When you teach you learn. I recently taught a workshop on Strategic Questioning at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government, as part of a Leadership Survival Skills workshop series for New England alumni. For background, Strategic Questioning is a technique of asking open questions that inspire movement and new insights/ideas. Strategic questions are… Read more
Author: btener
Boosting the Networking at NHBSR’s Spring Conference
We recently helped New Hampshire Business for Social Responsibility (NHBSR) start off its Spring Conference with a focused networking session. After welcoming remarks by the conference hosts, Beth Tener facilitated a one-hour session to generate new connections by creating ways for people to have meaningful conversations in small groups. The room of about 170 people… Read more
What is the Right Question?
At the recent Stonyfield Entrepreuneurship Institute, a boot camp for community-minded entrepreneurs, small business leaders, such as Vermont Cookie Love and Breakwind Farm (specializing in baked beans, no joke) presented a ten-minute overview of their business and asked for input on a key question or two. A panel of experienced advisers provided advice and feedback…. Read more
Horizontal Loyalty
Imagine this time of sustainability transition as a wave, where all along the leading edge are people and organizations inventing new ways of using clean energy, renewing democracy, creating businesses that solve social problems, and thousands of other innovations to create a better future. Each person or initiative, in their own way, has to go… Read more
Getting Beyond the Plan that Sits on a Shelf
After 20 years of consulting, I have dedicated a lot of time to developing action plans and reports. Like me, thousands of people have devoted countless hours of meetings, research, and writing to develop plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, implementing a sustainability strategy, etc. You know the reports with goals, specific recommendations, nice graphics,… Read more
Collaborating to Enhance Energy Efficiency in Transportation
New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative process to develop a framework for considering energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in transportation decision-making. The initiative was led by the Colorado Department of Transportation and the… Read more
Energy Smart Transportation Initiative
What does it take to make the transportation sector more energy efficient? The State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) sponsored the Colorado Energy Smart Transportation Initiative to explore this question. New Directions Collaborative, in collaboration with Sonia Hamel of Hamel Environmental Consulting and Pat Field of the Consensus Building Institute, helped to facilitate a cross-agency collaborative… Read more
If We Only Knew What We Know
Collaboration tools, such as blogs and Twitter, are changing the way people interact and the way information can flow within and across organizations. In a recent interview in MIT Sloan Review with Andree McAfee of the Center for Digital Business at MIT shared his take on what sells CEO’s on social media. He uses the… Read more
Strategic Questions for the New Year
As the new year begins, it is an opportune time to reflect on the past year and clarify vision and direction for the year ahead. Strategic questions enable people and organizations to move from the known (present) to the unknown (future) – exploring possibilities, seeing new options, and realizing where new information may be needed…. Read more
The Diversity Innovation Connection
At last week’s Green Innovators in Business Network Solutions Lab in Cambridge, MA, participants explored how to accelerate innovation to bring low-carbon solutions to market on a big scale. Accessing diverse perspectives is key to finding the innovative solutions to challenging problems, as illustrated by case studies of Innocentive and EMC. Searching Wide for Innovative… Read more