I hope that your year is off to a terrific start. I had a terrible cold starting Christmas Eve but you know what? It was kind of wonderful to lay low and get a lot of rest. In between the sniffles and the coughs, I enjoyed copious amounts of laid back quality time with my family, so for that I am truly grateful. Plus antibiotics when you need them. Grateful for them, too. đ
We hit the ground running last week with 52 folks flying in from as far away as the UK for our Skid Row School for Unleashing Large-Scale Change. This was our most thorough weaving together of the skills for personal transformation with the strategies/tactics for large-scale change to date. We also rolled out some new tools to help teams more clearly pinpoint some of the organizational dilemmas theyâll need to sort out on the way to scale. They were quite useful if I do say so myself.
Weâve also landed on a beautiful new location for our trainings, the Kellogg West Conference Center on the Cal-Poly campus in Pomona, CA. Check out the view above! Thereâs nothing like Southern California in the winter with 70 degree weather and snow-capped mountains! AND the hotel/meals package is about $100/night LESS than our previous location. We think it’s a keeper.
One of the questions that participants leaned into last week was âwhat are you morally obligated to get to everyone who can possibly benefit, regardless of their ability to pay for it?â
Itâs a question we ask ourselves, too.
Weâve heard from some of you that youâd love to come to the Skid Row School but you donât have enough time (4 days) or money ($3,000). Message received.
We will still continue to offer the Skid Row School twice a year (each January and June), we will also be creating these new ways for folks to benefit from our approach for designing and leading large-scale change even if you cannot afford to come to the Skid Row School. Coming soon in 2019:
The podcast. Candid conversations with our alumni about the thrill of victory and agony of defeat when it comes to leading large-scale change.
The book. Iâm finally going to do it! Iâm gonna write a book along the lines of âHow to Save the World without Losing Yourselfâ that captures my best thinking on how to do just that.
Dig Deep/Dream Big: Introduction to Unleashing Workshop. This workshop is a high level overview of our approach (the Model for Unleashing) that we cover more in-depth at the Skid Row School. There is an emphasis on the first two parts of the model: Dig Deep and Dream Big. Participants will explore the overlap between what the world needs most and what you were put on this planet to do. Expect to leave with a clear vision for the change you seek and actionable next steps. At $795 for two days, weâre hoping this enables more people to benefit from our approach to designing and leading large-scale change. Weâll be running this for the first time March 27th – 28th at the Kellogg West Conference Center on the Cal-Poly campus in Pomona, CA. Learn more here.
Next week we’ll get back to more regular musings on designing and leading large-scale change.
Meanwhile, I look forward to being alongside you on your journey to make the world a better place and wish you the very best for a successful and joyful 2019!
The science is in. In case you missed it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning that weâve got less than 20 years to get our sh%t together or weâre in serious trouble. Itâs happening much more quickly than had been anticipated.
An Oxford scientist says we have to turn the world economy on a dime. âTo prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050, use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between 1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20 percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.â {alumni of the Skid Row School – note the “direct the rider” play here – it’s not a mystery what we need to do}.
The past few years I have been doing my best to wrap my brain around climate change and grasp the implications. While no one knows for sure what will happen, hereâs the most disturbing description that Iâve found so far. Itâs not for the faint hearted so read at your own risk. But itâs also really important so please read it! Bottom line is itâs hard to imagine any aspect of our lives that wouldnât be negatively impacted if any of these come true.
The same weekend this climate report was issued, our family was delighted to host Skid Row School alum and climate change leader John Hepburn of the Sunrise Project and his lovely family for a couple days last weekend. We were their final stop on their much deserved sabbatical. Over several home cooked meals with fresh vegetables picked right from our garden, we had many conversations about where the world is headed and what we can do about it. i came away from those conversations convinced that there is much to wring our hands about and yet there is so much more that we can be doing.
Both John and I had recently read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (a book I cannot recommend highly enough for those of you who are curious about what it means to be a human being). While I believe our species is on in the midst of creating the sixth great extinction, John reassured me from his read of Sapiens that the defining characteristic of our species is our capacity to create new a story and live into it. As we believe, so it becomes. And one glimmer of good news is that it doesnât take that many people living into the new story to change the course of history (for better or worse). While John was in Peru he studied the history of the Inca Empire. It took them 40 years to do it, but a mere 180 conquistadors from Spain ended up conquering the whole empire – one with a massive standing army of at least 100,000 soldiers. The conquistadors had a new story (that was a lie) and unfortunately the Incas bought it. It changed the course of history forever.
I know this story took place 500 years ago and in this example the colonizers won. I know that things are different now. And yet I cannot help but wonder about what new (and truthful) stories we can start telling ourselves and start living into. I wonder how many of us it takes to reach a critical mass. I wonder how I/we might shift to a regenerative (vs extractive) way of being in the world. I wonder what my/our lives might be like beyond fossil fuels? What if theyâre a whole lot better than we can even imagine? What if, as Buckminster Fuller says, over the next 20 years we can solve this problem then get on with our true purpose and destiny as human beings: to solve even bigger problems than this…thatâd be kind of cool right?
One way or the otherâŠ.the clock is ticking. The choices we make individually and collectively might matter more now than ever before. May we all tap into our best selves for the challenges ahead!
Onward into the unknown!
Becky
p.p.s. If you’re ever in town, please come over for dinner and we promise not to be too depressing.
Skid Row School Alumni Jennifer Blatz CEO of StriveTogether gets a much deserved shout-out from this David Brooks’ piece in the NY Times about something that’s actually working well in America. Kudos, Jennifer and thank you for some good news!!
The January 2019 Skid Row School is now full though we are accepting folks on our waitlist just in case spots open up. The next available Skid Row School is June 25th – 28th, 2019. We are also available to bring the Skid Row School to groups of grantees for foundations on a case by case basis.
Graduates of the Skid Row School are invited to apply for our large-scale change leaders fellowship. We meet three times a year for three days at a time and deeply explore the adaptive challenges almost everyone leading large-scale change faces.
The next meeting of the fellows is February 5th – 7th, 2019, and will take place outside Atlanta, Georgia.It will include a tour of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
We offer scholarships to those who need financial assistance for both our Skid Row School and our fellowship. Give a shout if that’s you.
Our fellows met in Los Angeles last week to do some advanced explorations around integrity, justice, and self-care as leaders of large-scale change. Many of you know that we do an introductory investigation of the “hero” at the Skid Row School. The hero includes the parts of yourself that are uncomfortable with making anyone feel uncomfortable, so you take on too much and bite your tongue and nothing ever changes other than youâre on the fast track to burnout. That kind of hero that’s widespread in the social sector.
This week we looked more deeply into another way that Iâve seen large-scale change leaders burnout: the villain. The villain is really good at criticizing and assigning blame. Some of us have more access to this part of ourselves than others. Take me, for example: I have easy access to my inner-villain! Â The villain has strong opinions about the way things âought to be.â I assume many of you are asking, âwhatâs wrong with that?â Well, nothing if you want to be on the right side of history. Itâs actually quite satisfying know youâre right and experience the surge of adrenaline that comes with a good dose of righteous indignation.
The problem is…our villains might be on the right side of history, but our challengers are the oneâs who make history. Challengers create loving pressure for change by being deeply present with someone who sees or thinks differently than we do. Challengers are able to stay grounded in our own discomfort and through our full presence, ask questions like:
How are you keeping this going?
How is this costing others around you?
Are you willing to stop this now?
What truths have you not told?
What have you not been willing to face about this issue?
What boundaries have you not created or have you broken?Â
Just to ground this in practical reality – imagine watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week and taking on your best villain pose for how things ought to be and lecturing anyone who saw things different from how you did about just how wrong they are. You might end up being on the right side of history, but it’s unlikely that you created an authentic connection that opened up the possibility for creating something different going forward.
Another possibility in light of last week’s events would be to start wondering out loud some variations of the challenger questions above. Hmmmm….I wonder what truths have not yet been told. I wonder what we, collectively, have not been willing to face about sexual assault. I wonder what I have not faced personally about any of the trauma I’ve experienced in my lifetime. I wonder how I am contributing to keeping this whole culture going. These questions open the door for deeper personal explorations as well as increase the likelihood of a person to person dialogue that results in transformation versus being right or wrong. My invitation to you is to try some of these on for size and see how they work for you.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to our new fellows: Mari Jones, Michelle Pledger, and Wendy Loloff-Cooper (clockwise from top left).Â
Mari Jones is the Project Co-director of the Deeper Learning Hub, a national practitioner hub whose mission is to spread deeper learning practices and ensure that more students across the country are achieving deeper learning outcomes. With Michelle Pledger, she co-leads the Share Your Learning Campaign which aims to focus on spreading a small set of practices (exhibition, student-led conferences, and presentations of learning), to 5 million students by 2020.  She is also an Improvement Facilitator for the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at High Tech High Graduate School of Education, and a course instructor for the Teaching Apprenticeship Program at High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Previously, Mari was an elementary teacher for fourteen years and has always felt that education is a form of activism, and she is passionate about promoting social change and equity by empowering youth.
 Michelle Sadrena Pledger is the Project Co-Director for the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation and teaches at High Tech Highâs Graduate School of Education. With Mari Jones, she co-leads the Share Your Learning Campaign which aims to focus on spreading a small set of practices (exhibition, student-led conferences, and presentations of learning), to 5 million students by 2020. With a dual passion for education and dance, she embraces an energetic teaching and coaching style. Proficient in Spanish and conversational Japanese, Michelle enjoys international travel and leaves the country at least twice a year. As a former member of the renowned public speaking organization, Toastmasterâs International, Michelle has won numerous accolades for competitive public speaking.
 Wendy Loloff Cooper is the CEO of Generation Schools Network. She brings extensive experience in the non-profit and education sectors, especially in the areas of network and collaborative development, replication and innovative educational models. She has worked in higher education (Northwest College, Colorado Christian University & Harvard University) and co-founded the StreetSchool Network, which grew to include more than 50 schools in 27 cities under her leadership. Since taking the reins at Generation Schools, Wendy has grown the organization from serving a handful of schools each year to serving more than 60 schools in multiple states and founding a 56 district rural collaborative as a unit of change.
We still have four spots open up at the October 23rd – 26th Skid Row School and we are currently accepting applications for all of our 2019 offerings.
Graduates of the Skid Row School are invited to apply for one of the seven spots available in 2019 for our fellowship. We meet three times a year for three days at a time and deeply explore the adaptive challenges almost everyone leading large-scale change faces.
The next meeting of the fellows is February 5th – 7th, 2019, and will take place outside Atlanta, Georgia.It will include a tour of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
We offer scholarships to those who need financial assistance for both our Skid Row School and our fellowship. Give a shout if that’s you.
I hope all of you are safe and sound in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence.
This month I have been deeply immersed in our work to support two clients who are advancing racial equity in the US education system: The Raikes Foundationâs Building Equitable Learning Environments Network and the Sonoma County Office of Educationâs Empathy, Equity, and Engagement Project aka the âRooster Fellowship.â
For the Raikes Foundation, I am interviewing 36 experts in the fields of equity and education to capture their best ideas about what the purpose and function of the US education system would ideally be, why itâs not currently like that, and what needs to be done to move things in the right direction. Later this year, Iâll have the privilege of facilitating key stakeholders in learning from these 36 interviews and crafting strategies for whatâs next. I promise you this: I am glued to the zoom on my computer screen for every one of these interviews. I am committed to keeping an open mind and being deeply present with these luminaries as they share their wisdom and insights.
As a parent and someone who cares deeply about education and justice, I wish everyone could hear what is being shared with me. Please know there is zero debate among any of these experts Iâm interviewing that our current education system is out of date and reproducing oppression, right now, at a school down the street from each of us. Their consensus on this is sobering and a real wake up call for me personally.
One of the people I will interview – havenât quite gotten to him yet – is Jeff Duncan Andrade. In my research I discovered the Deeper Learning conference. I heard from friends who were in the audience that it was scheduled to last 45 minutes. Itâs an hour and fifteen. I also heard that not a person budged from their seats the entire time. Since it was the last keynote of the conference many people missed their flights, and I donât think a single person regretted it. Christine and I watched this together the other night the same way you would watch a TV show. Absolutely gripping and important. She sat across from me on the couch, scribbling down notes, and she doesnât even work in the education field. It is that good. I had the thought that everyone I know needs to see this keynote. Even if youâre not in education. Itâs that good.
Another big adventure Iâm on: Last week I traveled to Sonoma County to kick off a second year of working with Chuck Wade, Jessica Progulske (the dynamic duo otherwise known as “Chuckica”) and Elizabeth Najmabadi, and Amanda Snook. We’re doing a “wedge and spread” initiative to improve equity and engagement. The âwedgeâ teams from seven of the forty districts in the county. Each team is comprised of a superintendent, a principal, a teacher, and a classified person like a school counselor or special ed teacher. Each of the seven teams will be working to measurably improve student responses – across all demographic sub-populations – to these three questions:
What we worked on in class is important to me.
Class today was so interesting that I didn’t want to leave.
My teacher thinks I can succeed.
I don’t know about you, but as a parent I care way more about what my kids answer to those questions than I do about any test score. I want them to love their teachers, their classmates, their community, their school. I want them to love learning and love learning how to learn. Because someday they will be all grown up and inherit some really gnarly problems our generations are going to dump on them, and we will look to them to solve them. And we need all the talent of all the kids to do that.Â
Hereâs the kicker, though: As a result of these conversations Iâm having and the work Iâm doing, Iâm clear that I want that for every kid, not just our own.
If I could share one big takeaway from all my work in education and equity it is this: we must show up for all the babies. Not just our own. I do believe that is the challenge in front of us and that itâs way easier said than done.
And I wonder for other large-scale change initiatives in other sectors – how much that mindset shift – from “mine/me” to “ours/we” – is essential for creating the change we seek.
Yours Truly,
Becky
P.s. If all of this interests you, you simply must subscribe to STARZ for a month and watch all 10 episodes of America to Me. Then we can talk some more. It highlights the vastly different experiences that kids have in the same school. Eye opening.
Iâve been thinking a lot lately about this notion that there might be two primary ways to go about accomplishing spread/scale in the social sector: broad and deep.
When I think about broad I think about getting an intervention to everyone who might benefit as quickly as possible, and doing so as a matter of justice. I think about Rotary Clubs (among many others like the World Health Organization, the US CDC and UNICEF) pulling together to ensure that every single child on the planet receives the polio vaccine. They helped the world go from 350,000 cases of polio in 1988 to 22 in 2017. I even read that they stopped the Civil War in Sudan for four days so that every child in that country could be immunized. Now thatâs getting an intervention to everyone who might benefit!
Broad is often good and I think itâs often the default mindset of many foundations and non-profits seeking to scale when they come to the Skid Row School. My only caveat to going broad is be sure your intervention is truly âread for prime timeâ by being attentive to any unintended consequences that might actually cause harm. Otherwise – get to it!
Then thereâs deep. Deep doesnât always get the respect it deserves, especially in a culture where more + bigger + faster = better. I want to put deep out there as equally valid with broad as a scaling objective. By scaling “deep” I mean fully transforming an existing system. This is not something I have as much experience with, but my hunch is going deep and broad can be complementary strategies.
A friend at the National Equity Project recommended this article to me: âSeven Lessons for Leaders in Systems Changeâ written by the folks at the Center for Ecoliteracy and Iâm happy to share it with you. Cliffâs notes version – the lessons are:
To promote systems change, foster community and cultivate networks.
Work at multiple levels of scale
Make space for self-organization
Seize breakthrough opportunities when they arise
Facilitate – but give up the illusion that you can direct – change
Assume that change is going to take time
Be prepared to be surprised
Alumni of the Skid Row School will note some similarities with this and our Model for Unleashing 1.0 (yes, we have a MFU 2.0 now) in that #4 and #7 map to âplay jazzâ and #5 maps to âlose control.â
This week Iâve been focusing in on Lesson #5: âFacilitate – but give up the illusion that you can direct – change.â Â I want to share their instructions on #5 directly:
âSo what can you do? In the provocative maxim of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, âYou can never direct a living system. You can only disturb it.â How do you disturb a system? By introducing information that contradicts old assumptions. By demonstrating that things people believe they canât do are already being accomplished somewhere. By inviting new people into the conversation. By rearranging structures so that people relate in ways theyâre not used to. By presenting issues from different perspectives.â
What a breath of fresh air. This is a direct challenge to all of our inner control freaks, right? Itâs true – we canât control a system, but we sure can disrupt it – and they offer five concrete tactics ready for us to try today. I can think of a lot of systems and structures that could benefit from disruption, and this is useful for everything from our current (in)justice system to our organizations, no matter how big or small.
Whether youâre wanting to create change broad or deep, or both, Iâm happy to share these five tactics as inspiration and provocation. Iâm curious if any of these resonate for you and how it’s working out for you as you apply them.Â
