Just What Is a Social Entrepreneur?

In the current spring 2007 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, two Skoll Foundation leaders call for a more rigorous definition of social entrepreneurship in the lead article, “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition.”

Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and Roger L. Martin, a foundation board member and dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, write: “We would argue that the definition of social entrepreneurship today is anything but clear. As a result, social entrepreneurship has become so inclusive that it now has an immense tent into which all manner of social beneficial activities fit.”

To read the article, click here.

Live from the 2007 Skoll World Forum!

Join leading social entrepreneurs who are gathering this week at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University, including:

• Muhammad Yunus
• Larry Brilliant
• Bill Drayton
• Jeroo Billimoria
• Susan Collin Marks
• Jeff Skoll

http://www.socialedge.org/

Cultures in Second Life

What is really possible in Second Life, regarding “Change”, with a capital C? And especially in my fields of interest: that is intercultural dialogue and conflict resolution.

I signed up for SL after the Imagine seminar, but I had some computer problems in the beginning. Since a week or two I can walk and fly around without much technical problems. After my first encounters with other avatars, I felt it was not much different from an average bar… But I realised I just had to look for the right places (and those are definetely not in the “most popular places” list in the search engin!). After Fraukes post on Better World Island, I went to have a look, but I never met anyone there.

Then last week I discovered a group of (future) mediators, who plan to use SL to facilitate trainings with people from all over the world. But they also have real ambitious plans: host Real Life mediations in SL…! You are not in the same place, but there is still the visual aspect.
Still, the thing that really interests me, is the intercultural apsect. What is actually possible in SL, apart from facilitating a training with people you know through RL. I mean, in SL you look like you want to. And these looks, even if you can change your appearance any way you want, ae not really connected to RL cultures. So do intercultural issues matter?

This afternoon I chatted with a teacher from a learning center in SL, who suddenly made remarks about what I wrote about my avatar in my profile (about communication in SL and intercultural possiblities). He told me he always reads peoples profile, because that is the only way to learn anything about another avatar: it is the closest you get to someones real colours!

Maybe I’m taking SL too serious, or maybe I still have to find out the use of SL in intercultural dialogue myself! Do you have any experience with this?

From Innovation to Social Enterprise

Hosted by Patrick O’Heffernan (March 2007)

In his indispensable book, Migrating from innovation to entrepreneurship (Encore Press, 2006), Jerr Boschee describes the evolution of non profits from dependency – total reliance on grants and gifts, through sustainability with a little earned income, to self-sufficiency through income alone, to a social enterprise supported by income and operating for a double or triple bottom line.

Are you ready to exit dependency? How can you take great innovations and turn them into a profitable social enterprise? How do you deal with the harsh reality that the bottom line of an enterprise is survival and profits, regardless of its social mission?

Patrick O’Heffernan recommends the following six steps:

1. Articulate to yourself an idea that stirs your passions
If you are not energized every time you think about it, it won’t work. And, if you can’t explain it in your sleep in a tight, easily understood paragraph or sentence, it won’t work.

2. Do a reality check
Test your idea on a range of people. If any of them cannot understand it or find serious flaws, rethink it until you have clarified the idea and answered the questions – and still have your passion.

3. Estimate the resources you will need – both time and money – then quadruple it
Entrepreneurs moving from the NPO to the enterprise world frequently underestimate how hard and how expensive it is. And remember, whatever number you estimate for marketing is too little. One of the bitter experiences of a lot of NPOs is that good marketing often beats great products.

4. Set up metrics and monitor your income and outcomes daily
Boschee advises to watch your financial numbers every day. Go beyond that –watch other metrics such as number of phone calls, website hits, people served, etc, and relate these to your financial numbers. This will quickly tell you if you are on-track, if you need to make changes, if you are correctly capitalized or will need cash – before a crisis.

5. Don’t be afraid to change
If your data monitoring is telling you that your price is too high, or your profit margins too low, or you delivery times too long, or your advertising is not reaching your market, change! No plan is perfect, no product is perfect, and every process can be made more efficient. This is why you track your data – to see when and where change is needed.

6. Know when to fold’em
If your numbers tell you it is not working and you cannot develop a strategy to reverse the slide, quit. Spending your time and your investors’ money past the point of obvious failure prevents you from using that time and money for another idea. An important difference between developing an innovative idea and developing an enterprise based on that idea is that the enterprise can fail in the real world, costing time and money. While that can be painful, it is not necessarily a bad thing –learn from your failure and move on.

Join Patrick O’Heffernan in the conversation

The Hub Network

Another social movement is spreading at the moment: THE HUB

The Hub is an incubator for social, sustainable innovation. It offers membership of inspirational workspaces in office buildings in major world cities for social innovators to work, meet, learn, connect and realise progressive ideas. The Hub is a place for making things happen; containing all the facilities needed to cultivate an idea, launch a project, host a meeting and run a business. The Hub is already located in London, Johannesburg, Bristol and Sao Paulo, with current projects starting in Mumbai and Rotterdam.

The original Hub in London has been inspiring many others to start similar initiatives in their hometowns.

Check out photos of other Hubs: London, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Bristol, Soweto, Cairo, Halifax, Brussels, Berlin, Bombay, Toronto, Rotterdam: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehub/

Make a difference

Surfing around YouTube I found this video. Very much in the spirit of We Are What We Do, this guy calls us for some small deeds to make a difference and to share those with him, in the form of a video response!
I have never uploaded a video on YouTube, but who knows I will manage this week!

Make a difference

Effective Change Tools: Low Carbon Diet

Nina, in regards to your question “How can one drive change through awareness creation?”, the following example has build on the fact that enough awareness has been created around climate change in the US and the Empowerment Institute in New York has developed a program to act on climate change on a community level: the Low Carbon Diet.

They have excellent resources on their website, including the outline for a Climate Change World Café.

Last Friday, I took part in a telephone training of the Empowerment Institute (EI). Together with 60 people from across the US we have been discussing community change strategies using the Low Carbon Diet tools. There are more teletrainings with David Gershon scheduled, if you are interested.

Attached in the powerpoint, you find the points that I found most interesting. They include:

• There is a paradigm shift from awareness creation and campaigning to empowerment and grassroots action
• E. Rogers theory of “Diffusion of innovation”, Who are the early adopters in my local environment?
• US citizens are aware of the need to better preserve natural resources but the behaviour change is limited
• Like the We Are What We Do movement the EI has identified some key questions of reluctance to act: Where do I start? Which are the important actions? How do I take the actions? Will it make a difference?
• The Ecoteam program has put up a simple structure that is transferable to several social change issues
• A main part of the success of this program was the fact that change was best initiated within neighbourhood communities

teletraining_main-points.ppt

You find the longer ready-to-use powerpoint and lots of other material here

Appreciative Inquiry in Action

Nina, here is another brilliant change tool that we are currently experimenting with at Pioneers of Change: Appreciative Inquiry

” Appreciative Inquiry is currently revolutionizing the field of organizational development”, writes University of Michigan Professor Robert Quinn, in his acclaimed book Change the World.

Within the Pioneers of Change Network Dialogue, Anne-Claire and me have been interviewing each other last week around the question:

Tell me about your most recent inspiring/meaningful/true conversation that you have had as a peak experience in the Pioneers of Change network?

Here are our stories:
ai-network-dialogue-anne-claire.doc
ai-network-dialogue-frauke-i.doc

And as a side product I just fine-tuned my personal vision a bit while I was writing my interview story and added “To develop and connect…” to my mission statement. Amazing!

Chaordic Coaching I

So, I started chaordic coaching last week: me being coached with a method based on the chaordic model (assuming that a system is simultaneously chaotic and ordered; Dee Hock, founder of the VISA credit card system coined the term “chaordic”)

We started the process with me formulating my expectations in putting them into questions (Why questions? Simply because questions are future-oriented and give room for further questions that take you deeper into a learning process):

• How can I learn more about the chaordic model through coaching?
• How can I apply choardic elements at We Are What We Do?
• How can chaordic coaching help me to focus?

In the first session last week, we started a dialogue on the last question: “…helping me to focus on how can I leave We Are What We Do Netherlands in a “good” state, have a successful re-entry going back to Germany, and what does a We Are What We Do school and community programme in Germany need?”

After having defined the questions we moved into taking a picture of my current environment: what gives me energy? Generally speaking: it is CHANGE NETWORKS:

• We Are What We Do
• Pioneers of Change
• Kaospilots
• The Imagine Community
• AIESEC

In the next step, we took the Integral Framework and started to check “How aligned am I in this framework?” And that is where the personal values bit is coming in again See, you don’t get around not defining them, if you want to drive change!

For the next session, I have to run a personal Culture Scan that is related to Spiral Dynamics and to go into a deeper inquiry in regards to the integral framework:

• Where do I SEE a match/mismatch
• Where do I FEEL a match/mismatch

The Culture Scan has questions around:

• For my company to survive and prosper in the future, it should…
• Personal priorities: what matters most?
• I can be best managed when I have…
• When under stress, I …
• I like to work for an organization that…
• My current stage of change is…
• My preferred work structure is…
• My patterns of thinking and processing information are…
• My work-style preferences are…
• I prefer change to be…

Methods of (driving [Change) (Management], Networking and some Events

KommunikationVeränderungsprozesse
Networking
Action Research

What methods are there to support Change? How can one drive change through awareness creation? What methods are used in this field?

We had the U-Process on the conference and read great inputs about reflection and finding out “what our trees are”. I would now love to take these up and start a discussion and collection of methods on Change Management. I am currently researching on methods of personal and institutional Change Management and came across some approaches (first inputs, happy to get more of them) that I 1. would like to share and 2. would love to get some comments and methods you know to share them here.

Learning and Change through Action Research

Action research has a long history, going back to social scientists’ attempts to help solve practical problems in wartime situations in both Europe and America. Greenwood and Levin trace its origins to the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1940s to design social experiments that could take place in natural settings. Lewin is credited with the phrases “Nothing is as practical and a good theory” and the suggestion that if you want to understand an organization the best thing to do is try to change it. The participatory Action Research has a double objective. One aim is to produce knowledge and action directly useful to a group of people—through research, through adult education, and through sociopolitical action. The second aim is to empower people at a second and deeper level through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge: they “see through” the ways in which the establishment monopolizes the production and use of knowledge for the benefit of its members. This is the meaning of consciousness raising or conscientization, a term popularized by Freire for a “process of self-awareness through collective self-inquiry and reflection”. The tradition of participatory rural appraisal similarly is concerned with “putting the first last” and creating practical knowledge of use to the underpriviledged members of our world.

Find more about Action Research here and in the document attached:

http://www.4managers.de/themen/action-research/

Change Compass

The Change Compass is a collection of 30 decision matrices to support: Personal, Organizational, and Market Choices. The matrices promote a learning culture in strategy formulation, organizational development and interpersonal relationships. Explore options and make decisions based on sound principles and explicit assumptions.

http://www.changecompass.com/

Apart from this, I came across two events I feel are quite interesting:

Workshop Kommunikation in Veränderungsprozessen (sorry, this one will be in German):

This event is organized by an AIESEC Alumni using an interesting method: Simulations. Please refer to the introduction of the event below and the description attached.

“Das Gestalten und Umsetzen von Veränderungen gehört heute zum Standard-Aufgabengebiet eines jeden Managers und vieler Berater in Unternehmen, Organisation, unserer Gesellschaft insgesamt. Die Kommunikation hat im Change-Prozess eine herausgehobene Bedeutung. Sie ist es, die – wenn sie gelingt – aus einem gut geplanten Veränderungsprojekt ein erfolgreiches Veränderungsprojekt macht. Während man die Inhalte der Botschaften nur in Abhängigkeit vom tatsächlichen Projekt festlegen kann, sind die Art der einzusetzenden Kommunikationsmittel, die Reihenfolge ihres Einsatzes und ihre Wirksamkeit weitgehend unabhängig vom tatsächlichen Veränderungsgegenstand planbar. Grund genug, den Kommunikationsprozess vor Projektbeginn zu simulieren, anstelle nach dem „trial and error“- Prinzip am „offenen Herzen einer Organisation“ zu experimentieren.”

“Idealist.org Start-up Meeting, Berlin” (already took place, but interesting to know anyways)

We hope to welcome local activists and international visitors to our meeting to share thoughts, discuss sustainable solutions and inspire and connect communities of action. dropping knowledge as the host tries to connect local projects and people through modern-age media.
This is the German meeting from about 80 sessions worldwide motivated by idealist.org, a community that presents more than 66.000 nonprofit and community organizations in 165 countries. It is in fact the best Nonprofit Career Center on the web, with hundreds of job and internship listings.
The parallel meetings aim to help launch a global network of people who want to change their communities and the world by connecting people, ideas, and resources in every possible way. If you´re dedicated to social change, we hope to welcome you in the dropping knowledge office.

Find out more about here:

https://www.xing.com/app/events?op=detail&id=108244

http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/MyIdealist/PeopleDetail/default?country=Germany&sid=86105153-159-WcE

Last thing from my side right now is the documentation of our Networking Cards we all wrote on IMAGINE that I typed down and finally will upload here for all of us.

Going through them I realized that there are a lot of common topics and its great that some of them (e.g. finding the tree) are already actively discussed here in the blog.

Well, before ending, one last inspiration that reached my inbox some day ago:

The Invitation
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (A Native American Elder)

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine and your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine and your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself: if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul: if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes!’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you can stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Happy bloging, looking forward to your comments,

Nina