Collaborative Leadership

Some of you may know of Peter Senge.  He promoted the terms 'learning organization' starting in the early 1990's.  He is now a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Here is a link to a fascinating article he wrote recently.

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_dawn_of_system_leadership

If you believe we need to get beyond the myth of the hero, Senge is looking at the power of collaborative leadership. Together we come up with visions for more sustainable styles of society.  Together we participate in co-creating the society we want.

In the article you will also find new insights into the food crisis, youth crime, toxicity found within fashion items.

Movements help us get around rigid monopolies

At the last event we discussed how the present economic system will not serve many of today's youth and how young adults are organizing in parallel economies outside of the established channels.  We focused on promising methods of organizing as a society that suggest a way forward.

For society to be organized requires predictable structure and movements for change - like a Snakes and Ladders board.  Movements have always been the main way to get around rigid monopolies.  Movements, such as human rights, have drawn our attention to the need for change whenever some of us find it difficult or impossible to get ahead socially and economically.

We will meet again on Wednesday March 11th. at 7p.m in the library of the beautiful Columbus Centre.  Take the elevator to the second floor and follow the signs.

The Columbus Centre is an Italian cultural centre just west of Dufferin on the south side of Lawrence. 

 
(Use the Allen Expressway or take the subway to Lawrence West Station and take a bus a few blocks west to Dufferin.)

Leslie Ann Coles will be our visiting speaker sharing with us her inspiration for starting the Female Eye film festival.  (See below for more information.)

This Social Creator event is free with light refreshments catered by Mama D'Aleandro. 
Let Nick or I know if you are attending.  Bring a  friend.

 


Its time to fill out the Snakes and Ladders board for a post-2012 era. We will look at immediate economic opportunities and set educational objectives so that we learn to become more fulfilled. 

Our session we will go beyond logic and we will learn to use tools for insight.

 

There will be lots for everyone to talk about after selecting various breakout groups to discuss visions and educational objectives:

1. empowering ourselves for a More Lively and Loving Toronto,
2. a proposal to organize Neighbourhood TV,
3. influencing food quality and freshness,
4. influencing how the health industry operates,3. an income model for these and other proposals.

The Female Eye film festival is ranked one of the world's "Top 50 Festivals" by Movie Maker.  See: http://www.femaleeyefilmfestival.com.  Read more, below this email...

We will also have a draw for free passes to some of the films.

​Leslie Ann Coles (above) has been an actress and producer since 1997.

In 2003, the Female Eye Festival launched the script development program.
In 2004, FeFF produced the first Dec. 6th program with films that pertained to issues of violence against women.
In 2005, FeFF traveled to the UN Headquarters to present films on International Women’s Day.
In 2006, FeFF launched a photo exhibit and produced the first Young Filmmaker Development Workshop.
In 2011, Jules Koostachin became the director of FeFF's Aboriginal Filmmaker Series. 

What happens after the World Economic Collapse in 2008?

You probably missed news of evidence of massive bank fraud if you only follow the mainstream media.  We will never understand what happened when the world's economy almost tanked in 2008 and ruined so many lives unless we turn to other sources. 

Banks have paid huge fines to stay out of court and stop the rest of us finding out about their actions. 

A Canadian woman, Alayne Fleischmann, gave an exclusive interview on DemocracyNow.com.  She is the whistleblower who helped the Justice Department of the US make JPMorgan Chase pay one of the largest fines in U.S. history for its role in the world economic financial crisis.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/1/matt_taibbi_and_the_9_billion

The Rolling Stone article they refer to is at:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106

No-one at any of the banks has been prosecuted.  We could conclude that the Department of Justice never really went after the people who practically wrecked the world economy.

Eric Holder, as head of the US Justice Department, justified his forgiving attitude towards banks when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013, by suggesting some banks are "too big to jail." 

The bank that Alayne Fleischmann worked for seems unchanged.  The board of JPMorgan Chase gave their CEO a 75% salary increase after the collapse.


After so many people lost their homes, powerful people in government felt the need to help banks keep news and evidence of vast banking fraud away from the public. In the DemocracyNow,com interview we hear that Eric Holder used to work for a legal firm which had JPMorgan Chase as a client.  He worked his way up from being a corporate lawyer defending companies like JPMorgan Chase before becoming head of the Justice Department.

We now know that the main message Occupy Wall Street had to offer us, about the way the world is run, has proven correct. In the DemocracyNow,com interview we hear that a Wall Street CEO can phone the head of the Justice Department and ask for favours, like not prosecuting, and negotiating getting help with hushing things up if there were massive fraud.

Should we be thankful that the government did not aggravate a bad situation?  In the DemocracyNow.com interview, reporter Matt Taibbi goes through reasonable courses of action the Justice Department could have taken but decided not to.

Eric Holder was severely criticized for his statement on "too big" to even prosecute let alone jail. 

He resigned from the US Justice Department in September 2014.  Obama said that Holder served the people well.

So how do we begin to live with this news?  Do we resolve this within ourselves by looking for whose naughty and whose nice?

Mainstream media work are a big part of this story.  In a big media company we work together at a similar steady and reliable pace as the rest of business and governance as we have known it.  A lot of emphasis is put on 'naughty and nice'. 

Naughty is coming to mean the same thing as 'disruptive'.  Some of us operate at a pace that the rest of us find disruptive.  Yet the future of our economies has depended on disrupting what went before.

So naughty has become an issue of pace of operation.  In some parts of society pace of operation or functioning is called 'frequency'.

Creation exists as a long series of stages within a larger evolutionary progression.  Specific people and animals are representative of each stage.   

Collectively the entire range of stages has introduced and extended higher functioning into the material dimension including worldly events. 

Each stage works, much like an electrical transformer, to reduce the frequency of vibrations.  The frequency at which each creature functions and operates is either suited to that creature or the creature cannot be sustained within the larger being we call Life.  

A person will get ill and die relatively early if they operate at a frequency that disagrees with them.   

No-one can make a person that is able to thrive wrong.  We learn to live with what others do without denying the reality of the situation.

People used to learn to live by imposing fear and intimidation on one another.   As a way of daily functioning this caveman or clan-like mentality is very low on the scale.  

The vast majority of us are happy to live beyond that level of functioning.  It is a familiar reaction to rationalize wanting to lash out at others in the face of overwhelming emotions.  Today we recognize this is only a defense mechanism that buffers the immediate shock.

Then there is the stage of negotiating when the reality and the pain that goes with it re-emerge.  We use some form of logic to justify what we do.  The intense emotion is deflected from our vulnerable core.  We redirect or 'project' the emotion of anger on to others even complete strangers when we have no idea what motivates their actions.

Many in the Occupy movement were concerned citizens.  They wanted us all to stop for a while and learn a more functional way of living with one another. 

I like to discuss higher levels of functioning on another website:  betaDigest.wordpress.com.

Social Creator nutrition event goes Olympic

 Fresh-faced Carolina Kostner won bronze at Sochi this year.

 

​Dear friends,

Twenty-seven year old Carolina Kostner of Italy (on the right, above,) will be with us on Monday November 24, 2014 at 7pm.  Carolina will be answering questions about what is in her Olympian diet. 

In a very memorable women's singles figure skating event in Sochi, Carolina won the bronze becoming the first Italian to win a medal in Olympic figure skating singles. Adelina Sotnikova of Russia (centre) won gold and defending champion, Yuna Kim of South Korea (on left), won silver.

Kostner placed 9th in her first Olympics in 2006 in Turin, and placed 16th in Vancouver. She almost quit skating but instead came from her values by "learning to skate for the passion & the pleasure".  This seemed to make all the difference. 

This presentation will lead into developing our proposal to organize for a More Lively and Loving Toronto.  We will look at educating ourselves, engaging local growers, coordinating purchases among participating neighbourhoods, and negotiating big discounts through bulk purchasing.

We want input from people involved in all aspects of food, from the beginning.

Join us this Monday on the third floor of the beautiful Columbus Centre. Take the elevator to the right of the restaurant and follow the signs.

The Columbus Centre is an Italian cultural centre just west of Dufferin on the south side of Lawrence.  (Use the Allen Expressway or take the subway to Lawrence West Station and take a bus a few blocks west to Dufferin.)

Our latest Social Creator event is this Thursday November 13, 7 - 9.30p.m. 

Bring a friend.  This is the third 'no-charge' Social Creator event of 2014.We will be on the third floor of the beautiful Columbus Centre.  Take the elevator to the right of the restaurant and follow the signs.

The Columbus Centre is an Italian cultural centre just west of Dufferin on the south side of Lawrence.  (Use the Allen Expressway or take the subway to Lawrence West Station and take a bus a few blocks west to Dufferin.)

We will feature health and nutrition.  Healthy living is not rocket science.  It is more about making informed food and lifestyle decisions. 

Come learn, and share what you know that can help others, so we can move towards a more lively, vital and loving Toronto.  

We will be opening the discussion with a presentation from nutritionist, Gianna Berretta!

Gianna Berretta has worked at U. of T. and Mount Sinai hospital studying the relationship between diet genetics and cancer.

She has been teaching and promoting preventive health care for the last 19 years, specifically the importance of daily intake of fruits and vegetables in maintaining a healthy diet. Ms. Beretta will discuss vitamins vs foods, the organic alternative health craze, and the silent killer 'inflammation' and its relationship to disease.

We will serve refreshments and have our exceptional free dessert table catered by Mama D'Aleandro!

At 7.10 p.m there will be a 20 minute introduction to Social Creator network for people attending for the first time. 

Speed Futuring:  Sharing our ideas about a technologically-assisted, loving society.  Applying what we've seen and heard earlier in the evening.

After a presentation on Organizing our Neighbourhoods in support of Healthier Living by Andrew Owens we will break into smaller groups to share ideas about assessing new innovations based on a big picture, international approach.

This promises to be another busy, fun and delicious evening. 

Let's enjoy a healthier Toronto - having fun, where we have influence, in our immediate neighbourhoods!

Changing to a Culture of Mutual Fulfillment

We are all heavily influenced by the various cultures we move within and perpetuate: corporate culture, industrial  culture, popular culture, media culture, school culture - you name it.  Cultural activity is ongoing at the office, in factories, homes, and schools.  This activity reinforces what we believe, think, do - and ultimately, what we have been taught to value.

There is a crisis in society currently.  So many of the things we have been programmed to like and want can be immediately satisfying but we soon find that these things do not fulfill our longings.  This crisis can be addressed as we change the culture.

In the same year as the first moon landing, Swiss philosopher and child psychologist, Jean Piaget said -

"The principle goal of education is to create men (sic) who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done."  

So education is key to breaking from our programmed behaviour instilled in us by the dominant cultures.  The goal of education can be to get us outside or 'see beyond' our cultural conditioning.

The tendency in institutions when changing a culture is to focus on, or emphasize instilling new values in people.  People are instructed on 'how to place more value' on things that were less important to the institution in the past.

However, different values are somehow registered in the heart of each individual.  We formulate our values, perhaps based on individual life experiences or heart-felt longings from childhood.

No-one can dictate what we value and the longings that we strive to fulfill.  We can only agree to promote or espouse values that we may not actually hold deep within us.  We can talk in terms of values we don;t necessarily hold if we want to justify establishing new goals and strategies.

There is little evidence of education fulfilling the goal of changing the industrial culture of the 20th century.  Offices and schools are still run like factories within an industrial production line culture.

Offices and schools are still laid out with separate facilities depending in what someone decides should be produced there - a product, service, or a young mind.  Each facility is run based on different standards of what is acceptable not what is going on in our hearts.

To make a shift in a culture we change our habits of thinking and our observable habits in terms of how we interact with others.  We also positively influence the effects that a prevailing culture has on us by changing the physical surroundings where we learn and do things. 

Within effective approaches to cultural change we observe a cycle of steps (a, b, c, d, a, b...):

b. Beliefs

                                                 a. Habits                            c. Heart-felt values

d. Physical
surroundings

This goes against the traditional approach of starting with c, focusing on changing other people's values.  This is instruction, literally 'to strike', 'build with' or in order to impose or leave a deep impression.  It comes from Middle English, and from Latin in- + struere to build.

We influence or change a culture when we begin to focus on our habits.  This means looking at beliefs that we take for granted.  Hence the important role of eduction which literally means to educe or draw from within, or from 'our hearts'.

The more we focus on our habits the more likely we are to examine our beliefs.

To change our habits, first we examine why we are doing things.  For example, in education, endless attention is given to deciding how we educate ourselves.  Little if any time is spent on time questioning why we educate ourselves.

Are we educating ourselves to prepare for fully benefiting from today's economies, or are we still caught up in the old manufacturing economy?  Is education meant to promote making healthful food choices and well being?  Is it to make ourselves resourceful and imaginative people?

d. What kind of physical surroundings would contribute to questioning our habits in terms of why we do the things we do?

a. What kind of new habits in education can draw out our current beliefs?

b. What new understanding can support getting in touch with our heart-felt values?

c. How can we find people who share individual values and express them within our surroundings in ways that remind us to adopt new heart-felt habits.

Is this how we develop a culture of mutual fulfillment in our lives rather than short-term satisfaction.

Fulfilling deeply held longings

My sense is that, in Toronto, we are transitioning away from meaning and becoming more in touch with our core values.  

First I want to explore the effects and conditions of this transition to soulfulness as individuals.  Then I want to look at how to adjust socially to a new mood that’s rising up in the city.

We can identify our unique values by what we do on a Saturday afternoon - family, community, or hobbies.  Though we may have a sense of what our values are, we don’t necessarily give them the importance they deserve as indicating what we have to contribute to society.

However, fewer of us are willing to live based on meaning alone – like getting a salary, getting ahead of coworkers, or waiting for our boss’ job.  Meaning was an important motivator from the ‘60’s – ‘90’s.  Now we want work activity that fulfills our deeply held values and longings.  

People in the arts and self-expression are in touch with, and must express their values each and every day.  We express our values when we decide what is important, gracious, lovely and essential to a course of action.  

We attempt to glimpse the wholeness in situations.  Our values are what indicate the way forward after taking any number of factors into account.  

Decisions made based on values, wholeness and inclusion are not logical or about taste.  They are decisions made based on love and a higher pragmatism.  Pragmatism beats what’s achieved with logic and thinking about a limited number of things we’re able to measure.  Pragmatic action is based on a realistic big picture.

Our values are our means to the things that we live for.  Our values are like gas in the tank, and a map.  We need a course of action or some idea of a destination that will fulfill an inner longing. But values and a course of action without engaging in community limit what we can achieve to express love. 

We know there is strength in numbers. Working in organizations goes further.  It is powerful.  In fact corporations and the military are incredibly powerful.  They’ve become the most powerful things on the planet.  

However we leave many of your values at the door or in the office lobby before starting work each day.  We limit the number of factors we consider.  We think in polarizing, competitive and disheartening ways.  We can be working to pull the social fabric apart.  We must adopt policies and an agenda set by someone else.

My second point is about society and our complete empowerment as individuals.  Complete empowerment comes when we combine our values and our direction on a map with the resources for moving forward.  We readily find help and resources to use in an organization.

However, once you are in touch with your core values the last thing that you want is someone else telling you what to do or setting a course for you.  That is why so many of us who have gone inwards and found our souls stayed away from corporations and group activities.  We want to be proactive in response to inner promptings and be free to do our own thing.

What’s been missing is a form of organizing that allows us to respond to whatever values we have registered in our souls.  That is partly why the Markham Street MuSE is very significant to you at this time.  It’s a form of organizing able to support the new mood in the city.  

A muse is defined as ‘the function of deciding among ourselves through ongoing distributed decision-making across a network of developing or emerging connections’.  

Compared to what’s produced when people get together and assume power after politicking among themselves, a muse leads soulful people to full empowerment with shared roles that make things more fluid and practical.

The function of a muse in organizing does not consider only one location.  It is meant as a source of inspiration for organizing across neighbourhoods and organizing in any local area, no matter how small.  I recommend that you check it out and look at the degree to which we are free to do what we want once we’re connected with our values.  

It allows for all our multiple, diverse visions.  These are the courses we chose individually on a map of a creative era.  

If you are in touch with your core values and aim for full empowerment, then you don’t have to wait for society to change completely.  Find out more about how to use a muse to get from where society is now to where you want to be.