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CoVisioning: A New Way to Plan for Change

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:
  1. Sequencing— change the usual order of things in a fundraiser, advocacy campaign or another nonprofit program.
  2. 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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