“I hate boring meetings!” was the way Madeline Snow from UMass Lowell explained her passion for the Art of Hosting and its techniques for convening conversations that matter. She facilitated the September meeting of the Leadership Learning Community’s Boston Learning Circle where participants had the opportunity to experience a “taster” trying out several techniques including… Read more
Category: Facilitation
Enliven Your Conference Design with a Network Mindset
The way we gather and convene people can be a metaphor and an experience of what community and networks can be. Traditional conference designs leave most of the participants listening to speakers most of the day vs. interacting with each other or discovering the latent collective intelligence in the room. Often the most energizing productive… Read more
Setting the Table for a Great Meeting
A key part of our work at New Directions is collaborating with our clients to design agendas that lead to great meetings. Developing strategic clarity is the foundation of the fine art of agenda design. Getting to this strategic clarity is an iterative process best done in conversation. As I save and rename an agenda… Read more
An Iterative Approach to Network Design and Development
We have recently had the pleasure of working with the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance (MSGA) as they design a Great Neighborhoods Network. The Alliance’s Great Neighborhoods initiative seeks to build a movement to transform the built environment, creating great places around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Significant work has been done to create partnerships and goals… Read more
Seeing the System: Visuals of Networks
When people are coming together in a network to work on changing a system, such as local food, they need a picture of the system as a whole and its parts. Pictures are also helpful to map how work gets done in a network – and these images look much more molecular and circular than… Read more
Healthy People, Healthy Planet: Making the Connections between Wellness and Sustainability
New Directions Collaborative facilitated a World Cafe dialogue, in partnership with the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living and Integrative Medicine at Brown. This fun and inspiring evening forged new connections among Rhode Island’s wellness and sustainability communities, to discover new ideas and solutions that support wellness of people and the health of our planet. The interactive… Read more
Taking the Time to Realize the Full Value of Networks
What I appreciate about my work is that I get to team with various consultants on various projects in various sectors. We, and our clients, are all in an evolving conversation and experiment about how to work in networked ways to create social change. Whether the context is energy efficiency, local food, transportation, or education,… Read more
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
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
Fragmented Bureaucracies or Integrated Policy Coordination?
NPR’s Living on Earth show recently ran an interview with David Suzuki, author of “The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future,” where he shared a moving story illustrating the interdependence of the temperate rainforest ecosystem. He contrasted that to how compartmentalized our government agency approaches are to “managing” our forests. Coincidentally, the same… Read more