Workshop materials

Using appreciative inquiry: Tricia Lustig and Martin Hazell

Tricia’s presentation can be downloaded as a pdf here:

Lustig_Appreciative Inquiry for ProDev day, final presentation

Visioning: Wendy Schultz

Wendy’s presentation can be downloaded as a pdf here:

Wendy Schultz Visioning APF Pro Dev 2017 – to share

This version is a pdf which shows the notes pages and has more links:

Wendy Schultz Visioning Notes and Links APF Pro Dev 2017 – to share

Three Horizons: Bill Sharpe and Graham Leicester

More resources on Three Horizons can be found at these links:

International Futures Forum

University for the Third Horizon

Seeds of the Good Anthropocene: Tanja Hichert

Tanja Hichert’s session was based on the following presentation, which can be downloaded here:

Hichert-Good Anthropocene-presentation

The instructions for the workshop exercise can be downloaded here:

Good Anthropocene seeds instructions

More online resources on The Good Anthropocene, including the seeds, can be found here:

www.goodanthropocenes.net

The printouts of the seeds of the Good Anthropocene used in the workshop can be downloaded here.

Seeds of the Good Anthropocene

The video that Tanja played at the start of her session can be found on the website of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

 

 

Agitators, innovators, and orchestrators: leaders for change

Image: Agitators at work at Heathrow Airport.

Andrew Curry writes: I was struck by an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review that argued that it takes three types of leaders to make social innovation happen: the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator:

An agitator brings the grievances of specific individuals or groups to the forefront of public awareness. An innovator creates an actionable solution to address these grievances. And an orchestrator coordinates action across groups, organizations, and sectors to scale the proposed solution.

The article is by Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey, and a couple of things struck me straightaway about this model. The first is how closely these map back onto the Three Horizons model. The second is that although they are writing about social innovation, this model applies to pretty much any kind of deep or structural innovation (Disruptive? Transformative?). You need all three roles; the authors think they might blur, but I’m less sure about that. Anyway:

Agitation without innovation means complaints without ways forward, and innovation without orchestration means ideas without impact.

And maybe one more thought. Large organisations are usually full of orchestrators, lighter on innovators, and go out of their way to persecute agitators. In fact, there’s usually a whole corporate lexicon to disparage them, starting with “cynical” and escalating quickly from there.

The article is fairly detailed, and later on there’s a useful chart showing how each of the different types of leaders use the kinds of skills that leaders deploy.

One interesting aspect of the argument is that in the case study the authors use, of the French youth service organisation Unis-Cité, the leaders started out seeing themselves as innovators, but had to switch roles to agitators when the political climate changed and it became necessary to make the public case once again for youth service. As the article notes more broadly, mobilizing for social change is an “inherently political process.” But we tend to think of Three Horizons as a process that works its way from the visionary Third Horizon through the entrepreneurial Second to the managerial First. Systemic change isn’t always as tidy as that.

Places of Hope

The Places of Hope exhibition opens on 4th April in Leeuwarden, Europe’s 2018 Capital of Culture, and runs until late November.

It is being curated by Utrecht University’s Urban Futures Studio. From the university’s English-language page on the exhibition:

Places of Hope explores the Northern Netherlands as a place of inspiration, a starting point towards possible futures. The exhibition brings together academics, artists, policymakers and other agents of change. Who knows what the future will bring – and what we will bring to it?”

There’s more information available in Dutch. If you’re planning to visit, it looks as if it’s only open Thursday to Sunday each week. If you go, please send some photos for this blog.

On Three Horizons

Here’s the second of the interviews I recorded with the presenters at the Tools for Hope event in London in November. Bill Sharpe, the author of Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope, co-presented with Graham Leicester, the Director of the International Futures Forum.  The IFF has been the leader, in terms of both practice and theory, in developing the application of Three Horizons thinking, and has also published some valuable resources.

In this interview they talk about some of the principles that sit behind the Three Horizons model, its use as a dialogue tool to negotiate change between different members of a system, and the health and social care project SHINE, in Fife, that has been something of a poster child for the application of 3H to create transformative futures. Golf gets a look-in too.

(Nine minutes).

Wendy Schultz on visioning

Andrew Curry writes: During the course of the day at the Tools for Hope event I interviewed each of the speakers about their session. First up: Wendy Schultz talks about visioning, with a dash of history and some practical tips.

The interview runs for 7’40”.

Music stings from ‘Be My Love’ by Peter Curry, used with permission.

Hope in its shirt sleeves

I’ve added a quote to the top of the blog from the environmentalist David Orr:

“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”

My thanks to Daniel Wahl for sharing it with me.

The image is from Pinterest via Adam Levine.