The Creative Activist

David Castro's book Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul offers some thoughts on leadership that can be valuable to new social ventures in particular. Bad assumptions, the quest for salvation and barriers to effective group thinking could all undermine a social venture. Assumptions in Social Venture Planning: New social ventures should proceed on sound assumptions. This statement should sound familiar and obvious. Putting an idea into practice— by testing assumptions and rejecting the bad ones—does not always happen. This fact is evident in how individuals in organizations plan and solve problems. Castro reminds us that the past might not be a reliable guide for the present. He points out that past experiences often don't translate because the current social environment is not like the past social environment. This is only a problem when social entrepreneurs forget that what worked for their heroes and mentors thirty years ag...

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...