Genership 1.0 Beyond Leadership,
Toward Liberating the Creative Soul by David Castro
describes a number of tools that social entrepreneurs and nonprofit
leaders can use to improve their organization's performance. This
post is the first of several to address some of those tools or
strategies in more detail. This week the subject is CoVisioning
strategies. CoVisioning is thinking with others about desired changes
to reality.
Castro presents three specific
CoVisioning strategies that nonprofit staff and entrepreneurs can use
to think about the future: reframing, construction and recombination,
iteration and variation.
Reframing:
Think of a frame as a perspective. One
frame might be that poverty comes from the inherent unfairness of our
economic system, then solutions that occur are likely to be different
from a frame that emphasizes limited access to resources, for mental
health counseling or training in basic job skills. The inherent
unfairness frame might make one think about staging protests against
cuts in the nation's welfare spending.
Reframing is the practice of changing
the context in which we observe the pattern. Look for other
perspectives from which to view a problem or a challenge. Different
ideas related to fighting extreme poverty or gun violence or climate
change will emerge from viewing the situation through different
frames.
Construction and Recombination:
Take pieces of a pattern and put them
together in new ways. Smart phones combine phones, Web browsers and
cameras. Recombination takes parts and reassembles them in different
ways, so that the original is no longer recognizable. Reframing is
similar, but you can tell what has been changed, such as when a
melody gets recycled in a song written in a different genre.
The movie Alien was
once pitched as “Jaws in a spaceship”—a reframing
in a sense. To construct a new type of sci-fi tale, a writer might
combine elements of cowboy movies and detective films with classic
sci-fi technology like artificial intelligence and a criminal
conspiracy so often featured in dramas.
A nonprofit program could be
constructed using this methodology. What elements of different
programs could be combined to create something new and valuable? What
parts of programs for serving the homeless could be taken out and
recombined to create something entirely new?
Iteration and Variation:
Nonprofit programs and social ventures
share certain elements, elements that may be used without question.
The pattern for a successful fundraising campaign has been
established and may be copied with minimal customization. Evaluate
the results and repeat.
Iteration and variation are tools for
addressing challenges in areas like advocacy, fundraising and program
design. Many types of variation are possible, but two are enough to
cover in one blog post:
- Sequencing— change the usual order of things in a fundraiser, advocacy campaign or another nonprofit program.
- Substitution—swap one element of a pattern for another; Twitter in place of Facebook perhaps.
Think about a program or a policy. What
are the elements, parts or pieces? How could the elements be
rearranged? What element could be replaced with something entirely
different? As an exercise think about what elements traditionally
make up an effort to help the homeless get back into the mainstream
of society.
Take another look at those three
elements of CoVisioning. Reframe a challenge. Take the pieces of a
program and put them back together in a new way. Try a new variation
of an old idea. A new vision might emerge.
Next month’s post will be about
CoThinking, the practice of collaboratively thinking about what to
change and how to change it.
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