Future Forward is a six-month innovation process designed to explore and experiment with bolder ideas for resource generation. You can read more about how and why it was conceived here, and who we are over here. When we started this work, we shared an understanding that there is a real, systemic issue with the way our greatest, most innovative movement…
I’m facilitating the “workouts” that make up Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets, which we’re undergoing together as part of the Future Forward project. The workouts are designed to help the group practice the skills and mindsets that will help the group think and act in innovative ways. Why are we doing this? At its core, Future Forward is an innovation challenge…
Early in January, Eugene and I met to brainstorm what the storytelling practice would look like. We had three goals: sharing what we are learning with others individual sensemaking of the unfamiliar experience collective synthesis of the emergent process and two requirements. Storytelling for Future Forward needed to be: shared. Storytelling would be the responsibility of all participants. real-time. We…
When I first started talking with Eveline Shen of Forward Together and Holly Bartling of General Service Foundation about doing this work together, we quickly agreed that storytelling had to be central to the work. We wanted to have field-level impact, not just organizational, and one way we could do that would be to share what we learned as we…
On a cool Thursday at the end of January, we gathered in Oakland. Several had traveled far, and some were meeting for the first time. By afternoon, we still had more questions than answers, but our band of 13 leaned in toward the questions and toward our common purpose, feeling the rug under our toes. Among us were funders, organizers,…