When the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and its partners were ready to launch the Vermont Farm to Plate (F2P) Network, they recognized that they needed to build the understanding of network approaches among people in the food system who would be leaders in implementing a network. New Directions Collaborative, in partnership with the Interaction Institute… Read more
Author: btener
“Catalyzing Networks” Workshop for EPA New England’s Office of Assistance & Pollution Prevention
New Directions Collaborative provided a one-day training and strategic planning session for the staff of EPA New England’s Office of Assistance & Pollution Prevention on how to catalyze networks. The training was designed to build on the strengths of their previous work by viewing it through a network lens. We shared an overview of network… Read more
Preparing for the Unexpected
Outside my window, the snow is heavily streaming down as New England is being buried in a blizzard. In the hype of media coverage about the approaching big storm, emergency response officials talked about their efforts to be prepared for whatever would come. This got me thinking about how leaders in any type of work… Read more
Aligning Work at Various Scales
With Google maps or Mapquest, one can zoom in to the level of a city block or zoom out to see how that place that relates to the geography of a city or a region. In working for change within complex systems, we similarly need to be able to work at multiple levels and see… Read more
New Jobs that Support Collaborative Work
In the late 1990’s, I shifted my work from environmental management consulting towards a focus on sustainability. At the time, most of my friends and family, had not even heard of the word “sustainability” and I struggled to explain it as well as to figure out a way to make a living doing this work…. Read more
Network Analysis (SNA/ONA) Methods for Assessment & Measurement
Patti Anklam, an affiliate of New Directions Collaborative and Principal of Net Work, offered a Leadership Webinar, hosted by the Leadership Learning Community (LLC,) about techniques for social network analysis. In this Guest Blog post, Patti shares an overview of the webinar, with links to listen to it and further resources. Monday’s LLC webinar on… Read more
Opportunity Mapping: The Geographic Footprint of Inequality
In the days after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, there was criticism of those who had stayed behind – “they had warning, why didn’t they leave?” However, it came to light that 50% of the African Americans in the city did not have cars. They did not have the means to leave. The… Read more
Creating the Structures for a Generative Economy
A friend handed me a copy of Marjorie Kelly’s new book Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution; Journeys to a Generative Economy and said he thought it was so good that he had bought a case of them to share with colleagues and friends. By the time I was 50 pages into the book,… Read more
Collective Impact: Emerging Issues and Challenges from the Field
Last week, the Leadership Learning Community sponsored a beautifully-facilitated gathering in Boston to celebrate the launch of its new publication Leadership & Collective Impact. The room of about 25 people included network weavers, organizational consultants, funders, writers, community organizers – all working in some way to advance collective impact and network approaches to social change…. Read more
Rational and Not Rational at the Same Time
The resistance to taking action on climate change is a classic example of what in systems thinking terms is called “bounded rationality,” where people act in their rational self-interest in the short-term yet together create results no one wants. “Bounded rationality” was a term coined by Herbert Simon, an economist. Donella Meadows, the late scientist,… Read more