From the archives: “Inscaping”

Brandon, a teacher’s aide at Southwest Baltimore Charter School once said to me, “The weak link isn’t necessarily the person who doesn’t do the job well. It’s the person who doesn’t do the job from within or truthfully.”

The simple idea at the heart of expressive organizing is that people experience the organization’s core purpose in their daily work. Over time, that experience, though imperfect and often challenging, can become […]

Anna’s class list

My last post, on John McKnight, has quickly become one of the most read posts we’ve had on Organization Unbound. I’m not sure why. But maybe it has something to do with the how central ‘disdain’ has become to our political and and social change conversations. I suspect that […]

Turning John McKnight inside out

In workshops and classrooms I frequently hear some form of the question: “But how do we deal with those people who just don’t get it?” The ‘it’ is usually undefined, but everyone in the room understands it to be some combination of justice, sustainability, compassion…Heads nod. How can we hope to move forward when so many people don’t see the world from this perspective, when so many people don’t seem to care about the things we care about?

Whole person, whole system

What is less well understood is that treating each other as the patchwork, unruly human beings we are, rather than the zippered office functionaries we pretend to be, is also the only way we can really come to understand, let alone affect, the larger institutional patterns we are trying to change […]

Invoking Jim

My father-in-law, Jim, is a great destroyer of walls. Every house he has lived in will bear me out. Each is filled with reclaimed open space, the air laced with the cheerful scars of what has been removed. To create such space, a man needs to have a strong desire to see the world – the whole thing – from the chair where he sits. He also needs a hammer.

When our first instinct is to run away . . .

I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”

From the archives: “Growth at St. George’s”

The other day Tana and I went to talk to Megan Webster who teaches at St. George’s, a school in Montreal that seems quite steeped in this idea of expressive change. Megan describes it as a place where teachers, staff, and students are all deeply engaged in their own learning and where people pay profound and appreciative attention to each other.

Beyond emotion

For a variety of reasons, many people react hesitantly at first to the idea of inscaping and experiential structuring. One of the things they worry about is that inscaping will turn into emotional indulgence.

From the archives: “The experiential turn”

We just arrived in Mumbai, India and are getting oriented to our new surroundings. Here’s another post from our archives to enjoy until we get back on our blogging feet.

Sounding

The most catalytic organizational practice I’ve encountered lately is humblingly simple. It involves nothing more than pausing in the middle of a meeting or discussion and going around the room to hear from each person how they are actually experiencing the issue at hand – right now, in the moment. It seems like an obvious […]