The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act.
There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.
Photo by Darwin Bell
Hyperlinks –
follow these leads
a thread.
- Haiku resources
- My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang!
- Richard Sweeney weaves with paper.
- A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of.
- Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven?
- Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations
- You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world.
- Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…)
- Doug’s blog: Footprints in the Wind, which I read all the time, and so should you.
- From Nancy…the power of a line.
From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.
Doubt hunts us on the trail. It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it. We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.
In these moments what is needed is a stand. We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down. We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.
Large scale change is never certain. Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty. IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do. The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us. If it is not within us, we will never find it. We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end. At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.
Taholah, Washington
If this article is any indication, the future of management will require more hosts and less bosses. Hierarchies are disappearing, top-down and centralized is giving way to distributed, and organizations are becoming more open and engaging of stakeholders.
That is true everywhere in my experience, including here at the Quinault Indian Nation where we are reframing the tribal government’s strategic plan in several unique ways. First we have established a core team of stakeholders from the government and community who are willing to take responsibility for stewarding the plan. Second, the core team has proposed a new strategic plan model that organizes work not by the departments and programs of the Quinault government structure, but rather by “domains” which are yet to be determined but may end up being things like “prosperity” and “learning.” Organizing the aspirations and preferred futures of the nation this way means that the government departments need to talk to each other and the community to move the Nation forward. And finally the new plan requires engagement with many many people, to bring in the wisdom and ownership of the community so that the plan is theirs. Tomorrow for example we will be hosting an ongoing cafe in the lobby outside the Nation’s general council meeting, where we will be hosting conversations with community members and capturing wisdom with a graphic facilitator.
As a result, our planning sessions are a combination of work and facilitation training because the core team knows that to do this means that they have to talk to people. So we are exploring how to convene conversations that matter and that have an impact.
How is the shift in management changing the way you plan strategy?
Tahola, Washington
From Euan:
Management is becoming about noticing and enabling rather than driving and controlling.Get yourselves a big melting pot of different social tools that engender different conversations and expressions of intent from your staff, watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and then protect the baby shoots from your spoilers.
Nice.