In the complex space, Paul Hobcraft shares some very good guiding principles, but the whole post shimmers with good advice about transformation, and is applicable to movement building, network organizing and enterprise. Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles: 1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn …
Share:
Caitlin and I are hosting a learning process for the Vancouver Foundation which has brought together 11 people from community foundations around BC. We are trying to discover what kinds of new practices community foundations can adopt to roll with the changing nature of philanthropy and community. It’s a classic complexity problem. The future is unknowable and unpredictable. Data is plentiful but not helpful because context trumps all. There are competing experts with different hypotheses of what should happen. These twelve people are brave. They’re willing to be the innovators in a sector that is by nature fairly conservative when it comes …
Share:
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — TS Eliot Our Beyond the Basics team is about to host our last gathering of the current cycle of offers, back in North America. Over the past five Beyond the Basics offerings I have learned more than I feel like I’ve shared. I can feel that my practice has changed as a result of doing this work, and I’ve become interested in the way our team’s ideas and lessons from working …
Share:
Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene. It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption. So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.
Share:
I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.