leadership

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program.  Yet too many are tempted  to first rush into program design.  Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve.  This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize.  To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

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On Collective Leadership... read more »

• Curtis Ogden highlights four key concepts underlying the roots of the Interaction Institute's approach to collective leadership: epistemology, cosmology, ontology, technology.  Epistemology is that it’s not just about what we know, but how we know it – intuitively, intellectually, analytically. Cosmology is looking to the complex living systems and networks as the complicated reality we all live in. Ontology is the idea that each of us is evolving and capable of both learning and unlearning. Finally, technology/methodology is the idea of looking to the practices that create the best conditions for collective leadership. 
• Stowe Boyd discusses concepts from a Sara Horowitz’s talk on mutualism and creates a “mutualist manifesto”.  At the heart of the manifesto is finding common cause and growing mutual associations locally and globally, associations such as coops, unions, and policy organizations. Boyd thinks that associations supporting one another, governance by members, seeking benefits not profits, and cooperating in resource allocation will all make great headway towards directing change in a systemically chaotic world.

Peggy Holman shared some insightful reflections as a catalyst at OccupyCafe, a virtual world cafe space envisioning the future of the Occupy movement (check out her powerpoint slides on the vital conversations page).  She talked about the pattern of how change happens and she reflected on what leadership looks like in a movement for change.

All change starts with the disruption of a social system -- a disruption from coherence -- where things worked the way we thought they should, according to assumptions, principles and rules we all knew and understood.    read more »

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I spent four hours with people from many walks of life at the Occupy Boston Summit in the heart of Chinatown about 15 minutes from Dewey Square, the site of Occupy Boston.  Over three hundred people were in a school cafeteria, an overflow room, and on livestreaming to have a conversation for four hours about where the “occupy” movement in Boston goes from here.  

The Leadership Learning Community and World Café Europe have partnered to present this preconference experiential workshop at the upcoming International Leadership Association conference.  Here are the details:
When: Wednesday, 26 October; 09:00 - 13:00
More information: ILA conference website

The pressing issues of our time such as environmental challenges, intercultural issues and emerging social challenges (to name just a few) require effective leadership that can solve intractable problems and produce sustainable change. This session will focus on what can happen when we bring a network approach to leadership in communities, countries and regions worldwide.

World Café Europe and the Leadership Learning Community will host a dialogue to explore how more inclusive, networked and collective leadership approaches that can unleash transformational change. This dialogue will draw on findings from a collaborative research initiative of innovative thinkers and practitioners. Together we will reflect on the changes that will enable us to magnify the impact of our leadership work and identify the obstacles to making this change. In addition, we will explore specific steps to support leadership development approaches which foster breakthrough ideas and collective action on social purpose issues.

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As part of the Leadership for a New Era project, we are exploring programs and initiatives that are developing the leadership of networks, communities and regions and accomplishing significant results with fewer resources.  In the following weeks we will present short summaries of some of the examples we have reviewed:

ELIAS, which stands for Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors, is a global innovation and learning community that focuses on regional platforms for facilitating multi-stakeholder innovation across entire systems. Coming together around specific thematic and geographic concerns, key players across the sectors of government, business, and civil society embark on a shared sensing and innovation journey in order to deepen their understanding of their current systems and to discover and prototype new ideas and collaborative opportunities that could take the system forward on the best possible path.

ELIAS was co-created by the Presencing Institute, the MIT CoLab, and the MIT Leadership Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It has more than a dozen global partner institutions in business, government, and civil society, and it has sponsored multi sector change initiatives in both the global South and the global North.

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What do you think is missing in the ways we think about and support leadership that prevents breakthrough change on economic and racial equity? That is one of the questions we are exploring as part of a project focused on identifying innovative leadership approaches and models with the potential to reach tangible progress on seemingly intractable social problems like economic and racial inequity in urban and rural areas that affect life opportunities for low-income families and children.

As part of the exploration we are hosting two Innovation Labs in Boston and the Bay Area.  The goal of the Labs is to develop leadership scenarios that can help address key issues.  For the Boston lab, the framing question is: What will it take to catalyze and support 1000s of leaders to align their efforts and work together to insure that all children grow up "whole"?

Thought leaders in each area will come together to brainstorm and prototype different ideas and scenarios. Participants for the Boston lab include:  New Resource Strategies, Boston Alliance for GLBT Youth, Health Resources in Action, Thrive in 5 Leadership Council, Interaction Institute for Social Change, Open Society Institute, Boston Youth Organizing Project, DCA, Arbor Consulting Partners and Matey Odonkor (a user experience designer).  Kenny Bailey and Lori Lobenstine, from the Design Studio for Social Intervention, and Claire Reinelt, from the Leadership Learning Community, will facilitate and document the conversation.

We invite you to join the discussion – here are some of the ways you can participate:

• Listen In: We will be live tweeting during the innovation labs so be sure to tune in and share your questions and ideas – please use the following hashtag: #leadershipnet Here are the dates:
  • Boston Innovation Lab: Friday, September 16 2011 from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm EST
  • Bay Area Lab: Monday, September 19 2011 from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
• Join the Discussion: visit our LinkedIn group to join the conversation or share your ideas through this form
• Watch Videos: we will record short video interviews with some of the participants and share those through Twitter and the LLC website

We look forward to getting your questions and ideas! read more »

Over the next several months, the Leadership Learning Community has been funded to design and implement a scanning process to identify innovative leadership approaches and models with the potential to significantly enhance tangible progress on seemingly intractable social problems like economic and racial inequity in urban and rural areas that affect life opportunities for low-income families and children.

We encourage you to join the conversation and send us your thoughts around the following question:

What do you think is missing in the ways we think about and support leadership that prevents breakthrough change on economic and racial equity?

Share your Thoughts!

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Sally Leiderman is President and one of the founders of the Center for Assessment and Policy Development (CAPD), a 23 year-old non-profit organization.   CAPD’s mission is to help foundations, community collaborations and organizations and governments and public systems craft and execute thoughtful responses to pressing social issues.   She first became involved with LLC at the Creating Space convening in Boston and has subsequently attended several other Creating Space Meetings. 

At the time of the meeting in Boston, Sally and CAPD were attempting to identify different strategies for evaluating transformative change.  Transformative, personal leadership was a popular topic, but most of the literature on it made the claim that it was intangible and immeasurable. The Creating Space convening addressed these issues and Sally was encouraged to formulate a cross-program learning project that brought together three programs to explore experiences with personal transformation and develop a set of outcomes.

“When I came to Boston, we were challenged in one of the sessions to think about cross-program learning.  That was the impetus for me to ask [William Graustein] if he would support a project on values-based leadership.” read more »

In our last newsletter article we initiated a conversation about community change and the role of leadership.  Since then we have been reading a number of interesting evaluation findings and articles on this question that were produced by programs in the Leadership Learning Community.  We are hoping to engage a much broader group in synthesizing what we are learning from these different experiences.  We have created a wiki where we are sharing some of the resources we have been reading and our early attempt to lift up some lessons about community leadership.  We hope you will add resources, examples and your experience to collectively develop our understanding about how to support communities in ways that help them to organize themselves and mobilize their resources to effective action. Below are some of the ingredients of community leadership and action that keep coming up and may be the beginning of the ‘secret sauce’ for effective community action.

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