Pioneering a university degree for organizations

Seeking collaborators! We envision creating an entirely new genre of university course, one that recognizes organisations as organisms that learn and as vital sources of innovation. The course will support organisations in making their learning more conscious, systematic and informed and help them draw on the crisis of sustainability present in human and ecological systems as a creative source.

Becoming human through human-centered design

After years of practice, a pivotal moment came when I realized human-centered design could actually be an expression of our humanity. To drive true innovation, I could blur the line between designer and user and create the space for us all to advance our human potential. This happened during my Executive on Loan assignment to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Exploring the link between inscaping & social innovation

At the end of last year, we spent some time trying to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the practice of inscaping and the organizational capacity to initiate and sustain social innovation. Through the generous support of Nesta, we wrote a paper on the topic, which we presented to an international audience of […]

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…

In praise of dreams and magic

Time is ticking. There is less than half an hour until my teaching starts at Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia. I am in my office trying to focus and prepare for my afternoon lecture of “Management Skills and Personal Development” course for about 200 students. I feel terrified. […]

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 […]

Experiencing the giving field

After a talk we gave recently, we had a brief chat with Marion Adamson, a facilitator here in Cape Town. A few days later, after having checked out the Organization Unbound website, Marian sent us the following email:

I read the blog post of the Giving Field – and immediately my son’s preschool came to mind. It’s the place I find myself being drawn to when I’m most struggling with […]

The promise of the square: A conversation with Motaz Attalla

Warren: Can you take us back a bit to how you experienced the early days of Tahrir Square?

Motaz: There was this sense of rediscovering pure community- with all its good and bad. Knowing what it means to receive gifts and give gifts, to receive care and give care between absolute strangers and with a totally open heart. And feeling just a sweetness of courage. And to know that we don’t have to worry about the consequences of stepping out- not because things won’t turn out bad but because there is a lot of support for the act of bravery itself. And to me that’s the glue of society. Feeling like people are for you and you are for people.

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 […]