Business Model Innovation for Social Entrepreneurship

Written by . Posted on April 25, 2012. Filed under Act, Think. Tagged , , . No comments.

How can social organizations thrive in a post-funding society?

A special innovation circle session was held with Maya Roy and the Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto.  Through turbulent economic times, Maya and staff leadership grew a team of committed members and made the organization a successful NGO for helping new families settle into Toronto. With impending budget cuts, they are faced with an immediate need to change their business model from a publicly supported service to a social entrepreneurial model.

York University’s Antony Upward presented the “Strongly Sustainable” Business Model Canvas (an innovation of the BMG canvas) the framework for group ideation and collaborative design. In large and small group sessions, the group explored innovation of business and revenue models, service provision, new relationships and communications channels.  As the first public unveiling of the research and design of the  “strongly sustainable” business model, we gained valuable and practical feedback on the applications of the new approach.

Generating one group’s model based on its “What If” starting point (orange label).

Sharing the group’s model with the whole and Antony collecting and aggregating the unique values of each in a common map.

Our apologies to any who found it difficult to locate the session – we held DwD at OCAD University’s graduate studies campus, 205 Richmond St. for one time only.

Passion in Action: What is your Calling?

Written by . Posted on April 8, 2012. Filed under Learn. Tagged , . 1 Comment.

Vanessa Judelman of Mosaic People Development hosted the April 2012 DwD.

THE WORKSHOP

Everyone has a life purpose. It is the reason we are on this planet. It is the thing we are meant to accomplish, the gift we are meant to bring.

The session explored:

  • What a fulfilling life would look like
  • Core values and how they guide more fulfillment in life and life’s work
  • What might be stopping people from realizing potential
  • Bringing more passion and purpose into life

Download the session exercise handout.

THE HOST   

Vanessa Judelman is president of Mosaic People Development. a company that develops great leaders and builds collaborative teams. She has 15 years of experience as a facilitator, trainer and certified coach. In her coaching practice, she is passionate about helping others to find their purpose and enjoy a truly fulfilling life.

She is noted as an expert in her industry and has been published and quoted in The Globe and Mail and the National Post.  Her clients include Torstar Digital, Blakes LLP, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, United Nations, Motorola and Ovarian Cancer Canada.

DwD April 2012

Opening circle conversation "What would a fulfilling life be like for you?"

Breakout group in conversation

 

Wheel of Life (handout exercise)

Nonviolent Communication: Moving from Stuckness to Possibility

Written by . Posted on March 4, 2012. Filed under Act, Learn. Tagged , , . No comments.

What If You Had the Answer All Along?

Henry Wai of the Center for Nonviolent Communication conducted the March 2012 DwD with Patricia Kambitsch of Playthink .

THE WORKSHOP

The session engaged people in interpersonal interactions that revealed the principles of nonviolent communication (NVC). NVC is a technique for opening possibility in areas of life where individuals experience being stuck or frustrated. When provided with an empathic space, such as created in the workshop, an innate resourcefulness in the person is freed up for opening up possibility at work, home, or community.

Henry Wai’s hands-on workshop explored:

  • How common thinking and habitual patterns limit our capacity for constructive possibility
  • A simple and powerful approach to get to the heart of issues
  • How this insight serves as the basis for creative action

The workshop held three seminar sessions with a total participation of about 40 people. Methods for exploring empathy and listening in communication included dyad and triad exercises and the NVC Feelings / Values cards.

 

Visual reflection by Patricia Kambitsch.

Online References:

Henry Wai helps people to work effectively, compassionately and with vitality. He has 25 years of experience leading trainings, developing programs and delivering direct service in areas such as housing and food co-ops, volunteer management, adult education, social enterprise and employment counselling. Henry’s experience includes working with individuals, teams and boards from diverse cultures and backgrounds. For 10 years Nonviolent Communication has been a very powerful addition to his approach which emphasizes self-awareness, choice, relational skills and ways to build co-operation in both work and personal settings. Henry is a Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication.  More recently he has been exploring contact improvisation dance for lessons in finding ways through stuckness or awkwardness.

Long-term Thinking

Written by . Posted on February 7, 2012. Filed under Think. Tagged , . No comments.

LENGTH MATTERS:
How might we bring a long-term perspective to near-term decisions?

Consumers, organizational leaders and politicians make daily decisions that will affect our families, communities, prosperity and habitat for decades into the future. How would our culture and world be different if we made decisions in consideration of the well-being of our children’s children, rather than only looking at the next tweet, fiscal quarter or electoral cycle?

February’s DwD explored approaches to over-coming “short-termism” with a long-term view to make our resources and systems more sustainable.

  • Unpack the assumptions that keep us locked into a short time frame
  • See what our decisions might look like if framed in a long view
  • Explore how a values shift might reframe our perspective
  • Jam ideas on new incentive structures that could influence our behaviour

References:

 Images from the session

How do our values drive our decisions? How might that skew us towards a short-term view?

 

 

What incentive structures might shift values such that our decisions will consider a long-term view?

Designing a Future for our Future: Personal Foresight

Written by . Posted on January 11, 2012. Filed under Dream, Think. Tagged , , . 1 Comment.

Get ready for The Multiplicity.

This workshop engaged participants to co-create multiple personal futures in large and small group collaboration. This social design experiment in personal foresight generated the creation of possible personal scenarios for the challenging next-future term possibilities. We started by creating a personal profile for the Low Tech Social Network. Communities listed on the profiles were shared in the closing circle to co-create a living network among the participants.

An amazing array of participants were involved, suggesting that DwD is reaching beyond its business + creatives + designerly roots. More and more people from dedicated social change communities are engaged and returning. While businesses can benefit from and afford these creative group processes, social change agents need to learn from each other. A community across communities is forming.

The event was framed by the question of considering the multiple futures we have choice to create. When we think of the future, we tend to push a vague collection of dreams, possibilities and wishes out to a speculative point in the years following the nearest term. We can guess about the world in two years, we can plan for 5 years, but 10 and 20 years challenge personal vision. Our concept was to confront the future opportunities for humanity, by learning to position our own inherent multiplicities as creative narratives to counter a technologically-determined future, whether a career ideal or the “singularity.”

The venue supported the creation of a circle and pairs for the exercises:

  • Values conflicts at the Crossroads
  • 3 Whys of 3 Values: Core values, Calling values, Contra values
  • Mapping Values to Actions
  • Mapping Value-Actions to future possibilities in the Pathway template

The workshop was convened by Peter Jones and Patricia Kambitsch (visual reflection) at The Design Exchange  Feb 24th in the DX boardroom as part of the Toronto Design Week Design Offsite Festival.

 

The Meta-Design of Dialogues as Inquiring Systems

Written by . Posted on December 30, 2011. Filed under Think. Tagged , , . 2 Comments.

About 30 participants attended the first DwD of 2012 (Jan 11). This educational session explored the relationship of systems inquiry to dialogue. Small groups facilitated their own learning to identify knowledge profiles and to design dialogic inquiries that would best address a selected area of concern.

There’s a multitude of ways to conduct dialogues.  Which approach will be most appropriate for attaining desired outcomes among different groups?  This DwD engaged systems thinking for some foundations, with an overview of C. West Churchman’s design of inquiring systems.  With these foundations, participants (dialogue designers) sharpened their appreciation of alternative modes and techniques.  More open dialogic approaches might (or might not) be preferred over more bounded and structured approaches, under different conditions.  Theory was translated into reflective practice through group exercises. The session started by generating a range of concerns and ideas for inquiry. These were selected by groups for further

About the Convener

David Ing is president (2011-2012) of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, an organization with members with interests crossing disciplinary boundaries (e.g. social systems, technological systems, biological systems, ecological systems).  In that role, he is designing the program for the ISSS annual meeting (in San Jose, CA in July 2012), and working with the Systems Science Working Group of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).  Over the past year, he developed new courses in systems thinking for the Master’s in Creative Sustainability at Aalto University in Finland.  He is a visiting fellow with University of Hull (UK), an itinerant scholar with the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and previously a cofounder of the Canadian Centre for Marketing Information Technologies (C2MIT) at the University of Toronto.  David has had a continuous 27-year career with IBM, with home base in Toronto.  He can be found on the Internet at http://coevolving.com

DwD Reflection & 2012 Shared Vision

Written by . Posted on December 9, 2011. Filed under Dream, Retreat. Tagged , , . No comments.

Every end of year we retreat and reflect on what we learned over the year’s events and who we are becoming in DwD community and practice. Fifteen people attended to co-create the vision for 2012 priorities, sessions, and direction. An Appreciative Inquiry guided the exploration and reflection, leading to harvests for each phase, as illustrated:

Discovery

Discovery explores the best in our experience, sharing and learning from our past and bringing forward the positive values to be honored in the inquiry. Paired shares led to whole-group expressions of valued experiences and impressions from Design with Dialogue in the 2011 season.

Visual reflection of DwD 2012 by Patricia Kambitsch.

Dream

Dream envisions what might be, and generates a multiplicity of possibilities for the group to reflect and decide. Individuals generated their ideas, shared in triads to review and add more, and posted and clustered in a harvest sheet. We organized and labeled clusters in a following session, resulting in a document shared with participants. The original harvest appeared as follows (not the full image):

Design and Destiny

In concluding the review and vision, people expressed their own hopes and encouragement for the 2012 season. People added their personal commitments to their proposals, which all ensures a rich, diverse, and heartfelt community in 2012.

  • Have continuity between sessions, with blogging and conversational support.
  • Have workshops to explore the nature of inquiring systems (of which AI, DwD are representative)
  • Evaluate the impact of learning from dialogue. Observe and evaluate the forms and outcomes of design. Relate the learning and observations to academic impact.
  • Inquiry into experiential modeling and experiential learning. What contributes to enhanced perception in dialogue?
  • “Listening sessions”  How to best share what we are learning in listening?
  • Continue with “sessions on what’s going on right now.” Capturing relevance as its emerging.
  • Holding new types of experiential dialogue sessions (e.g., Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects)
  • Continue to connect with conferences and academic groups
  • Consider interim DwDs that provide continuity – Hold special interest groups for hot topics
  • Develop the practice and “rituals” of dialogue:
    Save 30 min at Pre or Post for continuing topics
    Provide coaching / video in basic facilitation and process skills
    Start Web conferences or online sessions

 

Designing Occupation Dialogue

Written by . Posted on November 26, 2011. Filed under Act. Tagged , , . No comments.

We invited Occupy Toronto to kick off a DwD session, and continued with the dialogue engagement live at the camp, after it came down mid-week following the session.

Grad students and even president Sara Diamond from OCAD University were involved with sponsorship from the Design Exchange.  Two major community events were held, located (ironically enough) in the deco-era original Toronto Stock Exchange used by the DX.

The goals of these sessions were to evolve a common framing and voice for (meaning “with”) the diffuse and diverse core members of the movement.

What we seem to be missing are the connections between similar events in other Occupy communities. Pay attention to the shift of medium here – Occupy is an emerging and embodied social medium for civil change. It is not like the Arab Spring or other social media narratives. This is embodied (situated in place) and broadcasted (livecast) and not tweeted and FB’d to organize.

People are working things out F2F – not online – its a classic McLuhan media transformation in the making.

Occupy DwD: The Innovation of Disruptive Democracy

Written by . Posted on October 31, 2011. Filed under Act. Tagged , , . 2 Comments.

Across continents, people in the developed nations have declared a time-out from the economic ravages dealt to Main Street citizens and working families by merely placing their bodies and minds in visible public spaces. Whether  or not you have spent time at St. James or Zuccotti park, the message of this new medium of dissent is clear – people of all ages and walks of life have had enough. The mechanisms given to us to exert democratic change have proven insufficient to the extraordinary problems of the time. Politicians and their entrenched financial sponsors have perfected a parallel fantasy world where CEOs tell governments what to do.

This Occupy “movement of the people,” though started without a designed plan, represents possibly the most obvious call to systemic action we have seen in our lifetimes. Without presenting the media fodder of demands or talking points, a clear and common vision for creating a responsible political and economic system has taken shape.

For November 2011, DwD invited the emerging and expanding Occupy movement with global and local citizens to a dialogue on the future of responsive democratic governance. The call was to help frame the emerging democratic engagement, not as activism or problem solving, but as visioning and caring for a shared future.

(Video) Presenting the purposes of Occupy as visions for the long-term expression of the values, goals, and actions of the movement. (Below) Collaboratively constructing a field of purposes in a hierarchy from personal to the transcendent.

The purpose of this session was inspired by George Lakoff’s call for the Occupy movement to clarify its purpose through its shared morality:

“If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands…”

In a series of 4 fast cycles (circle, cafe, purpose tree, and circle) we explored the shared territory of several questions:

  • How might an Occupy moral vision inspire everyone?
  • What underlying forces do we all share as the 99%?
  • What are we really asking for?
  • How can Occupy lead with their story, so that all might hear?
  • Where might the movement go next?

Designing a ‘Whealthy’ Life

Written by . Posted on September 28, 2011. Filed under Learn. Tagged , , . No comments.

How can I gain confidence that the choices I make will allow me to thrive? What implications do my choices have for myself and my community?

In October’s DwD, Eric Rosenberg shared how concepts from financial asset management might craft a broader ‘human portfolio’. We investigated the principles and practices of ‘value investing’ and its connections to wealth and well-being. Participants examined their inventory of existing prosperity tools recognize ‘expenditures’ for which they’re taking responsibility, and began creating a ‘choice architecture’ designed to realize a Life Well Spent.

About the host

Eric Rosenberg is a nature-inspired city guy with strong curiosities and big talent for turning what he learns and how he sees it into forms and content that engage us. He has a post-industrial sensibility, meaning his inclinations are toward a small-scale, grassroots way of life, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Eric has degrees in finance, fine art, and education, which feed his passion to voice and gather people around the idea of developing their own human portfolio that serves as a foundation from which they design a life of their own choosing – a life well spent. Learn more about Eric’s own developing portfolio at healthymoney.ca.