collaboration

Design thinking will make your team more democratic

Originally posted on Medium 

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We often talk about design thinking in terms of generating creative and user-centered insights and solutions. Less often do we talk about design thinking as a way to align and empower teams and individual contributors. Despite best intentions, teams can revert to hierarchies and groupthink, instead of enabling equal participation and representation of people and ideas around the table. Avoiding these traps is possible through thoughtful facilitation and setting of expectations.

Here’s three ways you can use design thinking to make your team more democratic. (more…)

What Millennials Are Doing With Millions In Government Funds To Reclaim Their Communities (Forbes)

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Over on Forbes, I wrote about the new civic movement of participatory budgeting, and how youth are making decisions about how to spend city budgets to improve their communities. I interviewed fellow UChicago alumna and SIPA professor Hollie Russon Gilman for the piece; she’s the author of a new book on the subject, Democracy Reinvented.

Check out the article here.

Let’s Rethink Social Enterprise: It’s a Framework of Values

LJIZlzHgQ7WPSh5KVTCB_TypewriterThis blog post has been sitting in my drafts for almost two years now. I keep coming back to it every few months–questioning its relevance, comparing it to the rapid evolution of thinking about social enterprise that has taken place since I first wrote this, asking friends for feedback, and then deciding I’m not comfortable sharing it. While our thinking about what “social enterprise” means has certainly evolved over the past few years, there is still room to question its meaning and trajectory. More and more, I’ve been gravitating towards the notion of “organizational values” and away from entities and missions. I wrote a bit about that here, but I wanted to FINALLY share this post below, as a draft, open for feedback and improvement.

Readers: What do you think? What’s missing? Is this even relevant? Are organizations adopting these values, and would those that don’t traditionally think of themselves as social enterprises want to advertise themselves as such if they aligned with the framework below? Add in the comments or message me. I really want to hear what you think and have your help in shaping this concept further. 

“That’s a non-profit, it’s not a social enterprise.” People make this comment all too often. The definition of the term “social enterprise” widely varies, but what is often most misunderstood is that social enterprises as entities can be for-profit, non-profit, or a hybrid, and I argue in this piece, even governmental.

We should separate the legal formation of social enterprise from the values and goals of social enterprise. Let’s think of social enterprise as a set of values for an organization. In this sense, social enterprise is a framework of values for change, and we can encourage all organizations to adopt this framework.

What is the social enterprise framework of values?   (more…)

The Community is the Project

“In societies under stress, where basic systems have broken down and the very social compact that binds people together is under strain, the project we need to undertake is not the bridge—or the road, or the banking system, or the sanitation system, or whatever. The project is the community. The specifics of projects that people undertake in the chaotic coastal slums we’ve been discussing are actually less important than the community cohesion, sense of solidarity, and common purpose that those projects generate. These are not side effects of a successful project—they are the project.”

– David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla 

Cultivating Empathy and Internal Awareness for Social Change

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“Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?…Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

In what David Brooks deemed an “empathy craze” of the past decade, several bestsellers exalted the values of empathy, followed by a series of widely circulated opinion pieces questioning the limits of empathy. Schools and social entrepreneurs preach the value of teaching empathy. The core of trendy human-centered design is empathetic listening and design. I too, caught on to the hype—seeking to better understand empathy as it relates to my own work in social enterprise and social design. Here is what I’ve begun to understand.

Empathy has a critical role to play in creating positive social change; it will enable us to become more collaborative and respond more thoughtfully to social issues. We can cultivate and teach empathy—with intentionality, or willed effort, not diminishing its power—and we can encourage empathy without requiring action or agreement. But before empathy can achieve it’s full impact in our lives and in positive social change, we must cultivate internal awareness to understand our own context in the world.

Through my exploration of empathy, I remain with more questions than answers, and know that my opinion will evolve and change over time. I offer my thoughts here because this subject is important to the public discourse on social change and personal development, and I hope that others wiser than me will offer their own ideas and feedback in response. (more…)

We are the problem, and we create the change

What follows are very incomplete thoughts and reflections on some recent readings. I would love to hear your ideas and feedback. 

The world is a system made of systems, all inherently living–what Donella Meadows defines as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”

As I’ve come to better understand systems thinking and social change at a cursory level, I’m realizing that change starts within each of us. As we are part of systems, we are part of the problem, and therefore we are also part of the change. That change begins when each of us realize that we create both sides of the equation.  (more…)

What I’ve Learned from Blogging
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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just over one year ago, I wrote my first blog post. I was very nervous about it, and wasn’t even sure I’d stay committed to the endeavor. But starting a blog has been one of the most beneficial decisions for me–personally and professionally.

It all started when a few colleagues finally convinced me to join Twitter in Fall 2011. Twitter was an amazing gateway into the online ideas and information market. After learning so many new things through Twitter, I started to find my own voice and opinions about the issues I followed. This realization, coupled with my move to India, encouraged me to start a Tumblr to share interesting articles I was reading and videos I was watching.

 

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“Our education system is a key reason for our lack of skills in collaborating effectively. This is now out of sync with today’s world of work. We do not emphasize collaborative skills and teamwork much in education, from K-12 to high school to college. It is an afterthought, it seems. Learning how to work well with others should be as important as learning math or accounting.”

Morten Hansen in this great article on cheating at Harvard

Why Teams Make Us Happy

Scott Belsky of Behance has a great piece on teams, collaboration, and happiness. He quotes ”Hive Psychology, Happiness & Public Policy” by J. Haidt, P. Seder, and S. Kesebir:
(1) “The most effective moral communities – from a well-being perspective – are those that offer occasional experiences in which self-consciousness is greatly reduced and one feels merged with or part of something greater than the self.”
(2) “The self can be an obstacle to happiness (given our inherent limitations as humans!), so people need to lose their selves occasionally by becoming part of an emergent social organism in order to reach the highest level of human flourishing.”
He asks:
“And what is the role of professional networks like Behance in connecting us, and helping us, reach beyond our own resources?”
Networks (such as StartingBloc and YPFP) can help create a team-like environment of like-minded professionals, for creative energy and accountability. The sense of being part of a larger movement and greater cause is the key. 
“Perhaps we reach a higher level of contentment and overall performance by working alongside others, if only from the camaraderie and sensation of being a part of something greater than ourselves?”
Belsky has a nice conclusion that I think many can get behind: 
As creative humans, we tend to always reach beyond our own limits. We want to keep learning and defy past accomplishments. In essence, we want to transcend ourselves. But we are most fulfilled when we push beyond what we can do alone. Whatever our goals, working with others may be the best path to happiness.

Why Teams Make Us Happy

Collaboration and Innovation

Fast Company has a great article on collaborating “with enemies,” branding, and innovation. Here are some highlights:

“In 2012, growth is no longer a matter of market share. In a world dominated by constraint, the brands that grow do so by understanding and meeting more and more needs and producing products and services to meet those needs. Growth is about share of mind and wallet, not simply share of market.”

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“The most important, most effective, most impactful brands are those that have put petty competition behind them and embraced collaboration as an operating principle—it is their core DNA. These brands are clear about their ambitions and are not shy about seeking out others who share those ambitions. And with these partners they will pool resources to create a better future.”

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“THE MOST IMPACTFUL BRANDS HAVE EMBRACED COLLABORATION AS AN OPERATING PRINCIPLE.”

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“This isn’t CSR or even crowdsourcing. It is a smarter way of doing business…The most impactful see themselves as players on a wider stage, as needing to understand and interact with the other players on that stage.”

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“BE MORE LIKE (RED): Create an entirely new service or product with partnership as its proposition. (RED) pioneered a new model of charitable giving by harnessing the power of brands and consumerism to create partnerships for change. 100% of the funds generated by (RED) partners and events goes to global fund programes, which provide medical care and support services for people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. The (RED) system is designed for mutual benefit—brands get an elevated profile through the custom product design and the cause’s own marketing, and the effort generates a steady stream of revenue for the global fund, far exceeding traditional one-off payments from corporate philanthropy budgets.”

 

Collaboration and Innovation