In this article, Guest Blogger and Integral City Lead Constellator, Diana Claire Douglas provides an overview of Systemic Constellation Work (SCW), an approach that enables stakeholders to effectively engage in systems change. Douglas explores opportunities where SCW can be used to enhance Collective Impact efforts and highlights examples of community change to illustrate this [...]
After reading Scale by Geoffrey West, I am deeply impressed by his research, even though it appears that I have some fundamental disagreement with some of his conclusions. West argues for a framework of scaling cities (and other complex adaptive systems) that includes four core properties. His treatise is to my sensibilities so [...]
Imagine Durant has drafted a working Vision. They are at a stage where that Vision will continue to be refined and wordsmithed. But it captures enough of the intentions of the last 3 years of Dialogue that three strategic themes have emerged. 1.Learning & Growing Citizens through: Growing (participation) Educating (to world-class level) [...]
With a process and a project like Imagine Durant, collective impact calls forth civic engagement in the present. But it also calls for a picture of a longer-term impact. The Integral City Book 1 is dedicated to the 7th generation from now – a horizon line adapted from the First Nations peoples who invoke [...]
When Imagine Durant embarked on it first Thought Leader Dialogue with the 4 Voices on the topic of Economy & Community they discovered the power of the Early Win. From the explorations of what was working around here, what was not working and what people envisioned for the future, participants discovered a shared longing. [...]
Designing for collective impact effectively means that Integral City teams are always paying attention to how we speak with one another. That is why we start off with agreements forms for Consent to Participate and guidelines for respectful dialogue. (We include the Guidelines for Respectful Dialogue with every Agenda and print them on the [...]
When Integral City works with a city like Durant, we design with a framework based on Values and the 4 Voices of the Human Hive. Our methodologies are designed around the principles for collective impact embedded in: Appreciative Inquiry Action Research The 4 Voices include the Citizens, Civil Society, Civic Managers and Business. [...]
Aliveness requires three processes: surviving, connecting to my environment and regenerating. Grief has a way of interfering in the practice of all three activities that make aliveness feel no longer attainable and seemingly not winnable. But grief also calls forth a recovery process that uses the relationship between these three practices like a scaffold that [...]
If the first injunction of aliveness is to survive, the second is to “connect with my environment”. Survival may seem like a one-person job, but that is mere illusion – for I survive in an ecology of relationships, actions, structures and infrastructures and nature herself. This “I/me/mine” depends on right behaviours, responding to cultures and [...]
The experience of grief is deeply personal. It is so all consuming, that the world shrinks to a very self-centered size. But the experience of grief is also universal. No consciousness nor culture is untouched by it. Pet owners know that not only do they grieve for lost pets, but pets – like apparently [...]