The Hub in Brussels at the Art of Hosting

Last week, I have been in Belgium to visit the Hub in Brussels and to be part of the Art of Hosting. Over 50 people gathered at the Heerlijckyt to celebrate diversity, complexity, and collective intelligence through conversations that matter.

 

I had to go to Brussels to meet Mushin from Berlin who wrote about the Art of Hosting afterwards: “Art of Hosting is not a method, even though it uses state-of-the-art (post-)modern social technologies that make a lot of sense and help turn that sense into effective action - if that is what the participants wish.”

Using the Hub vision document to present the Hub concept at the Art of Hosting in the Hub in Brussels last Tuesday, Simone and me discovered the chaordic stepping stones inside:

Simone is the initiator of the Hub in Brussels.

And this is how her week looks like:

New Ideas for Africa

Sofia participated in this event…

Hello folks,

I know you haven’t heard from us in a while and I have gotten numerous individual messages wondering what’s happening with the group.

Well, we are still ALIVE AND KICKING!!!!!

May New Ideas for Africa Output

Since that event and following the positive feedback we got from attendees, we have been trying to put modalities in place so we can continue to run the events sustainably but also so we can create a proper framework for us to be more than a talk-shop, but an active practical player in Africa’s development.

To this end, we now have an extended team of 7 people all working on the project now. The extended team met to work out our strategy for moving forward on Tuesday 3rd of July and will keep you updated as we progress.

We have also gotten a number of invites to partner with existing organisations working on development of the continent.

All in all, things are looking good and we will be sending details for the next New Ideas for Africa session in London as well as plans for a picnic in August.

We have also gotten requests from different people who want to run similar sessions in their own cities outside London. We are trying to put together a format on how this will operate and will send through once we have it. If you would also like to host the conversations in your city, let us know.

Take care and keen to see more activity on the group.

Cheers,

Femi & Lesley
For Africa++ Core Team

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

Output Values Session

Values-Session

One of the main targets of every personal development effort is to make our values more conscious. Only when we know what is important to us can we live them out in a conscious matter, and take them as guides, rather than being inflicted by random circumstances we cannot control. There are in my opinion two different types of values.

I call the first type VALUES FOR PRINCIPLES. These values can guide us in our daily behaviour. They are for example: Living with love and humour, pride, or to strive for excellence. The six AIESEC values are other good examples for this type (strive for excellence, living diversity, acting sustainably, demonstrating integrity etc.)
From these values, we can derive rules, or rather PRINCIPLES.

The second type of values that we have in life point us to our GOALS. Examples: Save the environment, create a family and care for them, help people to live more conscious lives, fight poverty, save the whales etc. If we know these values inside of us, we can extract a purpose in life, or for some people, even a VISION.

These two types can be compared with different cultures. The differences are not clear-cut in each aspect, but it makes sense to understand the difference, because we need different approaches to get to them. Ask a German businessman working in China whether he sees a difference in getting things done in the two cultures!

How can we then get to the first type of values, our principles?

Here are some different methods as keywords. They cannot be explained in detail here. For more information on them, lets get in contact.

1. People I admire- analyse the people around you. What do you admire on some of them? Look at your friends- why are they your friends? Which attribute is it about them that you value?
2. Reflect: When have I been passionate in life? When did I do something creative and productive with this passion? What was the passion about? I like this exercise a lot, because it reminds us that we have all created something special for us with our passion in the past. We can do so again.
3. Values-list: there are lists with different types of values. What we can do here is to cut them down one by one, so that there are just a few left at the end.
4. There are also other exercises like the Abigale: A story about how a girl sleeps with a guy just to get to the man she loves…quite controversial. Nobody is obviously right in this story, which makes it fun to discuss it. It can be a good start in values-discussions. You can download this exercise along with others here: http://www.training-youth.net/INTEGRATION/TY/Publications/tkits/tkit4/content.pdf

Page 56.
5. Look at difficult decision you made in your past. Why did you make them? What were the principles you based your decision on?

These are some methods to get ourselves closer to our principles. What about the others, our goals?

1. Funeral- exercise: In this exercise, imagine you are at your own funeral. People that cared for you are holding speeches. What will they say about your character? What about the achievements you had in life?
2. News-scan: What kind of news are you most interested in when reading the papers or watching news? What strikes you to be most unjust? Collect the articles that you care about, and find out what it is that touches you in them.
3. Look at your own CV: Which of the things you did in the past were most important to you? Why? Which role did I play in there?
4. One of the easiest, but for me personally, most effective exercise: Sit down with a pen and paper (or a computer), and type this title: I dedicate my life to… then simply brainstorm. In the beginning, I wrote down the most obvious things. But when I continued and kept on writing, I eventually got to something that really touched me. This is when I knew: This is it.

These are just some methods, if you know more, please share. And if there are still questions, drop me a line. .-)

As a second step to the Principle-Values, I suggest to find out rules for everyday life. What can be my principles to ensure that I really live out these values? What does it mean for me to strive for excellence? Find out tangible rules for yourself. The question was asked how many values we should have. There is no universal answer to it. I believe that we should limit the number to the ones we can consciously follow. More important than the sheer number is the PRIORITY of the values. Values, in both cases, should have ranks. It makes decision-making in life a lot easier.
The second step to the Goal-Values then is to find out a Vision for our own lives: So what is it then that I want to dedicate my life to? Its not possible to be sure about it for the rest of our lives. But we can at least be as sure as we can be, for now.

Looking forward to discussions, Thu Phong.

Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs

In Anja’s and Alex’s presentation on SE, Alex recommended the booklet “Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs” by the Schwab Foundation. Here it is as a pdf file:

final_brochure2006.pdf

Secondly, the Schwab Foundation had a SE Summit in Switzerland in January:

se_summit2007_report.pdf

And finally, I love Google, the Schwab Foundation gave an AIESEC workshop in 2004:

aiesec10032004onlineversion.pdf

U-Process: Presencing

In addition to Sofia’s posting here are some more reference documents on the U-Process from my knowledge database:

u-process_social_technology.pdf

theoryu.pdf

why-we-need-the-u.pdf

By the way, AIESEC International has just run their International Presidents Meeting on the U-Process.

Facilitator’s Guide to Imagine Reflection Session U-Process /Collective Intelligence Workshop

Dear Imaginers,

At last this guide is ready. I have attempted to create a ‘one size fits all’ version, which aims to cover most practical aspects as well as some of the concepts behind this workshop design.

In this guide are also references for further reading

Please feel free to give feedback. The idea is that this was meant to be a helpful guide, that had concrete starting points for someone who wanted to run it, as well as some of the ‘big-picture context.

Download the facilitator’s guide here:

U-Process and Collective Intelligence Workshop Facilitation Guide

In my foundation training on facilitation, back when I was working at British Airways, the external consultant who trained us said about the references he gave us:” take these and go beyond.”

So please do!

Thanks again Stefan for highlighting the creative commons concept so accessibly. I have put this guide under a CC license. (My first use of this! It feels good ;-))

“We live in a time in which most people believe there is not much inside them, only what teachers, parents and others have put there.” Michel Cassou and Stewart Cubley, authors of Life, Painting and Passion

Second Life ‘optimists’ gathering

Wow, 3 days into Second Life and we had our first circle discussion (actually, the meeting was another outcome of the OpenSpace session at Imagine) in SL!

We, that is Sofia, Mark (from the Pioneers of Change Cultivation Unit), Andrew from Learning House in London and myself.

Absolutely amazing: we started off with a warm-up drumming session on Better World Island:

(click on picture to enlarge)

We then moved into a cirlce conversation in the Peace and Justice Center exploring questions like:

• What has brought us here into SL today?
• How are we all connected to Sofia? (Sofia says: ”only as a starting point cos we didnt all know each other but I did. It was our way of introducing each other. We realise even a check-in is a new type of experience in SL- when you see the avatar but dont quite know the person behind it yet..we are learning.. come learn with us!”)
• What have been our experiences so far in SL?
• How can we create a hub for social innovation and change in SL?
• What would we like 1 million people to do to change the world?
• How can we continue our explorations in SL together?

(click on picture to enlarge)

I actually was the first one to ask about dancing possibilities in SL (I am the last one to do that in real life ) and we ended up in a techno rave festival: me dancing flying in midair (sorry, forgot to take a picture there but I have witnesses!)

We casually meet Friday late afternoons now, so if you would like to join in just drop Sofia or me a line!

By the way, anyone up for the SL Socrates Café on early Wednesday morning next week? Let’s see, if I can drag myself out of bed for this

Wear sunscreen

Dear all,

perhaps you remember the video we watched for introducing one of the key elements of IMAGINE: Our external speakers that are sharing their stories with us.

Here is the video to watch again:

And the text of it.

What is your tree?

Our OpenSpace Output…

what-is-your-tree.doc