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Collaborate to Create Community
September 1, 2016
Bureaucracy was an inspired invention, when government was out of control, and graft and corruption reigned supreme. Today, though, public policy innovation is strangled by the inertia of bureaucratic politics and regulations. The structures that generate silos of funding and function are barriers to innovation for the common good. On the other hand, powerful personal interests are eager to step in wherever government constraints are lifted. Explore how we can set conditions to guarantee work toward common goods without the waste and frustration of locked-in structures of governance.
Fear loves stories; it thrives on them. The more fearful the stories you can tell, the more your fears grow. Stories expand your fear, and they distract you from the feeling, disconnecting the thought about the story from the emotion it triggers. You tell yourself this discomfort you’re feeling has nothing to do with the fear you are experiencing, as long as you tell the right stories. I have many stories around my fear of water. I tell myself it's not really fear, because I know how to float and can move myself with basic strokes. But the truth is, even if I'm maneuvering in water, I'm experiencing stress. I'm not able to relax in the water. I feel fear.
Manage Strategic Change
In an interview with Gouran Dhawan Lal, Glenda Eoyang describes conditions for success in a complex environment.
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” The Butterfly Effect is one signature of a system in chaos. This chaos isn’t your garden variety chaos, and you won’t find this butterfly in your garden, either. I feel some urgency to clarify these distinctions when I watch the chaos that lies behind the façade of order, and the order in the chaos, of this election season in the US. I think it might help us to see the patterns of our “civil” society, to understand those patterns for what they are, and to take action to create the ones we want to create and to leave to our children.
Manage Strategic Change
August 4, 2016
Change is changing. Change initiatives with pre-determined goals and predictable processes seldom get off the ground or crash soon after takeoff. We will offer an alternative that creates a path for change as you and your organization walk it. The disciplines of Adaptive Action and Pattern Logic help leverage the assets of the system and generate change that is flexible and sustainable. Build your adaptive capacity and create a unique and emerging path toward the change you envision.
Have you ever sat in a meeting that you knew was going nowhere? The conversation continued to swirl around questions no one in the room could answer. You all bemoaned the uncertainty of it all. Or you were convinced that this time, one more conversation would get the answers you knew were out there. Or you were just stuck and didn’t know what to do, other than explore the question again. At best those conversations are frustrating. Often the unanswered questions just suck your energy and leave you tired and defeated. At worst, they are dangerous. They can trigger desperation that leaves you open to magical thinking.
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