Oral culture and engagement

During our recent stay in Toronto, we had the opportunity to grab a drink with Mark Federman, a lecturer and PhD candidate at OISE at the University of Toronto. I had been wanting to meet him for a while after hearing that he was researching Inter Pares as part of his doctoral thesis work. From […]

Inscaping at COCo

I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the power of inscaping in the context of my experience as a staff member at COCo. Over the past several years, we have shifted towards a more collaborative organizational structure. And although the conscious shifts that we’ve made have centred around things like roles, job descriptions, and lines of […]

Back from Toronto

The conversations we’ve had in Toronto over the past week have been incredibly inspiring and insightful. They have affirmed that the themes we’ve been exploring have a far-reaching resonance and that there is considerable interest in continuing to explore them in deeper and more practical ways. The feedback that we got from folks at the […]

Organization Unbound presentation in Toronto

This week we’re excited to be heading to the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) in Toronto to convene an interactive presentation on the practice of expressive change: Changing the World by Changing Our Organizations. We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to our callout and are especially excited that people are coming from so many different types […]

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.”

This is why, I think, that the most deeply engaging organizations I’ve encountered seem to be rooted in small, daily acts of personal revelation. […]

A healing culture

Rennie and I just returned from a visit to the International Masters in Health Leadership (IMHL) program at McGill, where we did a presentation on many of the themes of this blog. One of the participants said something that struck me about the potential of expressive change taking root in hospital settings. He said that it […]

“Something like that happened to me recently…”

We are talking to our friend Andrew Woodall, someone we can always count on for a spirited conversation. He has spent the last five years running the Millennium Scholarship Foundation.

After a pleasant, wintry morning tramp up Avenue du Parc in Montreal, we are hanging out in Em Cafe, discussing Organization Unbound over tea and toast. […]

The experiential turn

If expressive change or The Giving Field was the first big ah-ha for us, the second was something we might call “the experiential turn.” If we want to create a social change dynamic rooted in the actual lived experiences of the people who make up our organizations, it makes sense that, no matter what specific […]

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 […]

The giving field

It seems simple now.

But I had to hear many voices say it in many different ways before it became simple to me. Two of those voices, Patrick and Louis, are from a small organization in Montreal called L’Abri en Ville:

Patrick: “Before I came here, I slept all the time. After I ate, I went to bed. […]