The experience of school

Critics of modern schooling like John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich have recognized that the fundamental curriculum that schools teach us is school itself. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately since moving to South Africa, where school reform has become a nation-wide calling. The initiatives that feel most promising to me are the ones that are digging under the layers a bit- looking at ways of transforming [...]

The form trap

Check out this talk that Warren gave at Tedx Cape Town on an idea we feel is worth spreading!

The biggest challenge the world is facing is not how to create change but how to sustain change, and if we want to sustain change we are mostly paying attention to the wrong things, particularly inside our social purpose organizations and social movements…

The frenzy

I find myself returning so often to these words of Thomas Merton that I figured it would be worth dedicating a blog post to them: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs [...]

Podcast: A conversation with Sushrut and Tolu

In this podcast, we speak with Sushrut Munje and Tolu Ilesanmi about their experiments in transforming the underbelly of the cleaning industry. We met Sushrut last year at a workshop we gave in Mumbai a few months after he launched his new cleaning business Hammer & Mop. Recently he re-connected to see if we could [...]

Gestalt at the South African Treasury Department

I’m stumbling along, trying my best to remain in the single file line the path has forced us to form. We crest the hillside, overlooking a quiet river freckled with boulders and dragonflies. I overhear Jonathan and Kirsten chatting in front of me. They are introducing themselves, having only just met on this day hike organized through the Cape Town Hiking Group. I hear Kirsten say that she works for the National Treasury [...]

An interesting response to our recent talk

The first thing that struck me from the talk and that had me celebrate inwardly was that these insights are now surfacing at various points through various people who have all been keenly and committedly observing their environments and coming to similar conclusions: That organisations are [...]

Social innovation from the inside out

We are excited to share this talk that Warren gave last month at University of Cape Town exploring the organizational dimensions of social innovation. In our experience, few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if [...]

How to occupy democracy

When the civil rights movement abandoned its focus on nurturing personal, individual relationships and instead resorted to broad principles and detached theorising, it lost its power. It became coopted, removed from the people who otherwise held it accountable with the gentle discipline that is required in being true and kind to one’s friends.

I suspect that this aspect is where grand nation-building projects, based on the most beautiful of ideals, stumble.

Taking the revolution inward

Any categorization of outside and inside, enemy and friend, good and bad is an illusion of the mind. I remember a quotation by the first prime minister of the transitional government after the 1979 revolution in Iran, who said, “The Shah (king) is not gone, because there is still a little Shah living within each one of us”. His message was that the spirit of monarchy and dictatorship is not gone by the departure or execution of the monarch, but that it could continue in every meeting, every election, every institution, every family and so on.

The learning stance: A conversation with Anthi Theiopoulou

Warren: What are the particular qualities of the demonstrations in Syntagma Square that you most appreciate and would love to see deepen and expand?

Anthi: In my opinion, one of the very important ones is the learning stance. It is crucial because without this quality present, we cannot develop and work with any other quality… and because this movement in Syntagma Square is oriented towards something that still does not exist, this implies that it needs a lot of learning.