Leadership Learning Community [beta]

Leadership Learning Community
in partnership with Connective Associates and The Berkana Institute
Notes prepared by Aerin Dunford  read more »

LLC recently funded two Community Seed Fund projects that will explore and assess different learning approaches about how to cultivate and support learning communities.  read more »

Leadership development practitioners have become increasingly interested in the formation of leadership networks as a way to sustain and strengthen relationships among leaders within and across organizations, communities, and systems. Bruce Hoppe and I recently wrote a paper (see below for the attachment) that offers a framework for conceptualizing different types of leadership networks and identifies the outcomes that are typically associated with each type of network.  read more »

For anyone interested in creating and sustaining breakthrough change, you may want to read a fascinating article by Matthew Chin entitled Sustainability and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (September 2003). Matthew runs Operations Success Programs with the Primary Care Development Corporation, an organization that helps health centers and clinics form learning collaboratives to achieve and sustain transformational change in serving the poor, the uninsured, and the under-insured in New York City.

After years of implementing a highly successful organizational learning model in diverse health centers and clinics, he and his colleagues became interested in why clinics and health centers have a hard time sustaining the gains that they made. He discovered that leadership was critical to long-term success.  read more »

Three LLC circles (Sustaining Networks/Alumni, Social Media and Leadership, and Health Leadership) convened for a conference call and web-based meeting using the WebEx platform to discuss creating and sustaining leadership networks. Twenty people explored the following questions:  read more »

• What forms of collaboration and network creation are we seeing in the leadership development arena?
• What tools or processes do we find strengthen leadership networks?
• What are the biggest challenges to sustaining network participation?

We are holding Creating Space in New Orleans in 2009. What will it mean for us to be there? What can we learn? What do we bring? I have been thinking a lot recently about the power of place, about the stories that are layered in our environment that we are unaware of, especially the stories of those who have been excluded from history -- whose stories are invisible to us but are still etched in the land. What are those stories? What can they teach us? How do our lives embody these stories even when we are unaware of them?  read more »

The Leadership Learning Community Health Leadership Circle and the Center for Creative Leadership, hosted a peer consultation session using an on-line conference tool, WebEx. During the hour and half call, over 30 people provided insights, inquiries and tested advice to a team from the Center Creative Leadership who are partnering with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop "Ladder to Leadership: Developing the Next Generation of Community Health Leaders."  read more »

What experiences have you had developing and using EvaluLEAD results maps? How have you adapted EvaluLEAD in the contexts you are working in?  read more »

What is the role of evaluation in the process of leadership innovation? This is a question we discussed recently at a Boston Circle gathering. Debbie Frieze shared Berkana’s theory of change that starts with a premise that local leadership is a powerful force for innovation and change. Experimentation with new ideas and processes happens at the local level where leaders are responding to the conditions they face. They actively seek alternatives to “business as usual.” Innovation often inspires resistance because people are not easily able to let go of the old to make room for the new.  read more »