – The network conveys knowledge – in the form of gossip, …
This past week I have been in Minnesota working with colleagues Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles and Mandy Ellerton. We were conducting a second residential training in collaborative leadership with a number of planning grantees working in communities to make impacts on the social and economic determinants of health. In this residential we spent a fair bit of time working on tactical community organizing, exploring how to teach this from the perspective of the Art of Hosting. The traditional tactics of Alinsky-style community organizing operate by creating strategic targets for action and mobilizing community power against those targets. It’s a zero-sum …