From Learning to Doing

How do more of us help create a world that is good for all of us? Many of us have been attending at least a few of the hundreds of enticing webinars that have been available during the last pandemic year, but somehow have not been able to actually apply what we have learned in our communities.

The first challenge has been that most of these webinars are what I call “talking heads:”  one individual or a panel of experts share new ideas with us for the entire session. At the end we may realize that we have a million questions and have no idea how we might proceed. But we immediately move back into our workflow and the memory of the webinar content quickly fades.

I’ve even been part of sessions that are more interactive, where we are put into breakout rooms after the presentation and have a chance to reflect on the information provided. But somehow this, too, is not quite enough.  

As a result, I thought about times when I , or people I knew, had actually managed to apply a new idea to their community. The very crude chart (would love some graphics assistance on this!) below shows that there are many small steps that need to be taken (and supported by capacity builders) for learning to move to doing.

If we leave out any of these steps, the impact of the information is likely to be much less than it could be. 

Let’s go through the steps:

Create a learning community.

First, I think learning communities are the best place to be introduced to new ideas. A learning community is simply a group of people (using zoom such groups could actually be very large if good use is made of breakout rooms) who commit to meeting regularly (usually monthly) to support each other’s learning and doing. It’s wonderful if you can have skilled, paid facilitation of such a group but they work amazingly well with informal groups who share the facilitation role.  Most learning communities have some sort of focus to their learning, i.e. they may be people who want to learn more about systems strategies or network weaving or food access.

An important part of successful learning communities is that people in them feel safe to share their concerns or challenges. This means that learning community facilitators will need to include relationship building activities in every session where people get to know each other more deeply. 

Hear information about a new process, skill or strategy and have space to ask questions and reflect. 

I have found that listening to something new is often overwhelming, so I recommend that presenters limit their talk to 10-15 increments. If the topic is complex, you might want to have two 10 minute presentations each followed by a breakout session of 5  minutes. People can generate questions during the breakouts that are captured on a jamboard or Miro board - and answered by the presenter(s) as they are written. 

Do a demonstration. 

It’s often very useful for presenters to demonstrate the new skill or process with an individual or small group, with the rest of the participants observing. 

Practice in the learning community. 

The next step is to actually practice the process in the learning community, or in some cases, you may want to set up a smaller popup session for practice. 

Thinking/feeling about application.

It’s often useful, especially for introverts, to have some time by themselves processing their reaction to the process. Participants can be encouraged to notice how the process feels to them? Might it be a good fit with their community? Does the process seem hard or simple/ is it scary to think about doing something like this in their community? They can write notes or be encouraged to draw.  

You might also give participants time to discuss potential application in a breakout room. Here they might answer questions such as, “How might this work in my community?  Who else could work with me on implementing this process? Could I try it first with a small group of people? What is a meeting coming up where I could try this? 

Participants then (if they plan to go ahead) make a commitment to try out the process or skill in the coming month. 

Applying in your community. 

Participants hopefully have worksheets etc to help them take the information back to their community. They also need to be encouraged to find one or two others to work with them on the application. An important part of their planning process needs to be thinking about how the process may need to be modified for their specific context. 

An essential part of any process will be to allocate time for the groups’ reflection on the process.

Other worksheets can encourage the facilitation group to spend time after to reflect on the process: what worked well? What would we need to change? What challenges did we encounter that we didn’t expect?

Get peer support for challenges. 

When the learning group next meets, ask if anyone experienced any challenges in applying the practice. If there are several, you might want to have each person with a challenge go into a breakout room with others to support them. Then share the peer assist process to help them think how to work with the challenge.

As facilitator, you will need to frame the request for challenges with the importance of seeing challenges as a way to deeper learning. This embracing of so called mistakes is a key part of the mindset shift we all need to make.

Celebrate successes and harvest to share with other networks.

Encourage one or two participants to share successes they had with the process - encourage them to share pictures to make their success come alive for others.

You may want to facilitate a knowledge harvesting process. Some people have had success using jamboard, Miro or a google doc where everyone can add what they learned from implementing the process, suggestions for changes or improvements, key factors for success and so forth.  Encourage one or two participants to take this input and craft into a post or handout that can be shared by participants with all their networks and social media connections. They may want to include video snippets of the process or people sharing how useful it was.

Share with other networks. 

If the learning community is part of a specific network with a communications ecosystem, encourage the information to be shared through newsletters and social media. You might also want to turn the information into a resource or handout, as we are doing with this blog post!

If there is a good response to the sharing of the information, you might want to set up a popup for others outside of the learning community on how to use the process in their settings.

Big Picture

What is this chart suggesting about training? It’s saying that if we want our training to lead to change in communities, we need to reconceptualize training to make it more interactive and supportive of all the steps that are needed to move from learning to doing. We will get so much more impact if we shift the emphasis from content (and this is very hard because we as teachers, presenters and experts almost always LOVE our content and feel people need to have access to every bit of it! You can still share a longer video or article with participants so they can dig in deeper)  to an emphasis on support for application of new practices.  

Next steps

I would love for people to comment on this article, add additional ideas, edit it - in other words, make it better!  Please just click on this link and it will take you to a google doc where you can comment or edit. This blog post can be so much better with your thoughts added. Once we have collected and edited those new thoughts, I’ll revise this blog post.

I’d also love to hear how you share this post with others in your networks. Was it useful? Did you take any steps to shift your webinars so they are more interactive?

Download this blog post as a resource HERE

June Holley has been weaving networks, helping others weave networks and writing about networks for over 40 years. She is currently increasing her capacity to capture learning and innovations from the field and sharing what she discovers through blog posts, occasional virtual sessions and a forthcoming book. 

featured image found here

PLEASE DONATE to help Network Weaver continue in it’s mission to offer free support and resources to networks worldwide.


The Wisdom of W.A.I.T.ing: Mindful Sharing in a Network Age

“We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.”
— Zeno of Citium

The other day I was reminded of the group working agreement “W.A.I.T.” (which stands for, “Why am I talking?”) as a guideline for people to be mindful of sharing air time in discussions. Since then I have been taking fresh note of my own inclinations and motives to not only talk in discussions, but also to share on social media. And as I have done this, I have also been more curious about what motivates others to share, verbally, in written and other forms. What are they thinking? Are they thinking about other people? If so, who? Have they thought through possible impacts? What do they care about?

Picture, “Waiting,” by Judy Dean, shared under provisions of Creative Commons Attribution license 2.0.

I am a big fan of and subscriber to The Christian Science Monitor, which publishes a weekly digest of updates and perspectives on things happening around the globe, including (perhaps radical for these times) “bright spots” and “points of progress.” The editors and writers of Monitor articles also have a wonderful practice of publishing a little blurb for each offering under the heading “Why we wrote this.” How refreshing! What if all “news outlets” were to do this, or at least pause and ask this before writing and publishing/speaking?

And what if we were to do this in our different networks and communities? Might this help to break some of the spirals of othering and outrage (not to mention challenge the algorithms behind our growing social dilemma)? And shy of this, might the practice of W.A.I.T.ing or mindful and intentional sharing (viewed perhaps more generatively as “nourishing”) help people deliver on the promise of “network effects” to take communities and societies in a more prosocial direction?

I am currently working with two organizations over the course of 2021 to help staff and partners develop more networked ways of thinking and acting/being. Recently we had a discussion about how to keep the staff more up to date with respect to one another’s network weaving activities (connections made, crucial take-aways, immediate next steps) and also share other interesting content and connections. Trying to strike the right balance between radio silence and deluge, we started exploring how implementing the W.A.I.T/S. (Why am I talking/sharing?) prime might help. Along the way, a couple of people said that W.A.I.T/S. might also stand for “Why aren’t I talking/sharing?” and encourage the otherwise less inclined (for various reasons) to reconsider. This is stimulating rich conversation about how to tend and modulate important flows in various systems (organizational, community, school, etc.) to support learning, resilience, alignment, equity, emergence, coordinated action …

All this to say, whatever our goal(s) may be, it could be important to … W.A.I.T for it. This is how less conscious and helpful sharing (and silence) might become a practice of care-full curation (making thoughtful offers to and requests – sharing and caring can also include asking questions! – of one’s communities).

originally published at Innovation Interaction for Social Change

featured image found here

Curtis Ogden is a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC). Much of his work entails consulting with multi-stakeholder networks to strengthen and transform food, education, public health, and economic systems at local, state, regional, and national levels. He has worked with networks to launch and evolve through various stages of development.

PLEASE DONATE to help Network Weaver continue in it’s mission to offer free support and resources to networks worldwide.


Thinking Like an Octopus (and With a Collaborative Heart): Evolving and Interlocking Networks

“You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it.”
Toni Morrison

A network that I have been a part of for a number of years is seeing the emergent proliferation and strengthening of other related networks (some more adjacent than others) in its shared geographic and issue spaces. While this is welcomed overall, and sets up the potential for a more robust movement network and core-periphery structure (see image below), there are also some discussions within the network about how this proliferation constitutes an opportunity versus a looming threat or conflict.

SOURCE: Plastrik and Taylor, NET GAINS Workbook, 2006.

There is plenty being written about the power of collaboration to solve complex problems and shift undesirable patterns, and one of the persistent barriers to collaboration is the default competitive and protective instinct found in individuals and groups. There are good and long-standing evolutionary reasons for “watching out for number one,” so this impulse can be fairly baked in. And there are also good reasons for understanding and leaning into “collaborative advantage” (see, for example, the work of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson on multi-level selection).

“One step is to recognize that ‘ideologies extolling individualism, competition, untrammeled free markets, and conversely, disparaging cooperation and equality’ (as Turchin puts it) have no scientific justification. An unregulated organism is a dead organism, for the body politic no less than our own bodies.”
David Sloan Wilson

And of course, there are plenty of examples of “taking the high road” only to have someone else take advantage of this, which can leave us feeling like we are living in the prisoner’s dilemma. So what is a network to do? Well, if your values include collaboration and justice, then you do your best to lead by example. Which is where a recent network stewardship team conversation left us. And as often happens with this group, things continued to marinate and then one of our members sent the following beautiful email, reminding us of her experiences in a related network of networks.

“The dynamics we discussed reminded me a lot of what we have experienced at our organization since 2009, so if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes I’ll try to lay it out here. In late 2007, we piloted a new cooperative venture and launched the FL Collaborative in 2009. Our vision and aspirations were to bring a cross sector of people and organizations together to address the root causes of the problems facing our sector and relevant communities.

One of the first things the FL Collaborative really wanted to focus on was replicating the cooperative model, and our organization was tasked with doing that. And we did. Pretty soon it became clear that we couldn’t both do that and hold the bigger vision and aspirations. But to be honest, I didn’t want to admit that.

By 2011, the LC Network started to emerge from the FL Collaborative. My first reaction was that we have competition. But very soon it became clear that the LC Network was serving a role our staff and the FL Collaborative couldn’t serve. The LC Network was beginning to pull together elements of what it takes to shift the supply chain from one that is value-less to one that is value-full. The kind of technical support the sector and visionaries needed began to emerge through the LC Network.

By 2014, the SF Network (another network) began to percolate out of the FL Collaborative. And again I found myself triggered by the potential competition. What the SF Network was beginning to offer was the ‘social’ space. When our organization and the FL Collaborative were hosting a series of community gatherings and various social events that allowed us to have a public facing part, SF was emerging as being able to offer that. Another thing we could take off of our staff’s plate so we can focus on our bigger vision and aspirations.

The FL Collaborative, in the meanwhile, began to morph into the political and advocacy space. That’s where we think through policy shifts, organizing opportunities, connectivity, and alignment around the broader vision of what the future of the sector and larger system can look like and what it might take to get us there. Those who are engaged in each of these networks are doing things that they can easily wrap their heads around and inspires them most. 

Today, I talk about these three networks as three tentacles of an octopus with our organization holding the space of the head of the octopus. Because our staff was not liberated to focus more fully on the shared values, bigger vision, the bigger story, connectivity, etc., all these three networks are interlocked by a shared set of values, a common vision, and organizing strategies. 

Our staff are the ones who are asking the bigger questions of each of these networks when they seem to go off track. We are the ones who are finding the resources needed to get them to think about how racial equity is or isn’t showing up there (and we get most of that from [the network for which the readers of the email are the stewardship team]). So without sounding too egotistical, our staff is tasked with holding the moral center of all of this work whether it comes to the connections, strategies, resources, stories, organizing, etc. There is probably a better word than the moral center, but that’s the only thing that is coming to me right now.

More tentacles might emerge, and I hope they do as we identify gaps in this work. And I hope I can remain humble enough to not see them as competition but as a valuable addition to the family.

It takes work, real intention and effort, to stay grounded and humble, to practice discernment and to keep perspective, to keep asserting the larger picture of complexity, to honor the need for deeper collaboration and more allies, to have faith in the possibilities that we cannot yet see through the growing entanglement of intersections. Even better when you can depend on others to help you out with this! With #gratitude to so many.

“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”

Marge Piercy, from her poem “Seven of Pentacles”

Image by Kent Schimke

Originally published at Interaction Institute for Social Change

Featured Image from Giulian Frisoni

Curtis Ogden is a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC). Much of his work entails consulting with multi-stakeholder networks to strengthen and transform food, education, public health, and economic systems at local, state, regional, and national levels. He has worked with networks to launch and evolve through various stages of development.

PLEASE DONATE to help Network Weaver continue in it’s mission to offer free support and resources to networks worldwide.


Network Mapping and Analysis : How-to Guide | Societal Platform

Societal Platform Thinking emphasises the importance of network effects and facilitating interactions between and within formal and informal networks, involving state (sarkaar), civil society (samaaj) and markets (bazaar), to catalyse large-scale systemic change.

Network mapping and analysis can be a useful way to understand all the interactions happening in the network and the roles different actors play in the network—with respect to a specific Societal Platform mission. The ShikshaLokam example used in this guide, particularly in the network mapping section, gives a sense of how such a mapping exercise can be done for any Societal Platform mission or goal.

The guide is developed to serve as a reference framework and provide processes to help consultants and organisations engage in the network mapping and analysis process. A participatory process of involving all relevant actors across the exercises will be hugely beneficial in developing a holistic network and imagining new possibilities with the output that will come out of the network mapping and analysis process.

Network Mapping and Analysis: how-to guide:

The guide is developed to serve as a reference framework and provide processes to help consultants and organisations engage in the network mapping and analysis process.

This guide includes 3 documents:

  1. Report
    • This document helps a Societal Platform mission and mission leader to get an understanding of the existing networks and to plan and develop the network, in the context of their mission.
  2. Presentation
    • This presentation is an overview of the contents and processes mentioned in the document.
  3. Poster
    • The poster provides an outline of the summary of the asset.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Originally published HERE at Societal Platform


We are a community of curators, catalysts, and network weavers. We pool our individual strengths and channel our collective imagination to enable social change leaders to advance their missions.

Societal Platform is a community of curators, catalysts, and network weavers. They pool their individual strengths and channel their collective imagination to enable social change leaders to advance their missions.


Virtual Meeting Role Cards


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Virtual meetings and events are common place by now. Technology like Zoom and the persisting globalization make effective virtual meetings a must. Since January 2019 I am co-hosting the monthly network weaver cafes, in which we learn about different topics such as learning or governance of transformative networks (http://bit.ly/weavercafe).


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These virtual meeting role cards emerged through our process of organizing the weaver cafes. We found that these roles allow for seamless and interactive meetings. The roles, if done well, guarantee excellent technical hosting and support, harvesting the key outcomes and facilitating co-creation. You can fill the roles as an organizing team or distribute them to participants at the beginning of the call by sharing these role cards in the chat.


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I hope you find these valuable in your own work and feed them forward to anybody in your network that might be interested!

Adrian Röbke


Organizations as Communities


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Many people have asked how their network can function when organizations remain in their traditional hierarchical structures. Sahana's post explains how organizations, especially those in networks, need to shift and change. - June

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Part 1

Designing orgs as communities make for responsive, thrivable organizations


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ants working as community


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The very definition of organizations has changed. The impact of digitization is going far beyond a few collaboration tools and platforms. Today’s organizations are no longer defined by fixed workplaces, nine-to-five working hours or even a set of homogeneous employees. Organizations have become boundary-less and often, location agnostic and virtual. Operational and business models have been turned on their heads with the advent of enterprises like UberAirbnbEtsy and Amazon. And no industry is immune to this disruption — from education to retail, from healthcare to hospitality — the old business models are being rapidly upended by new ones. We have entered the Black Swan era with un-directed and unpredictable events regularly cropping up. These complexities are continuing to exponentially increase as we enter a hyper-digital era with AI, Robotics, 3D printing, Wearables, Alternate Reality and VR, and much more looming over the horizon. Some of the key shifts were identified by Dr. Lynda Gratton in her book, The Shift, and are depicted in the diagram below:


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the paradigm shifts
The Paradigm Shifts


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These paradigm shifts are causing wide-scale disruption in our personal and professional lives, and reflect an urgent need to rethink and re-imagine the workplace in order to take advantage of the affordances offered by the digital era. This is not merely about implementing a few collaboration tools or putting in place an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) with the diktat to “collaborate”. It requires a complete re-hauling of how business gets done. Organizations have to leverage the power of design thinking and emergent technology to create spaces where everyone can bring in their fullest potential. Going ahead, organizations of the future will possibly function as Transformative Communities connecting diverse, distributed and multi-talented individuals who will come together to move toward an Evolutionary Purpose.I will write more about the evolutionary purpose and transformative communities in my future posts.

The need for organizations to function as communities of passionate and purpose-driven individuals is becoming even more critical in the face of unprecedented upheaval being faced at local, global and planetary levels. Top down, hierarchical, command and control organizations just do not have the agility or the resilience to meet the needs of today. As the world becomes increasingly connected and networked, it calls for organizations that are equally networked and decentralized. An organization’s communities today would not be restricted to its internal employees but would extend to include contractual and contingent workers, partners, vendors and suppliers, and also customers and competitors — the extended enterprise. I would also add the Planet and all sentient beings since every decision taken has a ripple effect with the capacity to impact millions far away from the origin of the organization. For example, the massive expansion of palm oil plantations in Borneo and Sumatra are directly threatening the survival of orangutan population in the wild. We are all well versed with the Butterfly Effect. Hence, this “extended enterprise” is as critical to the sustainability — nay, the Thrivability — of the business as any direct employee/shareholder. It’s no longer enough to build an organizing that survives or is even just sustainable. The former implies a closed view/self-focus and the latter implies an organization that is just maintaining itself. A thrivable organization is anti-fragile, holds space for emergence and creates opportunities for the thriving of others, and flows with the change.Perhaps it is time for organizations to pause and ask:

How can an organization be designed such that it becomes a space that nurtures, supports and enables conditions of thriving?

The diagram below created by Jean Russell highlights the differences...


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A lack of Systems Thinking and understanding of Complex Adaptive Systems coupled with the desire/pressure for limitless growth have led organizations toward the kind of tunnel vision which has collectively led us to a place no one wanted to reach. I am emphasizing on organizations becoming communities because communities allow us to tap into Collective Intelligence from a diverse pool of people without the constraint of hierarchy, permission and rigidity. To be an evolutionary and purpose-driven organization and to engage in situations we do not have a roadmap for, it is important to seek/curate collective intelligence.

However, the underlying business processes, managerial strategies, and workplace protocols still adhere to mechanistic, Industrial Era paradigms with performance, speed and bottom line being the drivers. These, needless to say, lead to short term thinking, repeating of past patterns, loss of innovation, frustration and burnout, and a joyless work environment. By sticking to Industrial Era processes when that era is long gone, organizations threaten their own survival. Viewing an organization through the lens of a machine and people as cogs worked when the world was predictable, change happened very slowly, lessons of yesterday became best practices of today, and assembly line production ruled the day. Gone is that era. The 90’s brought the term VUCA into our consciousness. And the last decade has seen a veritable tsunami of change. Technology is taking us to a world that is science-fiction-like in its possibilities. But everything will come to naught if the patterns, mindsets and underlying consciousness guiding us continue to remain static. Our organizations today are rooted in the past while the future is already here. Unless we are cautious, we will run the risk of using technology to amplify and empower old systems and processes (faster production, greater efficiency, higher bottom line) while the organization gradually becomes less human, and we come face-to-face with our own Frankenstein. As we lose our humanity to the glitzy appeal of speed and technology, so will we lose our interconnectedness with each other and all sentient beings.

The power of technology is immense. The choice is ours — whether we use it to amplify our humanity and connectedness to each other and the planet or we use it to further short-term profits at the cost of humanity and all sentient beings.

Never in the past have we had such unprecedented opportunities to connect thousands, millions of people together. Never in the past did an organization have the platforms and technology necessary to build communities of passionate, diverse, globally dispersed and differently skilled individuals. Organizations now have the power to move from building teams to enabling evolutionary co-creating communities.

My next post will focus on how to move towards building communities, overcome obstacles and envision what such a re-imagined workplace could look like.


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Part 2

Exploring how communities enable sensemaking and emergence in organizations

Yesterday, in a Twitter conversation with Rachel Happe regarding the need for organizations to function as communities, I wrote the following: “Complicated solutions are yesterday’s good practices. Complex, holistic solutions are multi-faceted, emergent and constantly evolving. They can’t be pinned down by rules but have to be sensed into through open dialogues.”

This reminded me of one of my favorite frameworks — the Cynefin framework designed by Dave Snowden in 1999. Cynefin is a Welsh word meaning habitat; the framework is simple and elegant but leads us to profound insights. If we see the framework below, we can easily see where we are today as humanity and where we are headed. The habitat for organizations has moved from being complicated to complex with exponentially increasing rate of change (Moore’s Law in action) and is rapidly heading towards the chaotic. As is evident, rules, processes, constraints and good practices worked perfectly for the complicated, mechanistic Industrial Era. However, complexity requires Systems Thinking and “enabling constraints”. I interpret enabling constraints as “holding space for emergence” where constraints function as a safety net.


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the cynefin framework by Dave Snowden
The Cynefin Framework by Dave Snowden


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This is where things get tricky. Leaders today are geared to respond to challenges with speed and action. The hierarchical structure of most organizations places a few people at the top charged with all critical decision-making, thus losing out on the vast capacity of the collective intelligence available throughout the organization. And, ironically, in the face of increasing complexity and uncertainty, there is more pressure to deliver “results” and “do something” to allay the situation. What of course ends up happening is the putting of band-aids over symptoms while the root causes go un-examined, unexplored, and left to proliferate. While it is counter-intuitive, complexity requires us to slow down— to probe, sense, and then respond. It requires us to go from rapid-fire action to observation, reflection, and thoughtful response when the time is right.

How are communities connected to complexity, collective intelligence and “sensemaking”?

I propose that in the context of pervasive complexity and ambiguity, communities of passionate, connected and purpose-driven individuals can illuminate the way forward. Communities are different from typical project teams who come together for an explicit outcome, work towards their objectives, and when the work is done, it’s done. I am not denying the value of great team work having been a part of some amazing teams myself. However, I am focusing on communities here because communities come together and cohere very differently. They are usually aligned around a purpose larger than each individual; membership is usually voluntary which means people go where they are drawn to go. Diverse people connect who may “normally” not have known each other, creating greater opportunities for serendipity and innovation. Communities allow lurkers to also exist within its ecosystem, something teams cannot do. I believe lurkers carry immense value as they often become channels of cross-pollination between communities and are a critical part of the weak-tie network making a community more diverse, resilient and porous. And most importantly, communities carry a sense of belonging to something beyond the self. All of these contribute to make communities adept at feeling into the ecosystem, seeing the system through different lenses, caring about the system, and responding to the emergent with deeper insight. This is what tapping into the power of collective intelligence is about.


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Technology enabled communities in distributed Organizations
Technology Enabled Communities in Distributed Organizations


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Therefore, when an organization functions as a collective of networked communities, its ability to probe and sense its ecosystem increases manifold. It is akin to a human using all our five senses as well as the heart and the gut as opposed to only our rational ability. In the diagram below, I have tried to represent an organization as an open system connected via today’s ubiquitous technology. Imagine an organization whose boundaries are porous, giving it the capacity to fluidly exchange information with its ecosystem. Internally, the organization functions as clusters of communities which also have porous, permeable walls. The community members interact and connect through various means (some of which are shown in the diagram). This creates a system that is able to constantly sense and see itself, can connect its edges to its center and hold complexity by distributing it in the network.This ability to tap into the collective intelligence and wisdom of the whole makes a system/organization resilient, anti-fragile, and eventually thrivable. This requires viewing the organization as a living system that has the capacity to adapt, heal itself, and thrive given the right conditions.

I admit though that this is easier said than done. I have written about some of the obstacles to building communities here. Apart from the technology and the roles of community facilitators, this shift requires re-imagining and reinventing the structures, processes, and the culture as well as the underlying narratives of an organization. All of this are the glue that hold the fabric of the organization together in its current state, and exert powerful resistance to anything that threatens the status quo. I am not saying the shift is easy at all. However, as global trends and patterns threaten to plunge us into chaos, it is time to rethink and re-imagine our organizations. It requires us to move from holding a few leaders at the top accountable and responsible for all decision, actions, and their intended and unintended consequences. We are well aware that complexity cannot be tackled through planning, controlling, resource management, and other known and popularized forms of management and leadership. Complexity calls for leaders to become facilitators, to hold space, to flow with uncertainty, to let leadership emerge from the collective, and to be able to sense the system. Leadership’s role becomes that of designing and holding the container for exploration and the emergence of future potential. All of these capacities come not only from experience but also from deep reflection and inner work. In the section below, I have discussed — what I believe — are some of the mindsets/capacities required of the leaders if they wish to design for thrivability.


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Four levels of listening and conversing


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  1. Holding space for Emergence — This involves creating the conditions and preparing the soil (the ethos/culture) for dialogues to take place. This requires the capacity to be comfortable with the discomfort of staying in the liminal space, and not forcing a pre-defined outcome when a problem rises to the surface. It’s also the ability to see problems as gifts/messages calling the organization’s attention to what needs to shift. And using processes like The Circle Waythe U Process, and Liberating Structures to have generative conversations. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
  2. Staying with Uncertainty — While close to the above capacity, I have deliberately called it out separately as well. Leaders have the propensity and are often expected to provide answers in times of great uncertainty and upheaval. Staying with uncertainty conversely requires leaders to strengthen their muscles for staying in the space between stories, suspending judgement, being ok with not having any answer, and tapping into one’s inner guidance till a response naturally surfaces. And as leaders develop and operate from these capacities within themselves, the core skills permeate throughput the organization with support. [ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
  3. Creating space for Synchronicity — In the rush of solving daily challenges and focusing on short term goals, we all forget to slow down and stay with the emerging. Welcoming synchronicity require us to hold space for ourselves as well as others, to tap into our inner wisdom and allow the unfolding to happen. I can best describe it as a shift from doing to being. It’s in the in-between space when we let go of control and trust in a higher order do we begin to experience the synchronicity that come our way as guideposts.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
  4. Operating from Inter-connectedness — I firmly believe in the concept of “Interbeing” described by Thich Nhat Hanh. His definition of “seeing clouds in a piece of paper” is the quintessential and an eloquent description of Systems Thinking. It is essential for leaders to operate from this space of inter-connectedness and the whole lest the fixing of a problem in one part of the system creates unintended consequences in another part, and maybe elsewhere in the ecosystem too.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
  5. Sacrificing an Expert’s Mindset — Most of us are aware of the Japanese concept of shoshin articulated by Shunryu Suzuki as, “In a beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in an expert’s mind very few.” One of the fundamental capacities for holding space is to let go of the expert’s mindset, and also one of the most difficult. It means a letting go of the ego and all other credentials that has brought us to our current state of power, position, and privilege. This letting go is essential to foster openness. An expert’s mind will not be able to create space for emergence.[ap_spacing spacing_height="10px"]
  6. Facilitating Generative Conversations — I strongly recommend going through and practicing the four levels of listening and conversing defined by Otto Scharmer in his book, The Essentials of Theory U. A capacity and willingness to move beyond the downloading and factual to empathic and generative is essential to bring collective intelligence and creativity in the service of a greater good. In the first two situations, no new learning or insight can emerge as we stay stuck in false harmony or debate/compromise, respectively. They only serve to keep the system stuck in the old patterns and habits. The next two — empathic and generative listening — open up the field of the future and lead to emergent practices. I have included the diagram below for reference.

As would have occurred to most of you’ll reading the post, the capacities mentioned above require not only deep reflection and inner work but also great empathy, curiosity, courage, and compassion. Only by holding ourselves and others with open compassion and acceptance can we even begin to create the conditions for thrivability. I’ll deep dive into these aspects in future posts.

The next questions are: “Despite the phenomenal capacities of technology today, is technology the only solution? How important are connections in person? How critical is it for us to experience our inter-connectedness with nature? How do we balance the virtual world with the real world we inhabit?”

I’ll explore these questions in my next post. You can read the Part 1 of Organizations as Communities here.


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Part 1 originally published on Sahana Chattopadhyay's Medium page HERE

Part 2 originally published on Sahana Chattopadhyay's Medium page HERE


Analyzing Network Maps

Having network maps is a wonderful thing - but not if you can't read what they are saying!  This free resource offers some basic strategies for interpreting network maps.  

Network maps can have a transformative effect when as many network participants as possible are involved in interpreting the maps and then developing strategies to more effectively weave the network. So it's important to share these slides with your network and then have activities where network participants can use them on the network's maps.

I suggest that you talk about each slide, then have people in small groups see if that feature exists in their network map. If it does, they can generate ways to correct the network. For example, if the map shows that people from grassroots organizations are all on the periphery of the map, while larger non-profits are in the core, then the small groups can generate actions to connect people from grassroots groups with people in the core. It's best if individuals make commitments to make these connections. At your next network meeting, you can have then add the new connections to a blown up network map that you post on the wall.


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Click Here to Download


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Liberating Structures in Network Development

When working in a network comprised of technical folks, it is easy stay in the familiar territory of presenting knowledge when the network gathers. Sometimes assumptions are made about scientists, policy makers, or engineers and how they prefer to interact at a face to face meeting. "Watch that “fluffy” stuff!"

Visual notes from the day

My sense is a lot of this push-back originates in bad experiences where “interactive methods” were used for interactivity and perhaps less focused on the purpose at hand. With this in mind, I had a blast developing an agenda and coaching the facilitators for the Floodplains by Design Network gathering. I wanted to reflect and pull out some of the highlights of the process, both to acknowledge the fabulous team and the network participants, and to give some clarity on designing for networks, especially technically oriented networks.

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  1. Ditch the tables: People walked into the room to find a chair set of concentric circles – and were surprised. Coached to put their coats and backpacks to the side, there was a sense of “what is happening?” The folks kicking off the meeting had to adopt a new position to speak to and within a circle, but they quickly got the beat. Without tables, it was as simple as turning to someone to engage in conversation, look across the room to notice faces. The conversational sound level never wavered! [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  2. Nurture network relationships: Networks balance on the three legs we often use to define communities of practice: community (relationship), domain (what we care about – in this case integrated floodplain design), and practice (what we actually DO!) It is easy in a technical field to skip the community element so we started the day with a round of Impromptu Networking facilitating three rounds of short conversations about what we are grateful for in this work. Three new or deepened relationships along with domain knowledge! No fluffy “icebreaker.” The team crafted the invitation so it would resonate with the people in the room – something, by the way, I would have gotten wrong had I designed by myself. TEAMS, people, TEAMS! [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  3. The knowledge is in the room: use it! We used a modified version of Shift and Share to highlight as many stories of integrated floodplain work as we could to spotlight both the small and big steps being taken, and surfacing useful lessons for spreading. Along the way, people connect and relationships are nurtured in these rotating, purposeful conversations. We divided the short 5 minute talks, each followed by 10 minutes of conversational Q&A into five thematic “pods,” each with a “poderator” to help track time and capture highlights. We fully encouraged everyone to vote with their feet and move between talks, stay in a pod, visit all the pods, or just hover and bumblebee around. I was surprised that quite a few people stuck to a single pod and suspect there was growing identification and affinity around the pod topics. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  4. Networks that rely primarily on voluntary participation need to focus on what matters, not on EVERYTHING. To help identify what to STOP doing, we did TRIZ, a reverse engineering process to identify the stuff we are doing that is not adding value. This one baffled some people in the room, leading us to consider how we might deepen the structure if we had a “do-over.” But we discovered later in debriefings that some people really got it and came to some tough conclusions about how the work might need to shift. So it may have also been a little bit of “elephant in the room” going on. I found it fascinating to watch the dynamics of acknowledging that sometimes the stuff we are doing doesn’t matter. A tough one. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  5. Always find the next step. From the TRIZ we invited people to think about their 15% solution of what they could stop doing, and recommendations to the wider network of the more gnarly things that require a bigger lift to stop at a larger level. There were a few very concrete network recommendations, and some people began to crack open that they DID have some agency to stop things — or start them. That is always the temptation, to add before we clear the decks a bit. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  6. Use the knowledge in the room. As we started the day by noticing the knowledge in each other, so we wrapped things up with Troika Consulting to get specific feedback on the 15% solutions. In knee-to-knee trios, people dug in to help each other. When we asked for a show of hands of who gained valuable “consulting” from their peers, almost every hand in the room went up. In after-event conversations people noted that this activity and the Shift and Share had high value for them. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
  7. Don’t forget the reflection with space for every voice. We finished in a circle, just like we started, with a “Just Three Words” debrief with everyone having a chance to say something or pass. Many of the words were captured on the right side of the visual above… you may notice a pattern. [ap_spacing spacing_height="15px"]
Troika Consulting

There were a lot of smiles at the end of the day. The facilitation team did a fabulous job – mama mia, were they talented. The feedback was both positive and criticisms were super constructive, instead of generally grumpy. There was, from where I observed, a tangible pulse of energy.

Heather leaned in!

All kinds of people find value in engagement. Some need it a bit slower, some a bit faster, some need more space for reflection. But in a learning network, we need each other, so we need to design our meetings to truly BE with and ENGAGE with each other. Hats off to the Floodplains By Design team who had the courage to step outside of the “way things are done” and create that dynamic design. You KEEP GOING Heather, Carol, Courtney, Leah and all the shift and share speakers/poderators!

Read more…

Re-imagining and Re-designing Our Floodplains

 

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Originally published on 6.6.19 at Full Circle Associates.


Network Evaluation

In complex settings, causality is also complex. We cannot identify a single action that will produce the outcomes we want. We often have to experiment, trying out a number of actions or strategies and then notice what about those exploratory forays worked.

In the process of examining or reflecting on what we did, we often make breakthroughs in our thinking about the situation or problem and this helps us move to more effective actions.

For example, in combating infections in a hospital, we notice that when housekeeping staff work closely with – and are respected by – nursing staff and doctors, the resulting preventative actions are more innovative and effective. This insight leads us to become more inclusive in other aspects of our work, making sure that staff from many different roles work together on solutions. As a result, our hospital becomes a better place for both patients and staff. Complexity theorists use the term emergence to describe such new ways of operating that arise from this combination of self-organized experiments and reflection.

Of course, complex causality makes it difficult to determine whether a particular organization’s strategy is working or making a difference. And, in response to the complexity of problems, organizations in many communities have begun to work in networks so that they can utilize their differences to be more innovative and experimental and so they can access the power of scale, aggregation and diffusion.

A critical question then becomes: How do we determine the value of these networks? How are they contributing (or not) to the solution of problems? How can we tell if these networks are worth our investme nt?

We are just beginning to explore this terrain, but already we have developed a 3 faceted evaluative process that can be engaged in collaboratively by foundations, organizations and the individuals they are hoping to assist in some way. This evaluative process is meant to be inclusive and engaging, as well as developmental. Participants gain new understandings as a result of this process, and often need to restructure activities and even outcomes as they proceed.

Click here to download Network Evaluation.


Identifying Leverage Points to Focus Action

The idea behind the identification of leverage points is the assumption that working in some areas can be more productive than others. A leverage point is a place where, if people focus their collaborative efforts, they can begin to shift a system because there is a new opportunity emerging for change. This new opportunity might be a new openness and awareness in people (for example, the recent focus on dismantling racism and white supremacy) or change in policy or in the availability of new resources.

Instead of simply working on the most important action, identification of leverage points is helping people look for something that is most likely to succeed, and will build new momentum for change. The opportunity makes it more likely that any action the group does will be successful and make a difference.

Often working in a leverage point will bring together new partners who will have different perspectives on the problem and when the leverage group discusses what to do, they often make breakthroughs in the way they think about the problem  or issue.

Another important aspect to leverage points is that they will start shifting the system on several different levels simultaneously. For example, when a group I worked with recently decided to work on dismantling racism and white supremacy, they read the article by Tema Okun, then discussed how they saw examples of white supremacy culture in their own behavior and talked about how they could shift that behavior. They took a network values survey that helped them see their strengths and challenges as a group around interacting in new ways and generated a set of actions to shift as a group. They also talked about how they could bring this awareness back to their organizations and communities.

Some networks do a system mapping activity to identify leverage points but this a process that takes more time. If you are interested in this, you can check out the course on System Mapping offered at no cost by Acumen.

The free resource for this week is Leverage Point Identification Activity which you can find in the Resources section here.