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| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No. 4 |
June 2010 |
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Innovation in complex social systems.
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Social Sculpture: Enabling Society to Change Itself by Jeff Barnum
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Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees in South Africa and Leadership Scenarios in Queensland, Australia
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Build your capacity to effect social change by joining one of our courses and workshops
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Prouds and Sorries: An alternate lens for understanding current reality
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Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to Reos Partners' Quarterly Newsletter.
Our work to address complex social challenges and opportunities around the world continually stimulates us to extend, refine, and evolve our approaches and methodologies. This ongoing growth and metamorphosis within our own organisation opens space for new kinds of work and new forms of collaboration within and between our teams, offices, clients, and partners. It is essential that we evolve in order to meet the changing demands of the landscape.
In this issue, we will share with you some of our recent projects as well as some new ideas that are emerging within our organization.
The featured article, "Social Sculpture: Enabling Society to Change Itself," focuses on the role of art in social change and explores ways to leverage the power of citizen participation and creativity to cause systemic shifts at a massive level. Jeff Barnum of our San Francisco office explores this approach through the work of Joseph Beuys, Antanas Mockus, and Edi Rama, all of whom have engaged citizens to effect cultural shifts across large social systems. These artists and change agents are inspiring a new way of looking at and engaging with social change efforts. Our question and invitation with this article is: how might we work with this approach?
Also in this issue, our team in Johannesburg, South Africa works with Atlantic Philanthropies to tackle some of Southern Africa's most critical issues: conflict and migration, and our Melbourne office hosts a scenario exercise to foster leadership and innovation among a group of stakeholders in the child protection and family services sector of Queensland, Australia.
Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy!
Yours Warmly,
Reos Partners
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Featured Article
Social Sculpture: Enabling Society to Change Itself
by Jeff Barnum
In our work at Reos, we help stakeholders from across an entire social system come together to see their challenge from a whole-system perspective. With the whole picture in view, they then design, test, and evolve ideas for initiatives that they believe have the potential to address their challenge.
A key part of this process is uncovering and identifying the mindsets deep within the fabric of the social challenge: core beliefs, paradigms, assumptions, world views, dogmas, and identities that in turn shape behaviour, relationships, policies, and other structures that profoundly shape our lives. These vary from culture to culture, challenge to challenge, but they are always present. Systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows pointed out that changing a mindset is a powerful leverage point. Imagine, for example, if we all believed that money in the bank became less valuable over time—a negative interest rate—or if nature had rights. Our use of money and natural resources would look very different.
Identifying the key mindsets that shape a particular system affords stakeholders the possibility to shift those mindsets within themselves, their organisations, and their constituencies. Doing so can radically push a large social system in one direction or another. For this reason, in our Dinokeng project, leaders from across South Africa addressed the relationship between the people and the state, the issue at the heart of that country’s future. When facing a large-scale challenge, we need to affect the dominant mindsets in thousands or millions of people.
Therein lies the challenge I’d like to consider in this article.
My colleague Adam Kahane writes that because challenges characterised by “generative complexity” are fundamentally unfamiliar and undetermined, they cannot be addressed through a pre-formulated plan: we have to “carve” a way forward. Some examples from our work include the challenge of caring for millions of vulnerable children whose parents have died from AIDS, the creation of a local and green economy, and the expansion of the middle class in Colombia. Because the nature of these challenges is new and unfamiliar, there are no precedents from which we can draw; instead, they require an “emergent” process through which people can find a solution while working on the problem.
For a problem characterised by high generative complexity, the mindsets of the masses can be a powerful point of systemic leverage and a powerful force for systemic change. I’ve been studying this challenge for some time now, and I see some examples of practice and success I think can guide our thinking about working for massive change.
Read the whole article
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Project Updates
In each issue of our newsletter we highlight two of the projects that Reos teams are working on. Visit the Projects Page on our web site to learn more about the diverse contexts and issues we are addressing.
Scenarios for Immigration, Migrants, and Refugees in South Africa
by Reos Johannesburg
Many countries around the world confront the complex issue of immigrant, migrant, and refugee rights. As economies battle, GDP declines, and employment drops, anti-immigrant sentiment often rises. In recent years, this attitude has translated into many incidents of violent attacks and widespread xenophobia in South Africa, contributing to what is now a massive crisis in the country.
Political collapse in Zimbabwe, economic turmoil in other African countries, and poverty have displaced large numbers of people, many of whom have fled to South Africa. In 2008, the country received more than 45,000 new asylum applications, with a backlog of almost 40,000 cases. Although there is a massive influx of people with the xenophobic attacks, there have also been between 30,000-125,000 people who have been displaced by violence, with a further 25,000-35,000 who had fled the country. Estimates of the number of Zimbabweans who live in South Africa range from one to nine million.
To begin to resolve the looming human rights crisis, Atlantic Philanthropies, a global philanthropic organisation, has been working to understand the many underlying causes of this non-functioning system. What distinguishes Atlantic Philanthropies from other philanthropic organisations is that it adheres to the “Giving While Living” philosophy, in that they invest to help solve urgent social problems now. AP will spend down its endowment and close its doors by 2020; it is the largest foundation to date to choose this path. To this end, the organisation has made grants totaling more than $5 billion as of the end of 2009, through four programmes (see www.atlanticphilanthropies.org).
Read the whole article
Leading the Future
“How might the social, political, and economic landscape of Queensland unfold and affect the lives of its citizens over the next 20 years?”
by Leigh Gassner
Reos Partners opened its Melbourne, Australia office in early 2010. The Melbourne Partners bring experience from the corporate, government, and non-government sectors, particularly in the development of social policy changes and innovation, including the challenging area of child protection and reform of the family violence response system.
There is a growing recognition that social reform and sustainable social outcomes are accelerated when leaders of government and non-government organisations have the ability to understand and lead thinking and innovation that spans all sectors. In March, the opportunity arose to engage a group of such leaders—senior and chief executives from across the community services sector in the state of Queensland.
Reos Partners Melbourne, together with Adam Kahane from the Cambridge office, worked with Queensland consulting firm Archersfield Consulting to provide a challenging and enriching programme, beginning with a three-day scenarios process, that would form the beginning of what for these leaders will be a 12-month leadership development process. It was the first time that many of these participants had come together to ponder the future of Queensland from the perspective of social policy and service delivery.
Read the whole article
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From Our Toolkit
Prouds and Sorries: Another Lens for Understanding the Current Reality
by LeAnne Grillo
As our colleague, Bill Torbert once quipped, “In the 1960s it was said that ‘If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem.’ Today we say, ‘If you aren't part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution.’”
“Prouds and Sorries” helps teams begin to understand what their role has been in creating the current reality that they are trying to shift. By framing the exploration in terms of what each sectoral group or sub-group has contributed positively (prouds) or negatively (sorries), the entire team begins to see more of the system as a whole, as well as see each other through various contrasting lenses.
Because the sectoral teams have to create their lists of prouds and sorries together, and then present them to the larger group, this exercise once again reinforces constructive ways to listen and talk, while suspending our voice of judgement. Doing so allows us to see our roles more clearly and more compassionately.
Download the Complete Facilitator's Notes for Prouds and Sorries
Reos Associate Emily Wilkinson Featured in Notes on Design
Notes on Design, an online design journal with a mission to inspire creativity and promote engaged design thinking, has recently featured Reos Associate Emily Wilkinson in an in-depth article about her work.
Read the article at the Notes on Design website here.
Emily Wilkinson is an illustrator, designer, and creative facilitator working out of the London office of Reos Partners. Her work bridges creativity and collaboration to catalyze creativity and education for positive change.
The article was written by author and designer Kate Andrews. Check out her website here.
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| Quarterly Newsletter: Issue No.4 |
June 2010 |
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