Endless Knots

Restorative justice with The Dialogue Project

About six weeks ago, I received an email with the subject line "Interest...:"

Good morning Jessica!

I was wondering if you do invited talks on working virtually?

I’m running an event for a senior team at [a well known European company] with whom I have a long standing relationship.

My expertise is in dialogue and perhaps we could consider doing an interview with you to close a two day session in late January? Or maybe you’d prefer to do a talk, in person or virtually!

Do let me know if it’s worth us having a chat on Skype or something about this.

By the way – I read your writing about Jeff on your blog and found it incredibly moving and eloquent. Thank you.

Yours,

Karl James
Director
The Dialogue Project
20 Temple Sheen Road
London
SW14 7QG
+44 (0) 20 8878 0929
Twitter: @2plus2makes5

What ensued were a couple of conversations during which Karl explained the engagement and we developed the kind of rapport one does with like-minded people whom you meet only over Skype or on the phone. I sent him an essay I'd written about New Zealand; he sent me a link to an extraordinary radio program he's done for Radio 4 in the UK, which airs today.

Listen to "A Different Kind of Justice." Keep yourself busy while listening in whatever way makes you comfortable but you don't want to miss this. Karl (by the way, also a theatre director, for example, Malvolio at the New Victory Theatre in New York right now) brings two people into conversation. And what ensues is remarkable. He should teach us all how to do it.

And, yes, I accepted the invitation, which turned out to have many unexpected gifts attached.

 

 

The astounding Mona Golabek

Are you in or near Boston? Can you get here by Sunday night? You must.**

"The Pianist of Willesden Lane" is theatre like you've never seen it, music you've never heard played this way, a story that will turn you inside out -- and perhaps give you clues to solving intractable problems of your own (it did for me). And I haven't even mentioned that it's a one-woman performance. One woman. Ninety minutes. A monologue. A concert. The story of one child, one very talented child, who survives the Holocaust because she was told by her mother to "hold on to her music."

Mona Golabek is the performer, the (in real life concert) pianist, author of the book, The Children of Willesden Lane (written with Lee Cohen), and the daughter of that very talented child, Lisa Jura.

As one of the people I went with tonight said, "It's possibly the best play I've ever been to." I agree. And I wouldn't have known about it had I not read this piece in the Boston Globe. A daughter telling a mother's story is power enough but when the story itself speaks to the horror and the glory and the transcendence of humanity all at once, that is art, that is beauty, and that is reason to be alive.

Go. And if you're lucky, you'll witness it in the kind of theatre that we did, merely 100 people, few enough that everyone was virtually in the front row, eye-to-eye with this extraordinary talent. Not to mention the post-performance conversation, tonight with the star speaking with an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor and the local head of the Anti-Defamation League.

Thank you, Mona Golabek, and thank you, Hershey Felder, for your collaboration (he's the director) in bringing Mona's idea to fruition.

**Why do you have to see this by Sunday night? The Boston show at the Paramount closes then, headed next for Chicago, then on to Berkeley apparently, and hopefully one day to New York, London, and the silver screen. I can't imagine that all this won't happen.

Danny Hauben's Beautiful Bronx

Yesterday's New York Times profiles Daniel (to those lucky enough to know and love him, Danny) Hauben, the realist/muralist/"touched with whimsy" (Times description) painter who won the commission to create the art for the new Bronx Community College Library. Stupendous.

The Times interactive page shows four of Danny's works with the ability to mouse over and see them in more detail. Click-worthy, for sure.

This photo, from Danny's website, says what words cannot, him painting, what he's painting, and how he paints it.

 

It was my good luck to meet Danny when he was a teenager. His brother, Eddie Hauben, and his wife Jan (Ward) Hauben, were our first friends in Boston, whom we met in the context of bringing Bucky Fuller to Boston to stage World Game here in the summer of 1970. The story, of course, has many twists to it -- Eddie worked for Bucky; Jan worked for Gus Jaccaci, a futurist who had previously been a Harvard admission's office who had tried to recruit my late husband, Jeff Stamps, to Harvard so that he would ski with the Harvard team. (FTR, he chose Dartmouth instead, where he lasted for less than a year--it was all-male then and far too conservative for him--before transferring to University of New Hampshire.) Gus was working at Boston College at the time and in his role as Arts Assistant to the President was able to sponsor World Game.

And it was evident from first meeting Danny that he was a major talent. Most people (everyone?) in our lifelong network of friends who grew out of that 1970 confluence of interests own Danny's pieces, including one of our house, a pastel from the perspective of the back yard, that has hung in the dining room since 1985 when I asked Danny to do it. Just superb.

Which all of this is.

A Nobel or "Milner" for Organizational Innovation?

"Cosmic Inflation" by Don Dixon

Best I know, no one awards a prize for breakthroughs in organizational thinking, never mind practice. I can't even remember an author receiving one of the literary crowns (authors don't receive money, remember, the largest bag of bucks being the Nobel for literature -- $1.1M-ish awarded to a mere 100 or so folks in all of the world's existence) to any book about business ideas. Wait. I'm a little uninformed and thinking way too narrowly. A serious foray into search reveals this award from Financial Times and Goldman Sachs, which appears to have been cashing out to business book authors (about $50K, not bad) since 2005.

But a quick skim of awardees indicates their works are predictably, given the grantors, about Wall Street, where of course the way the companies and people they write about are organized is not the point. What they're organized for, obviously, makes quite a good story (follow the money)... which suggests this question: Who's going to get the big advance for the book on what these companies' organizational structures might have to do with why they succeed and fail? Ah-hem.

Why is this on my mind? My personal newswire for interesting stuff around organizations, Tom Stewart, whose feed on Facebook often catches my attention, does so again. Today he posts about the new no-strings (so to speak)-attached-prize in physics -- a cool $3M, awarded to each of nine (9!) physicists working on cosmic "inflation," which arguably could also be given to someone on Wall Street. The awarder is one Yuri Milner, a physicist-turned-social-media entrepreneur (he's no dope). Need I tell you that part of his $12B fortune comes from his early investment in Facebook, where, naturally, I saw Tom's post about this prize?

Here's, in part, how Nature reports it (though they missed the string-theory twist):

“The intention was to say that science is as important as shares trading on Wall Street,” Milner told Nature. The prize money comes with no strings attached, although Milner hopes that the theorists will contribute to a new lecture series for the public. Milner also plans to create an annual $100,000 New Horizons prize for young researchers and an ad hoc version of the Fundamental Physics Prize that can be won at any time “in exceptional cases”, the website says. According to the rules of the prizes, anyone can be nominated, and future prizewinners will be selected by a committee of all previous ones.

So here's my message to the next Sloan/Insead/Said grad in management who figured out how to make something of him/herself. Start a prize for "quantum organizational breakthroughs." Even call it that and it will sound scientific so people will think it's important. There's a lot of it going around these days.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

The origin of good ideas -- again

Summer Turner, Director of  Organizational Development & Communication at Omgeo, has "turner-ed" me on to this excellent Steven Johnson video, taken from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. With apologies to Mr. Johnson for a horrid over-simplification, he says what we know as group-lover cliches: two heads (if not more) are better than one, that ideas take a while to germinate (he does a nice riff on Tim Berners-Lee's 10-year gestation of the web), and that "the great driver in technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity." But he says it so well and with great examples.

We too have said this in a few of our books, even constructed a slide about it (see below) about a dozen years ago with clients at Shell Oil, that relates connectivity to the evolution of organizations. We've come a long way since smoke signals and tin cans. Technology innovation aside, connectivity even allows us to "innovate" -- invent, I guess you'd say, new organizations.

Great stuff, Steven. That your middle name is the same as my grandmother's makes me think that we're, how do you say, connected. Check out his website here.

 

 

 

 

"...Sign on to a big bold impossible enterprise"

Over the past six months, I've been working closely with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, MA. Bostonians -- and many many others around the country, if not abroad -- know of the remarkable things DSNI has achieved in its nearly three decades of existence, including launching a land trust in the most blighted area of Boston, now 225 units of permanently affordable housing, lovely homes; encouraged the creation of gardens and parks and an enormous green house where chop shops used to be; and numerous convenings of its residents that have given rise to a striking theory of place-based change that truly works.

Most recently and working with Boston Teacher Residency, DSNI has been involved with launching the Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School, an in-district charter school that is part of the Boston Public School system, which will open in September. (Unless you're an expert on Boston public schools, it's almost impossible to understand the fine-point differences between pilot schools, innovation schools, in-district charter schools, and whatever-the-other charter schools are but, in short, there are five in-district charter schools in Boston, including the new elementary school.)

All of this is prelude to the point of this post. As a result of my involvement with DSNI, I've gotten to know people in this beloved city where I've lived for my entire adult life, people whom I'd never have met if I weren't doing this work. Among them is Melinda Marble, deputy director of Barr Foundation. (if you go to the Barr link, you'll see a picture of DSNI executive director, John Barros, talking with Patricia Brandes, exec direc at Barr). Each of these people deserves a post of their own but...

Melinda has started a new blog, Change Practice, "a blog about changing practice – and practicing change – in the world of philanthropy and nonprofits," which, if its first posts are any indicator of what this will have to offer, is, shall we say, ratthhhher promising. I was taken with a single phrase from Melinda's tribute to Bob Hohler, an extraordinary force for change (he was executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust) who died suddenly in June 2011. I recommend Melinda's post about Bob, filled with wisdom and insight. This single phrase, the title of this post, comes from this sentence: "Bob realized that the great gift of a job in philanthropy was not to process grants, give other people’s money away, but to sign on to a big bold impossible enterprise.  His was 'finding and fighting the causes of homelssness,' the memorable tag line he composed for National Public Radio."

Isn't that what we all should/could/want to do -- sign on to big bold impossible enterprises? Thanks, Melinda.

And in other news this morning

Driving into Groton, MA this morning, suddenly a call from the sky...

"A Visionary's World"--Don Aucoin on the Bucky play

Last one on Bucky, I promise (for a while).

Don Aucoin's review (and Marcus Stern's photos) of “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,’’ in today's Boston Globe are spectacular. Aucoin captures the affect of the set, the script, and the actor:

Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough, suggests a swirling cosmos — [Thomas] Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.

And Aucoin honors playwright-director D.W. Jacobs's fine lines:

Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing; mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’

Wish all the photos from the Globe were online for you to see. Actually, it's worth buying today's paper if you only read here just to see Stern's cover photo that manages to capture what the stage really looks like.

I leave you with this, the video posted to the ART site (and YouTube) in which Doug Jacobs describes how he came to Fuller and concludes with Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of, calling her father "a great teacher to the world." Check.

 

 

What motivates us

Stumbled upon, so to speak, this video from Dan Pink (Drive, A Whole New Mind), which in 10 minutes reminds us of what we know deep inside: People do their best work when they're doing something that they're really interested in.

Our friends at Atlassian have put this idea into practice, taking the old midnight hack into a whole day of condoned behavior. Once a week, people are free to work on something that really interests them. No real surprise in the results: bugs get fixed, new product ideas emerge, people are excited. And then they have a party. Money, Pink points out for those who haven't caught on yet, is hardly the only motivator.

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the big three, says Pink, which squares precisely with our findings on successful networks and virtual teams. Self-direction (everyone's a leader), competence (expertise, confidence), and shared vision ("Purpose is the glue; trust is the grease") are what make us want to work--and make us work better.