How can the community be active agents of change? What's the process of creating an effective story? What's the best way for a story to motivate action? In an age of fast communication - of snippets, of 140 characters, of 7 seconds to grab attention - it is easy to reach people, but how can we use stories to truly connect?
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Brenda Zimmerman, dear friend to Tamarack and a champion of community change and innovation, died verysuddenly in mid-December. She will be deeply missed and she leaves a lasting mark on us all. Like many of you, I was inspired and honoured that Brenda chose to share her newest idea - the concept of “snap back” - with us at the 2014 Collective Impact Summit. Her thinking offers guidance for moving forward despite being surrounded by resilient systems, and we now must share her thinking broadly so that it can live on.
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Have you ever wondered what cherry blossoms in Vancouver taste like? I didn’t have the imagination to even conceive of such a question let alone answer it until I attended a dinner hosted by Elementa a collective of young culinary talents in Vancouver last spring. Not only did they serve a cup of frozen aerated cherry blossoms (It was like tasting cherry bubbles) to cleanse our palette, they also offered their rationale for presenting authentic regional tastes. Elementa chefs believe in honest food that is both true to the place where it is grown or raised and true to the people who prepare it. 'Our grapes, hops, produce and game should remind us of who we are and where we come from. We shouldn't be trying to make our food taste like food from elsewhere,' said one of them.
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It’s been going on for quite some time to be honest. Often it’s just subtle derision producing comments like “charities need to be more business-like” or “My goodness, how many charities do we really need?” Other times the charity slam manifests as a rant against “poverty pimps” or a rail against artists who create things “that my five year old could make.”
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Complexity is, by its very name and nature, a complex phenomenon to understand. Yet, many of the most urgent, challenging problems we face as a species – from climate change to social inequities and inequality through to health system sustainability – sit in the realm of the complex. Thus, if we are to make any positive shift in addressing threatening complex problems we need to be able to engage society in conversations about them and develop strategies to learn and adapt that work with complexity rather than fall into the trap of what Russ Ackoff called ‘doing the wrong thing, righter.’
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Two weeks ago, Tamarack hosted a webinar where Elayne Greeley interviewed Mark Holmgren about Upside Down Thinking. As Mark said, he doesn’t claim to have created this term but I’m certainly glad they brought it forward for us to think about. Actually he has been talking about his for a while to get us thinking about a lot.
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