Until I am face to face with how awesome it all is. I wrote about that when I visited the Mars lander project, and saw the immensity of what they were accomplishing. It blew me away. It inspired me to push harder and farther. It was, in the literal meaning of the word, awesome.

So this past weekend, I clicked on the link someone shared to the video below – a montage created by NPR about the early exhuberant days of the Space Shuttle.

And I wept.

I wasn’t weeping for the shuttle program or for space exploration. I was weeping to think that we have left behind the age of exploring for the sake of exploring. We have left behind the age of visionary possibility.

And we have entered the age of fixing / curing / ending / preventing as “high aspiration.”

We have entered an age of focusing squarely on our problems. We have convinced ourselves that ending something negative is the same as creating something affirmative. And that prevention is as lofty a goal as creation.

The future does not have to be an extension of the past. We can create the future we want. We do it every single day.

What it takes is aiming higher.

Aiming for the moon and beyond. Aiming at the world we DO want. Aiming beyond what the logic of our past tells us is “reasonable.” Reaching as high as we can, and then reaching higher again.

What it takes is then tethering our plans to that dream

Asking, “What favorable conditions would make that dream simply inevitable?” Asking, “What are all the cause-and-effect variables it will take to create the future we want?” (instead of tethering our plans to today, asking, “How far do we think we can reasonably go?”)

What it takes is aligning our day-to-day actions with our dreams for what is possible, and being that right now.

Instead of wishing others would be more cooperative, being more cooperative ourselves – right here now. Instead of wishing others would be more transparent, being that ourselves – right here now. Walking the talk, right here now.

We have convinced ourselves that creating the future we want is impossible. And we have convinced ourselves that if it is not impossible, then it surely will be hard.

What if it’s not? And what if the only thing standing between us and the world we want is the fact that we think it’s hard – or not possible at all?

Imagine what would have happened if 50 years ago, someone had said, “We’re going to send a man to the moon and back. And we’re going to do that in less than 10 years.”

Oh yeah. We did say that. And it happened.

Photo credit: NASA

Making Change has some of the best content on social change you can find anywhere. And I don’t feel boastful saying so, because the content all comes from amazing guests, with amazing experience in creating change.

This week’s highlighted interview is with Peter Block – author, consultant, teacher and inspired advocate for the power of communities. You can listen to the interview / conversation via the player below, or you can download it from iTunes here.

(If you are reading this in your email, the player may not appear below. Please click through here and listen at the blog online.)

The thread that runs through all of Peter’s work is the theme of creating communities that work for all of us, whether those communities are workplaces, neighborhoods, or Peter’s own home community of Cincinnati, Ohio.   Not surprising to readers here, Peter has found that communities that aim at creating what is possible, rather than fixing what is wrong, are far more likely to create visionary, transformational change.

Enjoy listening – and if you have thoughts as you listen, please note them in the comments!

Photo Credit: “Schnäggli” per Wikimedia Commons

It is becoming clear to me that, while seemingly noble, questions of blurring the lines are the wrong question.  Why? Because the question assumes there are, in fact, lines – that there are entities and organizations, corporations and social enterprises and traditional “nonprofits,” and that we need to tear down those walls.

It is the wrong question because, when we study and attempt to answer it, we actually reinforce the notion that we are all separate from each other.

A More Effective Question
What if instead of seeing a community filled with the artificial constructs of entities and organizations and businesses, each behind their own walls, we saw the whole interwoven fabric of the community? What if we saw each of the threads of that fabric not as legally separate entities, but as individual people, bringing together their dreams and aspirations, their talents and gifts, their access to “stuff” – all towards creating the greater whole?

Because of the brilliance of each of the strands in that interwoven fabric, our community knows about health and art and dogs.

Our community dreams of being healthy, vibrant, resilient.

Our community has desks and computers and storefronts and parks and cars.

Not mine. Not my organization’s or my business’s. Our collective whole has all of this.

We are not organizations. We are people. As people, we are all interconnected and interdependent, whether we acknowledge that or not. None of us is independent of the rest of us.

We are a whole with individual parts that constantly affect the whole and each other – cells in a larger body. We may be independently alive, but we are relatively worthless without each other. When small groups of us go off alone together from our own cancerous self interest, our fate is either to be stamped out by radiation – an outside force that is stronger than us – or we kill the very host that keeps us alive.

And like cells in a body, we are powerful only when acting in concert towards what is in ALL of our best interests – making sure the collective whole is healthy, resilient, at peace.

People. Together.

Which leads us to questions that can move us forward, instead of the well-intentioned yet ultimately unproductive question about blurring lines.

• What does it make possible when we stop seeing the labels and the walls, and start seeing our collective ability to live well together?
• What does it make possible when we stop having conversations about what social entrepreneurs and traditional nonprofits and corporations can learn from each other, and we START having conversations about the things we all care about as people who will only thrive when all of us thrive together?
• What is it we can accomplish together that none of us individual cells can accomplish on our own?
• And what favorable conditions can we create in our communities, that would make such coming together an inevitable result?

When we start asking these questions, what we will find is that the walls don’t have to be scaled, the lines don’t have to be blurred – because they don’t really exist.

With only 2 days left before Creating the Future’s first Scholarship Fund Campaign closes, we are going to do something we rarely do at this blog:

We are asking for your help as we head into the final stretch.

• If you get excited about the possibilities we discuss here at this blog – and you want everyone to know how to create those possibilities in their communities – your gift to the scholarship fund will help make that happen. Donate here
• If you have experienced Creating the Future’s work in other venues – perhaps a workshop or the NPCons Twitter chat or even this blog – and you want to create opportunities for deeper learning for yourself and your colleagues, your donation to the scholarship fund will help make that happen.  Donate here
• And if you want to attend one of our immersion courses yourself – whether our new ED / Social Entrepreneur class or our consultants class – and you want that scholarship fund to be there for you… well your donation will help make that happen as well.  Donate here

To prove how instantly individuals and organizations “become the communities they want to see,” one of the graduates of our courses has offered a dollar-for-dollar match up to $1,750 – the amount of one full tuition. With her generous gift, she told us this:

“I’d love to make it possible for someone to have the wonderful experience I had in the immersion course.”

Your gift will make a huge difference – not just for the individuals who attend the courses, but most importantly, for the communities they are impacting.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Creating the Future’s graduates tell their own stories!
(If you are viewing this via email or a reader, and the video doesn’t appear, click here to view this post online. You won’t want to miss these stories!!)

By clicking through to donate to the scholarship fund, you will be giving a changemaker the tools to create significantly better results in their communities.  Donate here

And there are only 2 days left to make that happen.

Thanks for your support and your excitement about the work Creating the Future is doing. And I promise, next post, we’ll be back to the stuff you love about this blog.

Many thanks to Alex Budak and Tom Dawkins from Start Some Good, for including this scholarship fund in the launch of their crowdfunding site. You are both doing amazing work, and we are honored to be part of it.

I found myself refraining from sending him a note that said, “If you want the world to be more positive, perhaps you might start with YOU?”

Which led to my starting this list. It’s just the beginning. I know I’ll be thinking more about it. But I sure would love you to add your thoughts to the bottom.

1) If you want others to be positive and optimistic, be positive and optimistic yourself. Complaining that the world is not the way you want it just adds to the negative you are hoping to avoid! So if you want the world to be more positive, more optimistic, be that.

2) Whatever other values you want to see in others, be those yourself. List what values you wish others held. Model what those values look like in action.

3) When you are not walking that talk, be conscious of it. Don’t beat yourself up (do you want a world where people beat themselves up?) Be compassionate, kind to yourself. Then remind yourself of what you DO want to model. Model it first to you, then to others.

4) If your positive world view is aimed at ending something bad (poverty, homelessness, hunger), reframe that world view to something truly positive, rather than simply the lack of something negative. What will it look like once there is no more poverty, war, mistrust? What will that make possible? Aim your life and your work at that positive goal. It changes things. Really.

5) If your positive world view is not just ending, but preventing something bad, see #3 (diabetes, AIDS, homelessness).

6) If you want a world where we are all working together, collectively empowered – work with others, and empower them. If you are working on a project that will make your organization stronger than others, defeat the competition, make you personally stand out – in other words, keep you separate – ask how that effort can be made stronger by empowering others to be just as strong as you (if not stronger!). Really. A world where we are all working together starts with you. Starts with me. Starts with us. In everything we do.

Like I said, it’s a start. Where do you think it might go from here?

Individual organizations begin reaching out to others doing similar work. They hold summits and host ongoing discussions. They create plans.

Often, great things happen from that work.  Yes, we hear about collaborations that fail, but much like the news media, stories of group efforts that thrive are not nearly as much fun to share as stories of disaster.

When I hear of these efforts – both the successes and the failures – the same question always arises for me:

What is happening with groups that succeed, that is not happening with those who fail?

That question was a big part of the discussion I had in my latest interview for the Chronicle of Philanthropy – an interview with the amazing Nancy Hunt, co-founder of the amazing We Are Family Foundation. (And they are both amazing – really!)

In my post yesterday, I told a bit about the history of the foundation – the phoenix that rose from the horror of the September 11 attacks.  From Nancy and Nile’s initial music-based efforts to bring people together, their work grew to bringing activists together – more to the point, young activists.

In the interview, Nancy shares stories of the kind of community results that are so often labeled “impossible.”  And while those results are truly astounding, for me the teachable moments in the interview are about how that happens – how we can turn gatherings of disparate individuals into closely knit groups, seemingly capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

You can listen to the interview streaming online, or download it to your MP3 player.

I know you are going to get a lot out of this interview. I recommend listening twice – once on your way to work or during your daily workout, and then again with a pad and paper. I am that certain it will spark your thinking!

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts after listening. My sincerest gratitude to Nancy for giving us much to chew on!

If you think others will benefit from hearing this interview, please share the links with your own social networks – post it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, start a LinkedIn discussion, or just send the link to your board. Let’s start elevating the discussion about what it will take to create the future of our communities!

It has been a curious path our species has taken. For the past few thousand years, we in the “developed world” have aimed ourselves squarely at perfecting the art of being an individual. We have aimed at individual salvation, individual wealth, individual power. And as we have influenced those in other parts of the world, we have aimed those individuals and nations squarely at those goalposts as well.

That societal focus has led to considerable individual wealth and power (I cannot make any claims about individual salvation).

And while the quality of both our material and social lives improved for many people during those millennia, the quality of the material and social life for many stayed the same. There is still immense poverty, immense violence, immense harm.

And across the world, there is still immense longing for living better with each other – something that has nothing to do with being an individual and everything to do with being a collective “us.”

The Time is Now, The Future is Here (insert your own cliche…)
We live at a time when we have everything we need to move forward as a people – not as a nation or a community, but as a planet-full of people. We have the material means and the scientific knowledge to best use those material means. We have political systems that allow for freedoms and control in our own lives that was unheard of even a few hundred years ago in the “civilized” world.

There is no longer any reason for anyone in this world to want materially or to live in fear politically. And that means there is also no reason that this planet-full of people cannot live together peacefully, joyfully and compassionately with each other. All of us.

There is no reason we cannot live from a place of kindness. And there is every reason and then some that we can. There is a path to that place – a path that will require one huge first step, and then many small steps to follow.

The first step is to realize that such a reality is not only possible, not only likely – but that it is already here.

For most people on this planet, the majority of daily life is already filled with good things. Joyful things.

Our lives are already filled with kindness most of the time.

Current societal systems, however – from our political and economic systems to the systems businesses and community benefit organizations use to do their own work – are rooted in our fears. Our fears that people will be greedy, power-hungry, or simply unkind.

Those systems focus all their energies on the small percentage of time where things are going wrong.

What it will therefore take to create a world that lives joyfully together from a place of kindness is to deeply understand the reality that the percentage of life on earth where things are bad, sad, evil, horrible is small – and to emphasize and amplify the patterns that already make life overwhelmingly livable, joyful.

Creating visionary improvement to the quality of life in our communities is therefore the most practical objective there is. The small steps, then, are to change the systems that assume reality is other than that. Change systems that focus on problem-solving to systems that focus on creating something positive. Change systems that assume we will treat others badly to systems that assume we will choose kindness and compassion.

This year, Creating the Future is taking wing. The focus of this new entity will be precisely that – to make clear that the reality we want is a big part of the reality we already have. We already know how to do everything we need to do to create the world we want. Our job at Creating the Future, then, will be to work alongside others to transform the systems our society uses, to ensure they reflect that reality.

It is clear that creating healthy, vibrant, resilient, humane, joyful communities will not take working harder or smarter. It will simply take changing how we see things.

Because when we change the way we see things, things change.

We look forward to working side by side with you in this year ahead, to create that future for our world. Together.

Year-end is always a time for wrapping up, but these days around our office, we feel like we are just getting started.This ramping-up year at Creating the Future has meant inspired leap after inspired leap, lightning bolt after lightning bolt. I never dreamed so much creation could happen so instantly!

Of course, it’s not really instantly. We have spent the past few years seeing what happens when we put The Pollyanna Principles more deeply into practice. We’ve spent hours and days watching the growing army of consultants who have trained with us – watching what they accomplish, how they move beyond what challenges them, tapping into their clients’ highest potential to create amazing communities.

The result has been a plan for developing the programs that will aim this entire sector’s work at our potential to create the future we all want.

I hope you’re strapped in, because this is going to be one heck of a ride!!!!

Our Vision for the Future
The story of our planning began with the same questions we would ask in any planning session: What future will we aim our plan at creating? That vision has been so solid for so long that this was an easy question to answer.

Our mission and programs will be tethered to the peaceful, joyful image of a healthy, vibrant world. A future where each of us naturally and reflexively reacts from a place of kindness and possibility. A future where that is what we expect as the norm.

A Mission to Accomplish
We then began to reverse engineer that future, asking, “What pre-conditions have to be in place for that future to be reality?” To each response, we asked the same question again. “For those conditions to be in place, what would have to happen first? What would cause that? What would it take?”

It was during this process that the first surprise hit us.

We had thought our mission for the next 5-10 years was to change the modus operandi of the Community Benefit Sector, so that every aspect of the sector’s work is aimed at creating that vision of the future.

What became clear is that we hadn’t drilled down deeply enough, to establish all the steps along the critical path.

The big huge honking piece we missed was this:

“Sectors” don’t change. Neither do “organizations” or “systems.”

People change.

People change their beliefs and assumptions and expectations, which then changes their actions. That is the combination that will change systems and organizations and yes, the whole sector.

And so the mission we are working to accomplish in the next 5-10 years is this:

1) To change the assumptions and expectations of people working in and influencing this sector, regarding the extent to which visionary community / global change is possible

2) To embed those new expectations into every aspect of the work being done by people in this sector, and

3) To ensure that all leaders of organizations know how to make that level of visionary change practical and doable.

Programs that will Accomplish the Mission
If our mission was to make those 3 bullet items the reality of this sector’s work, what exactly would we do to accomplish that?

Focusing on people vs. institutions changed everything about the programs we considered. Reverse engineering continued as we asked ourselves, “What is it that creates behavioral change?” In both our practical experience and our research, we have found repeated success with two basic steps:

• Meet people where they are in their thinking
• Then show them a path for moving beyond their frustrations, towards what is possible.

That’s when another aha struck.

Capacity building initiatives have been aimed at positions (board member, executive director, foundation CEO) and at organizational life cycles (start-ups, growing orgs, sustaining orgs, etc.). Where they have not been aimed is at real live people! No wonder the capacity building movement has not succeeded in creating a strong, effective sector!

So what might happen if we create a capacity building effort for the whole sector, focused on real people making those changes?

What if we helped move people’s assumptions and expectations towards our collective potential to create the world we want?

What if we acknowledged people where they are, embracing that “where they are” is at all different stages along a spectrum of willingness / readiness / being-ness to move towards that potential?

And what if we provided a range of programs for every field – a range of programs for boards, a range of programs for consultants, a range of programs for funders, and etc. – depending on where an individual might find him/herself on their own journey?

And THAT is when the whole world opened up.

Those of you who followed my limited blogging / tweeting during my 6 weeks of contemplation and exploration this past summer kept hearing me say that my head was exploding. (IrkaFirka even immortalized my saying that in one of their wonderful sketches!) Lightning bolt after lightning bolt shook my living room as I wrote and thought and read and then wrote and thought and read some more.

Others began providing their own thoughts, as well as other readings. The more Dimitri and I shared our thinking, the more we found evidence of a spectrum approach in all effective efforts to influence behavior. Some of the more high profile thought systems included:

• Moves Management (fundraising)
• Lead Scoring (and other effective business sales methods)
• Stages of Change (psychology)
• Belief Repatterning (personal development)
• Spiral Dynamics (human development)

Imagine the power of applying this vast array of wisdom to the work of a sector that is poised to create a healthy, vibrant future for our world!

Developing Programs
From all this planning and thinking, our path has become clear, and the work has already begun. We are simply applying the same thinking that has worked to create change in individual behaviors – from getting someone to quit smoking to getting someone to donate to a cause – to the work of social change.

Over the next 24 months, we will be developing a spectrum of programs for boards, for consultants, for funders, for academic instructors, for executive directors, for social entrepreneurs… and so on, for every field within this vast Community Benefit Sector.

Each of those programs will meet individuals where they are in their own being – their current assumptions, expectations, beliefs, and especially their current programmatic and organizational needs.

Each of those programs will then extend a hand to encourage those individuals to take the next step towards their potential to create a more vibrant, healthy world.

We are confident that if we have a staff committed to developing this breadth of programs, we will have a full spectrum of programs up and running in the next 24 months. For now, our next step is clear – find funding, hire that staff, and get to work!

We’re excited to see what’s next, and we are honored that you are part of this adventure – sharing your wisdom, your ideas, your experience, your passion, and most of all putting new ways of being and doing into place in your own work.

We know that creating the world we want is both practical and doable.

We also know that once our assumptions and expectations align behind what is possible, things happen faster than we’ve been conditioned to think is possible.

How much more exciting can it possibly get!?

Starting today, we will begin sharing what we have been thinking about, as we have spent the last few months asking ourselves questions such as

“What will it take to create the conditions that will lead to a world that relates to itself from our highest potential as humans?”

“What will it take for all of us to naturally and reflexively respond to each other with kindness?”

“And what programs can we develop at Creating the Future that will move this world towards that way of being together?”

Impossible? Hardly. Unless something is physically impossible, it is absolutely possible!

If the video does not show in your email reader, click here to view it on the site.

As Arnold Toynbee noted over 50 years ago, this modern world is in the unique position to “dare to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”  As we begin developing the core programs at Creating the Future, that is precisely where those programs will be aimed – at our vision of a world that is thriving physically, intellectually, emotionally, creatively, spiritually.

The “Nonprofit” “Nongovernmental” “Civil Society” “Community Benefit” “Social Enterprise” “Citizen” sector is poised to create that world. We have no other motives but to make our world a better place. We have the resources. We have the knowledge. We are poised, ready, a force to be leveraged to create the world we all want.

Over the coming months here at Creating the Future, we will begin to engage that larger conversation about what it will take to create the path of cause-and-effect that can indeed create a more humane world.

For now, as you head into your week, please start each day by remembering WHY we all do this work. Take a moment to see the whole forest before the week drags you into the trees (and the leaves and the cells…).

Have a great Monday and a great week, all!

]]> http://hildygottlieb.com/2010/09/26/monday-morning-rock-out-57/feed/ 3 http://hildygottlieb.com/2010/09/01/social-entrepreneurship-whats-the-difference/ http://hildygottlieb.com/2010/09/01/social-entrepreneurship-whats-the-difference/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:42:13 +0000 Hildy http://hildygottlieb.com/?p=3241 If you have heard the term “Social Entrepreneur” but can’t exactly define what that means, you are not alone. I spent some time today on Twitter, trying to find the difference between a “social entrepreneur organization” and a plain old organization – the kind we all know in our communities.  I came up empty-handed.

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