Four biggest mistakes made by leaders of large-scale change ?

by Rebecca Margiotta | Jan 28, 2019 | Uncategorized

One of my favorite things to do is speak with alumni of our Skid Row School a few months after they’ve graduated. The phone calls often go something like this:

Exchange of pleasantries.

So, Becky…the Skid Row School was great and all but…we’re kind of stuck.

Tell me more….

Having fielded dozens of these calls now I want to share with you the most common ways folks get stuck while leading large-scale change (and what you can do about them):

4. Your aim is off. Too big or too small. We recommend something in between a 5 to 10x expansion over a similar time-period from your last wave of expansion. So if it took you 3 years to get your intervention to 100 schools, in the next 3 years you could aim for being in 500 to 1,000 schools.

If this is you, you may want to proactively change your shared agreements about how much, by when. One thing that often helps is to ask for one more year. Kind of how you can buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune. You can usually buy a year if that’s what you need.

3. Theory lock has set in. We see this all too often. You’ve chosen which “all teach, all learn” structure from our “Many Ways to Many” tool and it’s not getting you the results you’d like. Instead of getting curious that maybe there’s a better way, some people double-down on tactics that just aren’t working. Remember, the whole point to there being many ways to many is that there are…many ways to many. Not just one.  

2.  A commitment is missing. Having a bold, quantifiable aim is one thing. Committing (and re-committing) to that aim is a whole other. It is in the committing that the aim comes to life. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way more times than I want to share. When things ain’t right, it’s at least work asking if somewhere a commitment is missing. While you cannot control objective reality, you can definitely control your decisions and actions. My mentor Katie Hendricks likes to say, “you know what you’re committed to by the results you’re getting.” Look at the results you are getting, and that will tell you what you’re committed to. If you don’t like it, time to make a new commitment. The sooner the better!

1. There’s a subconscious sabotage effort going on. This is the #1 most common challenge that I find when I’m working with our graduates and this is why we’re insistent on combining skills for personal transformation with skills for planetary transformation in all our workshops. It’s so easy to imagine that the problem is technical or “out there” but all too often it’s personal and “in here.” There’s a lot more to say about this but I’ll sum it up with four questions:

(1) what have you not faced?
(2) what have you not felt or acknowledged?
(3) What are you holding back from saying? and
(4) What are you holding back from doing?

Believe it or not, most of the time the answer that gets someone unstuck is in one of those four questions.

I hope this is helpful. Zip me a note and let me know if this struck a nerve. I wish you all the very best in your work to make this world a better place to live. 

Love,
Becky

What’s ? and ? @ the Billions Institute in 2019

by Rebecca Margiotta | Jan 18, 2019 | Uncategorized

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. 😉

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 they’ll need to sort out on the way to scale. They were quite useful if I do say so myself.

We’ve 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! There’s 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 “what are you morally obligated to get to everyone who can possibly benefit, regardless of their ability to pay for it?”

It’s a question we ask ourselves, too.

We’ve heard from some of you that you’d love to come to the Skid Row School but you don’t 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:

1. The podcast. Candid conversations with our alumni about the thrill of victory and agony of defeat when it comes to leading large-scale change.

2. The book. I’m finally going to do it! I’m gonna write a book along the lines of “How to Save the World without Losing Yourself” that captures my best thinking on how to do just that.

3. 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, we’re hoping this enables more people to benefit from our approach to designing and leading large-scale change. We’ll 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.

4. 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!

   Love,

   Becky

We’ve got less than 20 years to get our sh%t together

by Rebecca Margiotta | Oct 24, 2018 | Uncategorized

Friends,

The science is in. In case you missed it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning that we’ve got less than 20 years to get our sh%t together or we’re in serious trouble. It’s happening much more quickly than had been anticipated.

An Oxford scientist says we have to turn the world economy on a dime. “To 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.” {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, here’s the most disturbing description that I’ve found so far. It’s not for the faint hearted so read at your own risk. But it’s also really important so please read it! Bottom line is it’s hard to imagine any aspect of our lives that wouldn’t 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 doesn’t 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 they’re 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…that’d be kind of cool right?

One way or the other….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.

Announcements

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!!

Upcoming Events

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.