Leadership Learning Community [beta]

As the Leadership Learning Community staff and the Creating Space VIII design team reflect on our experiences, observations, and our still emerging learning, a few themes keep showing themselves. So far we have been organizing the synthesizing of the experience around four themes: roles, structures, context and strategies.  read more »

The Evaluation Learning Circle held a meeting on January 17th-18th, 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first day combined the work of the Funders' and Evaluation Learning Circles. Our theme was "Deepening our Capacity to Foster and Evaluate Collective Leadership." With a growing interest among funders and practitioners in cultivating boundary-crossing leadership, community leadership and collective leadership, we saw an opportunity and a responsibility to deepen our understanding of what collective leadership is and how to evaluate it.  read more »

When was the last time you were in a conversation so riveting you waited uncomfortably for a break, afraid of what you might miss if you left the room, even for a quick trip to the bathroom? I was just in such a conversation that lasted for a day and a half. The discussion was incredibly tight without the usual tangents. In a world of chronic “know and tell” we were transformed to A+ listeners. We were engaged in the U Process and “Presencing” led by Otto Scharmer.  read more »

Read Part One

I guess you could say we reached a point in the Tuesday group where we had to choose the red pill or the blue pill (If you have seen the movie, you may remember when Morpheus offered Neo the red pill. If Neo chose the red pill and truth he was warned that he would never be able to retreat to the comfort of his current world and if Neo chose the blue pill he could go back ‘to sleep’ and the comfort of all that he knew and believed before.) Through the U Process we as a group chose the red pill. Many of us have experience with those “no turning back” lines of inquiry in our personal lives, “Is this the right job? Is this the right relationship for me? Do I want to have children?” It's something else altogether to engage in this type of deep questioning as a group!  read more »

Observations on the “I” Fear Factor and the Hopeful “We”

Six weeks after 9/11 I found myself at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association. We were all shell-shocked and eager for a chance to talk, heal and try to make some meaning of what was going on. An impromptu panel session formed over lunch as a number of scholars shared their thoughts and concerns about 9/11 and its aftermath. One speaker’s comments stuck with me and were unfortunately played out in the months that would follow. Jean Lipman Blumen talked about what occurs in a climate of fear and our willingness to abdicate leadership as we look for a savior and hand over our authority for the promise of safety. Of course during the years that followed, we saw Congress give new authority to the white house and our civil rights being slowly eroded as we responded to the promise, “I will make America safe.”  read more »

The social web is a brand new way of doing very old things with still emerging implications. The nature of change has always been connected and collective but our recent history and the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector and our social change organizations has been much less so. We as a people, and our communication tools, are on a path to bring the individual and the collective back into balance and planning for this is both impossible and necessary. A document in progress examining this shift is available here.

Join the Bay Area LLC on May 16th, 2008 (save the date!) to discuss this topic live and in person at the next Bay Area circle gathering.

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