|
You've received this email because you are a client or friend of Reos Partners.
If you would like to opt out, Unsubscribe [email] Instantly. Having trouble viewing this email? View it on your browser.
|
| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No. 3 |
March 2010 |
|
Innovation in complex social systems.
|
Laboratories for Social Change: Towards a Theory of Systemic Action by Zaid Hassan
|
Mont Fleur Scenarios and the Sustainable Food Lab
|
Build your capacity to affect social change by joining one of our courses and workshops
|
Dialogue Interviews: A Sensing Exercise for the Workshop Context
|
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to Reos Partners’ Quarterly Newsletter.
Reos Partners aims to bring about profound transformation and change in the most complex and “stuck” problems that we face as a global community. Climate change, food systems crises, education, health, HIV/AIDS, and armed conflict are all areas where we have applied our processes for social innovation. In this issue, we introduce some of our tools and processes, to shed a bit of light on what it is that we actually do with our clients and colleagues.
The featured article, “Laboratories for Social Change” by Zaid Hassan
, explores one of our core processes—the “Change Lab”. The Change Lab is a composite approach to social innovation that combines Theory U and multi-stakeholder dialogue with systems thinking, prototyping, and deep democracy, among other methodologies. It is a collective effort to address a vital, complex challenge in a given social system by building a committed alliance of influential government, business, and civil society leaders. The Change Lab provides a safe space, within which a rhythmic process and specifically designed “spaces” allow us to develop a shared understanding of our current reality and our role in it; of what is possible and what is needed of us; and of what we will do in order to co-create a new reality in that system.
To show you theory in practice, LeAnne Grillo and Mia Eisenstadt present an overview of the Sustainable Food Lab—a “real-life” example of a Change Lab—from its inception eight years ago to its current impact and activities.
Also in this issue, Adam Kahane revisits his work at Mont Fleur, where scenario thinking helped to bring about transformation through the creation of relevant, challenging, plausible, and clear narratives that changed the way South Africa thinks about, and engages with, its future. To this day, scenario thinking remains a powerful and useful tool for identifying possible futures.
Finally, we offer you the “how to” on another tool from our toolkit: a paired dialogue interview process perfect for the workshop setting.
We hope that you enjoy our newsletter, and thanks for reading!
Yours Sincerely,
Reos Partners
|
|
Featured Article
Laboratories for Social Change: Towards a Theory of Systemic Action
by Zaid Hassan
Current approaches to addressing complex social challenges are not working. While there is much to celebrate in terms of the numbers of people involved in change initiatives, in the increasing amounts of money being invested, and in the attention given to innovation, the underlying trends, from species loss to public debt, continue to deteriorate. The social fabric is increasingly strained under loads it was never intended to contain.
Examining dominant responses to a wide range of complex social challenges as diverse as environmental degradation and the financial crisis, we find two broad approaches widespread among institutions, policy-makers, and change agents: technical and planning-based approaches. Together, they form a technocratic approach, which dominates efforts to address complex social challenges.
While we can at least imagine technical solutions, planning-based approaches, widespread in both corporations and governments, are almost entirely unsuited to situations of complexity. Conditions are changing too fast and systems are too interconnected for planning to make sense. In practice, technocratic approaches to complex social change can best be understood as an attempt to optimise sub-systems.
By continuing to invest all of our resources in the optimisation of sub-systems, or silos, we are simply avoiding the difficult, unpredictable, and frankly unprecedented work of systemic change. To put it another way: Deploying tools and approaches that we are familiar with but that are not necessarily effective in the face of today’s situations and conditions is ultimately not a very intelligent gamble. By the measure of a small part of the whole, a few people in a population of millions, we will succeed. By the measure of the whole, we are guaranteed to fail. Social challenges remain fundamentally fixed in their downward trajectories, even if plenty of action is happening around addressing symptoms.
New approaches to addressing complex social challenges are required. The Change Lab orientates us towards a new approach, one that leads us in the direction of a theory of systemic action.
Read the whole article
Reos Partners is currently hosting courses on Labs for Social Change. Please see our events page for more information.
To learn more, download our Labs for Social Change Seminar Notes.
|
Project Updates
In each issue of our newsletter we highlight two of the projects that Reos teams are working on. Visit the Projects Page on our web site to learn more about the diverse contexts and issues we are addressing.
The Sustainable Food Lab: 8 Years and Counting
by Mia Eisenstadt and LeAnne Grillo
The global food system is perfectly designed to produce the results it currently produces. In 2002, a group of food system leaders and change agents decided that those results were not good enough. The system was not sustainable for people or for the planet. The group decided that it was a time for change and redesign, and the Sustainable Food Lab (SFL or simply the Food Lab) was born. Now, an eight-year-old project and the first of many large-scale “Change Labs”, SFL is distinguished from other programs by its multi-stakeholder approach, based on action learning and Theory U.
The Food Lab was convened to bring corporations, non-governmental organisations, and governments together to accelerate the incorporation of environmental, economic, and social sustainability into the DNA of the mainstream food and agricultural system. To launch the Food Lab, Hal Hamilton and Adam Kahane spent several months interviewing many of the key players of the food system and enrolling them in a new way of working together. In 2004, 32 leaders of organisations representing the Americas and Europe signed on to the project, each committing 40 days of their time over two years. Larry Pulliam, executive vice president of SYSCO, made the following comments about the diverse and unique composition of the Food Lab:
“It’s pretty unusual that fierce competitors like SYSCO and US Foodservice can come together and work for the higher good. The essence, the power, of the Sustainable Food Lab is that we can do one hundred fold, one thousand fold, more together than we can do by ourselves. What we’re doing is the right thing to do, the good thing to do—for the world. It’s also good for our businesses. There’s a competitive advantage for SYSCO to be involved, but we can’t fully realize that competitive advantage without working together with others in this group to mainstream sustainability”.
Read the whole article
Learning from Experience: The Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise
by Adam Kahane
Scenario thinking is an increasingly important part of Reos Partners’ work to support and build capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems. Scenarios are a deceptively simple tool: a set of carefully constructed stories about how the world around us might unfold. They are internally consistent hypotheses about the future that are simultaneously relevant, challenging, plausible, and clear.
Scenarios have been used for years as a tool to help organisations anticipate and adapt to their unpredictable and uncontrollable contexts. The scenario tool was used first by militaries, then by companies, and more recently by governments and NGOs. But the future is unpredictable in part because, although people cannot control it, they can influence it. Reos Partners has pioneered the use of scenarios not only as an adaptive tool but also as an activist one; not only to study the future but also to shape it.
Read the whole article
|
From Our Toolkit
The Dialogue Interview
Dialogue Interviews are one of the most reliable and versatile tools of the Change Lab process. They are also foundational in that they can be used to build participants’ capacity in a number of different skills—from seeing, suspending and redirecting to talking and listening empathetically and generatively—and they can occur in many parts of the Change Lab itself. Dialogue interviews can help us engage with stakeholders during the convening phase; they can help us tap into the interviewees’ commitment and determine whether they may want to participate in a Lab process. They help us see the system during the co-sensing phase both when they are done between Lab members and with external partners. They enable us to build our collective knowledge about the system we are endeavoring to impact and by doing them, we form deeper and stronger relationships between team
members.
In a workshop setting, dialogue interviews can also be very powerful, again combining skillbuilding with relationship building and co-sensing. We often use them close to the beginning of a workshop because they can build an esprit de corps amongst the participants so effectively and we generate a lot of knowledge about the system in the room quickly.
Dialogue interviews can segue into other teaching pieces, like the four quadrant model for talking and listening, the ladder of inference, as well as more work on seeing, suspending, and redirecting.
Lastly, we have found that there is so much richness in doing dialogue interviews, the skills they build, and the results they deliver that we often start our work with client teams with a full one-day workshop on dialogue interviews so that they can then go and interview themselves and others in order to build the field in which they will work.
To try this exercise during your next workshop, download the Complete Facilitator’s Notes for Dialogue Interviews.
|
|
| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No. 3 |
March 2010 |
|
