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| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No.1 |
September 2009 |
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Innovation in complex social systems.
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We Can't Keep Meeting Like This: Developing the Capacity for Cross-Sector Collaboration by Mille Bojer
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Meet Our Global Team: Who They Are and What They Do.
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News from the Field: Child Protection Lab in Australia and the Dinokeng Scenarios in South Africa.
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Build Your Capacity to Effect Social Change by Joining Our Courses and Workshops.
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"Check-In" as a Tool for Co-Sensing
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Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the first issue of Reos Partners' new quarterly newsletter. Reos was founded in 2007 by a group of friends and colleagues from around the world who share an aspiration to contribute to positive social change. We are strategists and activists, artists and scientists, writers and consultants. Our diverse competencies and perspectives contribute to our ability to help our partners and clients see, understand, and act on whole systems.
This newsletter will give you a glimpse of some of the projects we’re working on and some of the tools and ideas we’re using in this work. We want the articles we have included to help you in your efforts. We welcome your contributions, comments, and questions.
With warm greetings,
Reos Partners
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We Can't Keep Meeting Like This: Developing the Capacity for Cross-Sector Collaboration
by Mille Bojer, São Paulo
From climate change to culture clashes, from epidemics to poverty, we all face complex, global challenges. These “messes” have many causes and many manifestations, and multiple players influence them in multiple ways. Cause and effect are far apart in time and space and so are hard to grasp. The causes themselves have many causes of their own and are often interlinked and reinforce each other.
There is no one button or leverage point that we can press to make these problems go away. They require us to work out creative and systemic solutions by communicating, learning, and acting across sectors, levels, and cultures. Using the Leadership and Innovation Network for Collaboration (LINC) in South Africa as a case study, this article explores how we can build cross-sector collaboration aimed at addressing complex problems and creating systemic solutions. What are the qualities of the types of solutions we need? What mindsets and capacities do we need in order to be effective? How do we overcome the blockages we face? What processes and resources can support this work? By addressing these questions, we can begin to develop collaborative leadership and innovative, systemic responses to today’s challenges.
Read the full article
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Child Protection Lab: Transforming a System
by Jeff Barnum, San Francisco
Work on protecting children involves multiple stakeholders in complex decision-making processes that have profound implications for the safety and well-being of vulnerable young people, their families, and child protection workers. Here follow some reflections on the beginnings of our work in this area in Australia; in a later issue, we will share our related efforts in South Africa.
In March 2008, Steve Atkinson of Atkinson-Consulting! in Australia attended our introductory Change Lab course in New Zealand. After the course, Steve observed that this approach might benefit one of his longstanding clients, the Child Protection Program within the Department of Human Services’ North and West Metropolitan Region, which serves approximately one-third of the 30,000 children across the state of Victoria.
Steve and I worked over the course of the next year to develop a way to address the escalating number of children and families cycling through the system and the unproductive and problematic relationships with non-government service providers, courts, and the press, all of which was breeding low morale, a sense of hopelessness, high staff turnover, and increasing bureaucracy. The results of preliminary interviews and diagnostics showed that while there might be some simple ways to alleviate particular symptoms, larger challenges and their causes were deeply rooted in the culture and architecture of the system as a whole—and that these challenges could not be addressed successfully through the approaches that had been used in the past.
Read the full article
The Dinokeng Scenarios: Three Futures for South Africa
by Busi Dlamini and Sarah Babb, Johannesburg
What will our country, South Africa, look like in 2020? As citizens, will we be better off? Or will we be worse off? And how will the country stand in the world?
These are the questions posed by the Dinokeng Scenario Team, a diverse group of 33 South Africans, who came together from August 2008 to map possible pathways into our future.
South Africa finds itself 15 years into our democracy, facing the harsh realities of our times, and several uncertainties about our future as a nation. This is the context in which Old Mutual and Nedbank decided to sponsor a public domain exercise to generate scenarios for South Africa. The sponsors determined upfront that they would influence neither the process nor the outcome, which has contributed to the sense of open participation and authentic engagement of all in the Dinokeng Scenario Team throughout the process.
The six convenors were selected as prominant leaders in South Africa, and one of their first tasks was to identify and invite the Scenario Team, of which the number was limited to be conducive to a space for deep conversations as well as to cater for maximum diversity of perspectives. Both of these were achieved as the diversity of the team represented views from business, trade unions, most political parties, youth, research institutions, civil society, government, religious groups. And the space was created for dialogue through the scenarios construction process.
Read the full article
These courses and workshops embody Reos’s commitment to helping our partners and clients build their capacity to effect social change. Please click on the course location for specific details and registration information.
The Change Lab: Putting the U-Process Into Practice
November 01, 2009: Seattle, WA USA
Solving Tough Problems: Co-creating New Realities in Complex Systems
January 10 - January 16, 2010: Espleet, Netherlands
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From Our Toolkit
In each issue, we will share a tool or process that we find useful in our work. We suggest that you give them a try—and we’d be happy to hear your feedback.
The “Check-In” as a Tool for Co-Sensing
by LeAnne Grillo, Cambridge
One of the critical capacities that we need to develop to do social change work more effectively is “seeing with fresh eyes.” MIT professor Edgar Schein says, “We do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.” How can we practice really seeing what is happening, rather than just seeing what we expect or already believe to be true? One way is to use a “check-in.”
Many of you may be familiar with a “check-in” as a way to start meetings: each participant gets a turn to briefly share what is happening in “their world”—what they are thinking, feeling, and wanting at that moment. Check-ins are an effective and reliable way to help participants to become fully present, to get everyone’s voice into the room, and to hear what’s on people’s minds around a particular question. When we use a check-in as part of a change lab workshop, it can serve an additional purpose: it gives the group a chance to see itself—an important aspect of collective sensing. A check-in lets everyone see what is going on in the group as a whole, by making explicit what is happening within and among us. Our check-ins weave us together, and the comments form a snapshot of our whole. By practicing how to listen empathetically, to
suspend judgment, and to create a safe space where each member can share their authentic feelings and thoughts, we are able to learn a lot about who we are and where we are in our individual and collective journeys. We can identify trends, notice differences, and be able to make any necessary mid-course corrections with greater confidence. And by practicing our capacity to see ourselves more clearly, we can better work together.
Taking a tool like a check-in, which you may already be comfortable using, and enhancing it to build other needed capacities is an easy way to jump start your social change work.
Download the complete Facilitator's Notes for using The Check In as a Tool for Co-Sensing
Coming Up in the Next Issue
In 2004, Berrett-Koehler published Adam Kahane’s first book, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities. Nelson Mandela said, “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.”
In January 2010, this same publisher will bring out Adam’s second book, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, about which William Ury says, “This profound book offers us a wise way to negotiate our toughest group, community, and societal challenges.” In this new work, Adam suggests that the two most common ways that people try to address their challenges are fundamentally flawed—and offers an uncommon and better way forward. We will print an excerpt from Power and Love in the December issue of this newsletter.
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| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No.1 |
September 2009 |
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