Posts Tagged ‘Relationship’
Earlier this year we were contacted by Keith McCandless, co-developer of Liberating Structures. He was interested in exploring the synergies between Liberating Structures and the work of Organization Unbound. After some initial conversations, I became intrigued and am excited to share the start of our inquiry here.
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When we started Organization Unbound, people often mistook us for a consulting firm, an understandable assumption given how common it is for organizations to rely on consultants to lead processes of internal change. However, we felt strongly (and still do) that the traditional consultancy model would be a barrier to cultivating a rich and expansive field of learning around expressive change. We wanted to learn with organizations, not just provide support to them.
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It is becoming increasingly clear to me that social change, when done well, is an intimate act. For many years, I was taught to ignore my feelings and intuition, and to develop unassailable plans and irrefutable theories to explain and legitimize my work. These days, I don’t […]
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The recognition – that we are all now so close, our global footprint so large, and all our processes of life so befouled – releases increasing tendencies towards management and control. We appear caught in a vast paradox that exceeds our capacity for irony – we foreground ourselves as the solution to the problems that we have created through foregrounding ourselves.
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I’m just finishing up a fascinating six-week on-line course on Theory U. I found this 10-minute excerpt from Otto Scharmer’s interview with Dayna Cunningham particularly moving. She shares about her experience as a civil rights lawyer and how she came to understand the importance of developing an individual and collective capacity for empathy in social change work.
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In a letter to her fellow organizers, Katherine Therese Whaling offers a heartfelt reflection on her experience organizing last year’s Muizenberg Festival, a week-long celebration of community-led development in the seaside town of Muizenberg, South Africa. We were struck by how beautifully her reflection illuminates what it means to live an event as a process rather than simply plan it as an outcome.
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We recently stumbled upon the work of Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC), one of a growing number of capacity-building organizations taking an ‘inside-out’ approach to social transformation. One of their associates, Curtis Ogden, wrote this piece a few months back reflecting on their journey of stepping more fully into their most deeply held value: “the love that does justice”.
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This provocative essay on Black Girl Dangerous sheds light on how the oppressive social patterns that we’re trying to change ‘out there’ inevitably live inside us and our social movements, no matter how hard we try to chase them out. Author Ngọc Loan Trần invites fellow activists to engage with these patterns more consciously and lovingly in order to be a stronger force for change.
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If we believe that changing the world involves changing the kinds of relationships we have with one another, what role do organising structures have in helping or hindering the relationships we are trying to create?, asks Liam Barrington-Bush.
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At Kufunda Learning Village we had fallen into the rut of our weekly meetings having become very task oriented. They were the least inspired place of our village (mostly), and several issues were being discussed with only a few voices repeating themselves. There was little collective wisdom at play, and oftentimes we left our weekly Village Circle feeling drained and tired, although we might have managed to tick off many items on our to-do list. One day – after one too many such meetings – I decided, no more […]
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