Archived with love

October 11, 2023 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| Comments Off

This website is a static archive of Organization Unbound (2010-2020), a decade-long global inquiry into the relationship between the inner life of social purpose organizations and their outer work in the world. We hope you are enlivened by the writings, videos, and self-guided workshops it contains. Although Organization Unbound is no longer an active community of practice, the learning continues to evolve in exciting new forms.

Special podcast appearance: Making Positive Psychology Work

May 6, 2020 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| Comments Off

In this episode of the popular ‘Making Positive Psychology Work’ podcast, best-selling author Michelle McQuaid interviews Organization Unbound co-founder Warren Nilsson about what workplaces of all types can learn from social purpose organizations about how to create societal change from within.

Seeding Expressive Change across Canada

October 14, 2019 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| Comments Off

A few months ago, we convened a 3-day gathering, in partnership with The McConnell Foundation, to explore how to spread the practice of Expressive Change across Canada. It was both an affirming and challenging experience, one that we’re still feeling the ripples from. The intention to spark a community of practice in Canada has been […]

In memory of Alessandra

April 30, 2019 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| No Comments

It is with a heavy heart that we share that mindfulness-in-action pioneer Alessandra Pigni passed away from cancer at the end of last year. In her memory, we are re-publishing our 2017 interview with her about her book The Idealist’s Survival Kit, which explores what is causing the high rate of burnout in the field of humanitarian work. We’ve also included an unpublished segment, with her family’s permission, in which she shares how being a cancer patient influenced how she wrote her book.

A bundle of book joy is on its way!

April 16, 2019 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| No Comments

In 2018 we began writing a book, bringing together the threads of insight gleaned over the past 15 years. We are still deep in the writing process, so while we appear to be in hibernation, please know that we are far from asleep, just active in a less visible way. We are excited to share the 3-page Introduction with you.

Liberating Structures

November 27, 2018 | Expressive Change | Organization Unbound| Comments Off

Earlier this year we were contacted by Keith McCandless, co-developer of Liberating Structures. He was interested in exploring the synergies between Liberating Structures and the work of Organization Unbound. After some initial conversations, I became intrigued and am excited to share the start of our inquiry here.

Accompanied Learning

October 1, 2018 | Expressive Change | | 2 Comments

When we started Organization Unbound, people often mistook us for a consulting firm, an understandable assumption given how common it is for organizations to rely on consultants to lead processes of internal change. However, we felt strongly (and still do) that the traditional consultancy model would be a barrier to cultivating a rich and expansive field of learning around expressive change. We wanted to learn with organizations, not just provide support to them.

Burnout & organizational mindfulness

October 3, 2017 | Expressive Change | Alessandra Pigni| No Comments

We hope you enjoy this conversation with Alessandra Pigni, author of “The Idealist’s Survival Kit. 75 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout”, a light and inviting exposé on what is causing the high rate of burnout in the field of humanitarian aid and activism and ways of addressing it: “I no longer believe that meditation and self-care are enough. It can certainly be a starting point. It was for me. But we can’t stop there.

A personal journey to a new way of working

September 21, 2017 | Expressive Change | Peter Brownell| No Comments

Over the course of a year I had been trying to find ways to encourage my team to self-organise. We created roles, adopted structured meeting formats, had many discussions. We made progress, but nothing significant changed. Over the course of this work I found that the problem was not them… it was me.

Listening to the head, heart & feet

July 25, 2017 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson|

For inscaping to be a robust organizational practice, we need to refine our listening skills so that we learn to listen at an experiential level. Listening with the ‘head, heart and feet as described by the Barefoot Guide Connection is a very helpful tool to practice this. It helps us to listen ‘between the lines’ and ‘beneath the main text’, to hear not just what people are saying, but what they are trying to say or […].

5 reasons to build a network of small groups, rather than a mass movement of individuals

June 29, 2017 | Expressive Change | Richard D Bartlett| 1 Comment

Long term human survival depends on us replacing the status quo with a fundamentally different set of behaviours and structures. I believe the root of that challenge is essentially cultural, and the best place to grow culture is in small groups.

In memory of Tolu

June 14, 2017 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Now and then someone comes to visit this planet and, finding it a bit dusty and forlorn, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. When you meet him on the road, right away you feel yourself becoming kinder and wiser. You see more light around you. And you want to say thank you but you’re not sure how.

Crowd-sustaining Organization Unbound

June 9, 2017 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

At the top of our minds these days is the question of how to financially sustain Organization Unbound so that it can grow into the community of practice it is yearning to be, with a deeper and wider impact across the globe. We’ve been exploring this question with many people over the past year. Out of these conversations has emerged an exciting vision- to crowd-sustain Organization Unbound so that the financial support it receives is gently […]

Pioneering a university degree for organizations

June 6, 2017 | Expressive Change | James Taylor|

Seeking collaborators! We envision creating an entirely new genre of university course, one that recognizes organisations as organisms that learn and as vital sources of innovation. The course will support organisations in making their learning more conscious, systematic and informed and help them draw on the crisis of sustainability present in human and ecological systems as a creative source.

The Organization Unbound giving field

May 5, 2017 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi | 5 Comments

One of the many Organization Unbound ideas that I love is the Giving Field, where giving is not a unidirectional transaction but a field in which all participate, where there is no longer a distinction between giver and receiver, where everyone contributes and benefits continuously. I have experienced the […]

Cleaning in Cape Town

January 31, 2017 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi |

Cleaning is the process of removing dirt from any space, surface, object or subject, thereby exposing beauty, potential, truth and sacredness.” Ever since I had the above epiphany, I have spoken it countless times in many places. Each time I do, I get washed by it, as the essence of cleaning is invited into the space to do its work. This happened again and again while I was in Cape Town recently for Cleaning workshops and conversations organized by […]

Intimacy

October 24, 2016 | Expressive Change | Akaya Windwood| 2 Comments

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that social change, when done well, is an intimate act. For many years, I was taught to ignore my feelings and intuition, and to develop unassailable plans and irrefutable theories to explain and legitimize my work. These days, I don’t […]

Join us for a Tiny Open Online Course!

September 6, 2016 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | No Comments

During the month of October, Organization Unbound and The Barefoot Guide Connection will be hosting a TOOC (Tiny Open Online Course) to explore the relationship between organizations and social transformation. This light, month-long learning experience called ‘Seeding Change from Within’ will explore how to increase an organization’s social impact by growing change from the inside out.

Resisting in our free time: The state of civil society today

May 23, 2016 | Expressive Change | Gioel Gioacchino|

What happens when you get 900 civil society groups in the same room at over 8,500 feet above sea level? Excitement is guaranteed you’d think, along with a bit of oxygen deprivation and a whole lot of partying. That’s what lured me to Bogotá late last month for International Civil Society Week—the annual conference of an NGO called CIVICUS, the ‘World Alliance for Citizen Participation.’

The presence of an absence

May 2, 2016 | Expressive Change | Allan Kaplan|

The recognition – that we are all now so close, our global footprint so large, and all our processes of life so befouled – releases increasing tendencies towards management and control. We appear caught in a vast paradox that exceeds our capacity for irony – we foreground ourselves as the solution to the problems that we have created through foregrounding ourselves.

A conversation mashup with Biren Shah

March 24, 2016 | Expressive Change | Conversation| 3 Comments

“It is only when we don’t have a social purpose that we’re truly serving the world.” That’s a pretty mind-bending statement, especially for those of us who are working in social purpose organizations. What exactly do you mean?

Cleaning the African narrative

February 29, 2016 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi| 1 Comment

“My name is Tolulope Ilesanmi, I am a Cleaner. That is not a confession. It is a celebration. It is also a protest. I was a banker. That is a confession.” These were my opening words when I spoke at the Desautels African Business Initiative conference in […]

A new collaboration in Cincinnati

September 11, 2015 | Expressive Change | Rachel Griner|

What if, in research, we paid attention to how we paid attention? What if in strategic planning we were as introspective as we are analytical? What if our work were a true expression of our humanity? Would our capacity for innovation grow? I want to find out. So, I’ve launched […]

Self-guided learning sessions - new and improved

August 10, 2015 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

After spending some time beta-testing our self-guided learning sessions with organizations, we’ve come out with these new and improved versions. The sessions were created to help people introduce the concept and practice of expressive change into their organization.

Film release- An intro to expressive change

August 3, 2015 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | 1 Comment

* Now subtitled in Español & Français * The short film that we’ve been working on over the last year and a half is finally finished! The 16-minute film is intended as a conversation starter for staff, volunteers & funders of social purpose organisations. Through a compilation of crowd-sourced interviews, it challenges us to pay closer attention to the link between an organisation’s social purpose and how that purpose is lived inside the organization on a daily basis.

Podcast: Emerging from hibernation

July 29, 2015 | Expressive Change | Podcast| Comments Off

In 2012, we hosted a podcast with Aerin Dunford of The Berkana Institute about the organization’s decision to go into an undefined period of hibernation. Given its focus on promoting ‘living systems’ principles in social change work, we were curious to learn how they were putting these principles into practice internally. Berkana recently resurfaced from its restful state, and so we followed up with Aerin to find out what the experience has been like for them.

Cleaning myself, cleaning the world

May 29, 2015 | Expressive Change | Linda Sarvi|

Oh and of course as part of the job you will also have to clean homes and offices too”, Tolu said, his twinkling eyes examining me. Mhm. Interesting. We were sitting in his office after my job interview to do the communications and marketing at Zenith Cleaners, which had turned into a 2-hour long conversation.

Becoming human through human-centered design

March 9, 2015 | Expressive Change | Rachel Griner|

After years of practice, a pivotal moment came when I realized human-centered design could actually be an expression of our humanity. To drive true innovation, I could blur the line between designer and user and create the space for us all to advance our human potential. This happened during my Executive on Loan assignment to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

A conversation with Dayna Cunningham

February 23, 2015 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

I’m just finishing up a fascinating six-week on-line course on Theory U. I found this 10-minute excerpt from Otto Scharmer’s interview with Dayna Cunningham particularly moving. She shares about her experience as a civil rights lawyer and how she came to understand the importance of developing an individual and collective capacity for empathy in social change work.

Becoming a festival

February 9, 2015 | Expressive Change | Katherine Therese Whaling|

In a letter to her fellow organizers, Katherine Therese Whaling offers a heartfelt reflection on her experience organizing last year’s Muizenberg Festival, a week-long celebration of community-led development in the seaside town of Muizenberg, South Africa. We were struck by how beautifully her reflection illuminates what it means to live an event as a process rather than simply plan it as an outcome.

Is democracy an enemy of nature?

January 27, 2015 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

Are the environmental challenges we face as a planet too urgent and pervasive to be effectively dealt with through democratic means? I was surprised to read that in the wider circles of global environmental discourse, the implied (and occasionally directly expressed) response to this question is increasingly ‘yes’. Andrew Stirling, in his powerful essay ‘Emancipating Transformations’, sheds light on […]

Reflections on attentional violence

December 3, 2014 | Expressive Change | Undine Whande| 1 Comment

Most of us are probably familiar with Johan Galtung’s ‘typology of violence’. As a peace researcher Galtung is known for developing the term and theory of structural violence. The concept of structural violence dawned on him while seeing the victims of poverty in India. People were suffering and yet the cause […]

SWOT hack

November 17, 2014 | Expressive Change | Rachel Griner|

The following reflection was written by Rachel Griner, a new contributor to Organization Unbound, based in Dubai, who is keen to help businesses engage more deeply and authentically with social purpose and hone their capacity for social innovation. We’re excited to learn from her experiments.

Networks: a love story

November 11, 2014 | Expressive Change | Curtis Ogden | No Comments

We recently stumbled upon the work of Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC), one of a growing number of capacity-building organizations taking an ‘inside-out’ approach to social transformation. One of their associates, Curtis Ogden, wrote this piece a few months back reflecting on their journey of stepping more fully into their most deeply held value: “the love that does justice”.

Calling in

November 2, 2014 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

This provocative essay on Black Girl Dangerous sheds light on how the oppressive social patterns that we’re trying to change ‘out there’ inevitably live inside us and our social movements, no matter how hard we try to chase them out. Author Ngọc Loan Trần invites fellow activists to engage with these patterns more consciously and lovingly in order to be a stronger force for change.

Music to my ears

October 27, 2014 | Expressive Change | Akaya Windwood| 5 Comments

I’m old enough to remember when music, dance, art and poetry were integral parts of social change. No one would even consider having a meeting that didn’t include some aspect of celebrating the human spirit. There is something deeply satisfying about about gathering in groups and singing together.

Stuck in an old story

October 21, 2014 | Expressive Change | Tania Katzschner|

“Help stop them before they destroy earth. Become an AlienBuster!”… “It is time to reclaim our country! We need the public to join us in our fight to rid the planet of these deadly invaders!” This call to arms was envisaged – perhaps surprisingly – from an ecological, green, ‘natural’ systems context as a creative intervention in the South African government’s management of environmental issues."

Should we fight the system or be the change?

September 18, 2014 | Expressive Change | Mark Engler & Paul Engler | 1 Comment

Once an obscure term, prefigurative politics is increasingly gaining currency, with many contemporary anarchists embracing as a core tenet the idea that, as a slogan from the Industrial Workers of the World put it, we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.” Because of this, it is useful to understand its history and dynamics. While prefigurative politics has much to offer social movements, it also contains pitfalls.

Structuring our Beloved Communities?

September 8, 2014 | Expressive Change | Liam Barrington-Bush | 2 Comments

If we believe that changing the world involves changing the kinds of relationships we have with one another, what role do organising structures have in helping or hindering the relationships we are trying to create?, asks Liam Barrington-Bush.

A six month dive into expressive change

September 2, 2014 | Expressive Change | Josee Methot & Jess Marais|

Social change work is slow, and we’ve all heard stories of well-intentioned people burning out as they scramble to improve this big old world of ours. But what if this were different? In the fall of 2013, the McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS) was fortunate to work with Organization Unbound to re-imagine the way we think about and engage in social change. With the guidance of our […]

Sneak preview of 'A Delicate Activism'

July 17, 2014 | Expressive Change | Allan Kaplan & Sue Davidoff| 1 Comment

One of the gifts of being based in South Africa has been the opportunity to get to know Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff and their work at The Proteus Initiative. We’re excited to share a sneak preview of their soon-to-be-launched short book A Delicate Activism: A Radical Approach to Change.

What was sparked

April 6, 2014 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 5 Comments

More than 170 people from 14 countries tuned into the Stanford Social Innovation Review webinar in February where we shared our learnings around the concept and practice of inscaping. A number of interesting questions and comments were raised during the Q&A. Since we did not have time to respond to all of them during the webinar, I thought it would be worth sharing our responses here in writing.

Exploring the link between inscaping & social innovation

February 6, 2014 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

At the end of last year, we spent some time trying to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the practice of inscaping and the organizational capacity to initiate and sustain social innovation. Through the generous support of Nesta, we wrote a paper on the topic, which we presented to an international audience of […]

Manifesting a second order revolution in Brazil

January 28, 2014 | Expressive Change | Augusto Cuginotti| No Comments

Protest is never enough to secure a long-term vision for a country, so the straight lines of demonstrations have to be re-shaped into new patterns of participatory democracy and dialogue. This is what is happening in Brazil. Brazilians will continue to show their discontent about a country that is known for its corruption, and for the huge gaps that exist between rich and poor. But alongside […]

Join us for a webinar

January 16, 2014 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

As a follow-up to our article Social Innovation From the Inside Out, the Stanford Social Innovation Review has invited us to share our learnings around the concept and practice of ‘inscaping’ through their next SSIR Live! Webinar offering. We’re excited to have Marlon Parker, founder of the Cape Town-based organization RLabs, join us to share his organization’s experience. Twenty complimentary tickets available!

Capturing experiences from South America, East Asia & the Middle East

December 16, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

As many of you know, over the last few months we’ve been collecting interviews from around the world for a short film we’re making on expressive change. Although we are in the process of wrapping up the crowd-sourcing phase of the project, we are keeping the door open for interviews from South America, East Asia, and the Middle East in hopes that [. . .]

Hot off the press!

November 27, 2013 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Check out our feature article in the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review- “Social Innovation From the Inside Out”. In it we explore the concept and practice of ‘inscaping’ and highlight three organizations that we’ve learned tons from over the years: Santropol Roulant, Southwest Baltimore Charter School, and PLAN. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

I am a cleaner

October 16, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi| 20 Comments

So when we clean a school, we are not just cleaning the hallways and the bathrooms but if they permit us, there is a possibility of cleaning their system of education. When we clean a church, our intention is to introduce cleaning as a spiritual practice. When we clean for a real estate developer, we can work with them to […]

Missing the forest for the trees

September 18, 2013 | Expressive Change | Liam Barrington-Bush| 1 Comment

Children’s social services in England, like those of many other countries, don’t always have a sparkling public reputation when it comes to face-to-face relations. Like police, social workers who tackle state-mandated child protection cases spend their days witnessing and intervening in many of society’s darkest moments. From paedophilia to domestic violence, a social worker often observes the worst of what human beings are capable of in a typical working day. It takes a special kind of person to avoid […]

The heart of Einstein

September 8, 2013 | Expressive Change | Veena Vasista|

When I recently came across Einstein’s explanation of his statement, I felt relieved and excited to discover that indeed he was instructing us to use more than our mind and ego-driven analysis to work through problems. Knowing this, I take it further to imagine that by ‘higher levels’ he meant higher levels of […]

In practice

August 26, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | 1 Comment

If you are looking for ways to introduce the concept and practice of expressive change into your organization, check out these “conversation deepeners”. They are the first in a collection of self-guided learning materials that we’re developing. They are designed for a small group of people within the same organization to do together and can be done in any order.

Wanted/Recherche: Two Montreal-area learning partners

June 5, 2013 | Expressive Change | Jonathan Glencross| No Comments

Organization Unbound is seeking to enter into a learning partnership with two Montreal-area organizations to better understand the experiences organizations have as they begin to engage with the practice of Expressive Change. What we learn from these learning partnerships will feed the development of a self-guided curriculum on Expressive change. Interested/Intéressé?

The experience of school

May 12, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 6 Comments

Critics of modern schooling like John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich have recognized that the fundamental curriculum that schools teach us is school itself. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately since moving to South Africa, where school reform has become a nation-wide calling. The initiatives that feel most promising to me are the ones that are digging under the layers a bit- looking at ways of transforming […]

How we gather

April 21, 2013 | Expressive Change | Marianne Knuth| 3 Comments

At Kufunda Learning Village we had fallen into the rut of our weekly meetings having become very task oriented. They were the least inspired place of our village (mostly), and several issues were being discussed with only a few voices repeating themselves. There was little collective wisdom at play, and oftentimes we left our weekly Village Circle feeling drained and tired, although we might have managed to tick off many items on our to-do list. One day – after one too many such meetings – I decided, no more […]

Seeking beta-testers

April 8, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

Over the past several months, we’ve started to see our vision for a self-guided curriculum on expressive change come to life. A number of people have volunteered to beta-test the sessions we’ve developed so far, and the testimonials have been so encouraging that we’ve decided to expand our pool of beta-testers to […]

The form trap

February 1, 2013 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Check out this talk that Warren gave at Tedx Cape Town on an idea we feel is worth spreading! The biggest challenge the world is facing is not how to create change but how to sustain change, and if we want to sustain change we are mostly paying attention to the wrong things, particularly inside our social purpose organizations and social movements…

Podcast: Dancing the talk

January 20, 2013 | Expressive Change | Podcast|

In this podcast, we speak to Kiran Gulrajani, who challenges us to take a lighter and more exploratory approach to living out our values in our work. We had the pleasure of hosting him and his CoEvolve colleague Rohit Sasvehalli at our home during their recent visit to South Africa. Our intention was to […]

Ending the year on an exciting note

December 21, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 4 Comments

You might have noticed that we’ve been a little less talkative at Organization Unbound lately. It’s not because we’re scared speechless that the world is about to end, but because we’ve been hard at work on a new project: A self-guided curriculum to deepen and spread the practice of expressive change.

In praise of dreams and magic

November 29, 2012 | Expressive Change | Fahri Karakas|

Time is ticking. There is less than half an hour until my teaching starts at Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia. I am in my office trying to focus and prepare for my afternoon lecture of “Management Skills and Personal Development” course for about 200 students. I feel terrified. […]

Gross organizational happiness

October 29, 2012 | Expressive Change | Akaya Windwood| No Comments

Over the past several years, there has been a great deal of international focus on the notion of happiness. While there are many definitions of happiness, here is a composite of my favorites: “emotions experienced when in a state of well-being that range from contentment to intense joy.” This is not a new notion. Thinkers from Aristotle to Alice Walker to the Dalai Lama have written much about […]

The frenzy

October 17, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 11 Comments

I find myself returning so often to these words of Thomas Merton that I figured it would be worth dedicating a blog post to them: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs […]

How the spotted owl can save us

October 1, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock | 14 Comments

If expressive change or The Giving Field was the first big ah-ha for us, the second was something we might call “the experiential turn.” If we want to create a social change dynamic rooted in the actual lived experiences of the people who make up our organizations, it makes sense that, no matter what specific […]

Podcast: A conversation with Sushrut and Tolu

September 18, 2012 | Expressive Change | Podcast|

In this podcast, we speak with Sushrut Munje and Tolu Ilesanmi about their experiments in transforming the underbelly of the cleaning industry. We met Sushrut last year at a workshop we gave in Mumbai a few months after he launched his new cleaning business Hammer & Mop. Recently he re-connected to see if we could […]

Gestalt at the South African Treasury Department

July 20, 2012 | expressive-change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

I’m stumbling along, trying my best to remain in the single file line the path has forced us to form. We crest the hillside, overlooking a quiet river freckled with boulders and dragonflies. I overhear Jonathan and Kirsten chatting in front of me. They are introducing themselves, having only just met on this day hike organized through the Cape Town Hiking Group. I hear Kirsten say that she works for the National Treasury […]

Multiply wounded

July 12, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 4 Comments

We recently came across an illuminating talk by Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera- Living and Surviving in a Multiply Wounded Country. In her talk, she describes the uniquely holistic approach to societal healing that she and her team developed over a decade of experimental work in Nicaragua.

The Bike Shed

June 27, 2012 | Expressive Change | Sadaf Kashfi|

Once members get past the initial challenge of putting together a jigsaw puzzle of missing parts, they quickly realize that something greater than bike repair and the inhalation of kerosene is happening here; a sense of purpose and community is beaming through the interaction of those involved in the repair.

Nothing left to fight against

June 20, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

In this short reflection titled “Nothing to Fight Against”, Zenkei Blanche Hartman, a political activist-turned-Zen monk, describes the turmoil she felt when she confronted the disconnect between her deepest values and her experience of activism. It is a good reminder that organizational incoherence is not simply an abstraction about social change. It often manifests itself […]

Daring to hibernate

May 31, 2012 | Expressive Change | Podcast| 3 Comments

A couple of months ago I received an intriguing note in my inbox from The Berkana Institute. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Berkana, you might know one of it’s founders Meg Wheatley, a well-known author who writes about […]

An interesting response to our recent talk

May 23, 2012 | Expressive Change | Undine Whande| 2 Comments

The first thing that struck me from the talk and that had me celebrate inwardly was that these insights are now surfacing at various points through various people who have all been keenly and committedly observing their environments and coming to similar conclusions: That organisations are […]

Social innovation from the inside out

May 13, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 11 Comments

We are excited to share this talk that Warren gave last month at University of Cape Town exploring the organizational dimensions of social innovation. In our experience, few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if […]

Cleaning for a change

May 1, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi| 4 Comments

It took courage to start a cleaning company when Ronke and I did. I was an MBA student at McGill, having worked as a star banker at GT Bank, an elite Nigerian bank, and in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. Being slightly rebellious, I proceeded partly because being a cleaner was contrary to everything my society expected of me. The clients, friends and associates who have engaged with us have had a sense that there was something different […]

Experiencing the giving field

April 15, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| No Comments

After a talk we gave recently, we had a brief chat with Marion Adamson, a facilitator here in Cape Town. A few days later, after having checked out the Organization Unbound website, Marian sent us the following email:I read the blog post of the Giving Field – and immediately my son’s preschool came to mind. It’s the place I find myself being drawn to when I’m most struggling with […]

At The Change Collective

March 28, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Last week we convened our first workshop in Cape Town, at the invitation of the Change Collective Cape Town. It was definitely one of the more engaging workshops we’ve ever done. It seemed to get under people’s skin- both positively and negatively- in more of an immediate way than we have previously experienced.

Transcending discontent

March 12, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi|

We aim to make more people see that Nigeria is not 'them' but 'I' and 'us', bringing closer to home the urgency and the responsibility of change. We aim to show that change begins when many more Nigerians stop being frustrated at the government, the polity and the society and channel the same energy into becoming the bigger change they seek, in day-to-day interactions with family members, friends, colleagues, clients and other Nigerians and non Nigerians.

From the archives: "Inscaping"

March 1, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| No Comments

Brandon, a teacher’s aide at Southwest Baltimore Charter School once said to me, “The weak link isn’t necessarily the person who doesn’t do the job well. It’s the person who doesn’t do the job from within or truthfully.” The simple idea at the heart of expressive organizing is that people experience the organization’s core purpose in their daily work. Over time, that experience, though imperfect and often challenging, can become […]

What if an art gallery was itself a work of art?

February 24, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 8 Comments

Is it possible that creativity in arts organisations not be limited to the gallery space? Anne Bertrand has been flirting with this question for as many years as I have known her. When we first met almost a decade ago, she was asking it from a place of frustration. She had spent several years working for an artist-run organization and was feeling quite disheartened as a result. How can it be, she would say to me in exasperation, that […]

More reflections from Greece

February 6, 2012 | Expressive Change | Sarah Whiteley| No Comments

To wrap up the revolution-themed month of January, Sarah Whiteley of Axladitsa shares two very personal in-the-moment accounts of the citizens movement that took place in Greece’s Syntagma Square last year. Her reflections highlight the non-linear nature of building a movement that is deeply aligned with its values and how to approach it with patience and reverence.

How to occupy democracy

January 30, 2012 | Expressive Change | Baj Mukhopadhyay| No Comments

When the civil rights movement abandoned its focus on nurturing personal, individual relationships and instead resorted to broad principles and detached theorising, it lost its power. It became coopted, removed from the people who otherwise held it accountable with the gentle discipline that is required in being true and kind to one’s friends.I suspect that this aspect is where grand nation-building projects, based on the most beautiful of ideals, stumble.

Taking the revolution inward

January 25, 2012 | Expressive Change | Aydin Yassemi| 2 Comments

Any categorization of outside and inside, enemy and friend, good and bad is an illusion of the mind. I remember a quotation by the first prime minister of the transitional government after the 1979 revolution in Iran, who said, “The Shah (king) is not gone, because there is still a little Shah living within each one of us”. His message was that the spirit of monarchy and dictatorship is not gone by the departure or execution of the monarch, but that it could continue in every meeting, every election, every institution, every family and so on.

The promise of the square: A conversation with Motaz Attalla

January 8, 2012 | Expressive Change | Motaz Attalla| 1 Comment

Warren: Can you take us back a bit to how you experienced the early days of Tahrir Square? Motaz: There was this sense of rediscovering pure community- with all its good and bad. Knowing what it means to receive gifts and give gifts, to receive care and give care between absolute strangers and with a totally open heart. And feeling just a sweetness of courage. And to know that we don’t have to worry about the consequences of stepping out- not because things won’t turn out bad but because there is a lot of support for the act of bravery itself. And to me that’s the glue of society. Feeling like people are for you and you are for people.

Taking the Revolution Forward

January 3, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 6 Comments

Welcome to Organization Unbound’s special themed section, Taking the Revolution Forward. Like many people, we were fascinated by the global wave of uprisings and citizens’ movements in 2011. What struck us most was their focus on how people were coming together. Public demonstrations had a generative quality. They expressed not just demands but a kind of rich, unqualified yearning, and people worked, however haltingly, to meet that yearning right in the squares and streets where they stood.

City of Sanctuary

December 15, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 1 Comment

Casper ter Kuile shared this City of Sanctuary clip with us as a beautiful example of a social change initiative that is completely rooted in meaning and experience. On the City of Sanctuary blog, Giuilia, a newly arrived volunteer from Italy, shares how surprised she is to see so many asylum seekers and refugees […]

Anna's class list

November 27, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| No Comments

My last post, on John McKnight, has quickly become one of the most read posts we’ve had on Organization Unbound. I’m not sure why. But maybe it has something to do with the how central ‘disdain’ has become to our political and and social change conversations. I suspect that […]

A quick dip into anarchy

November 15, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| No Comments

When I heard that the first-ever South African Anarchist Book Fair was being organized in Cape Town, I jumped at the opportunity to check it out. I had been to the anarchist book fair several times in Montreal, but never with a specific goal in mind. This time, I was going with a more tailored curiosity: How do anarchists go about […]

Turning John McKnight inside out

October 25, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 3 Comments

In workshops and classrooms I frequently hear some form of the question: “But how do we deal with those people who just don’t get it?” The ‘it’ is usually undefined, but everyone in the room understands it to be some combination of justice, sustainability, compassion…Heads nod. How can we hope to move forward when so many people don’t see the world from this perspective, when so many people don’t seem to care about the things we care about?

Rayat-Bahra Teachers College

September 22, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 5 Comments

The landscape turns from deep green to sepia-yellow as we drive out of the tree-lined streets of the city and onto a dusty road lined with wheat fields. At some point we return to pavement and I glance out the back window to see a horse gallop across the road in our wake. Our taxi slows and turns onto a smaller road, meanders through an enclave of large white-washed structures, and comes to a stop in front of a cheerful looking building with students streaming through its front doors.

Fun change = real change

September 15, 2011 | Expressive Change | Megan Thom| 6 Comments

I burnt out in third year university. The nail in the coffin on top of school and work and everything else was the effort and time I’d put into organizing a day of panel discussions about ethical consumption. I booked the best minds of our university, matching them with on-the-ground activists in the community and a good smattering of ethical producers and consumer representatives.

The social innovation space

September 7, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| No Comments

Inscaping is too broad a concept to explain some of the variation we see in the capacities of different organizations to become true social innovators. Many organizations might reasonably describe themselves as good at inscaping. They are relatively open and honest. The members of the organization care about each other and are willing and able to share their experiences. Yet these organizations often struggle to fully develop their capacities for meaningful, resilient social change. Why?

Token presence or true participation

August 19, 2011 | expressive-change | Caroline Howe|

Whole person, whole system

August 14, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 1 Comment

What is less well understood is that treating each other as the patchwork, unruly human beings we are, rather than the zippered office functionaries we pretend to be, is also the only way we can really come to understand, let alone affect, the larger institutional patterns we are trying to change […]

The invisible networks

July 28, 2011 | expressive-change | Vanessa Reid|

When our first instinct is to run away . . .

July 11, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 2 Comments

I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”

Bringing minutes to life

July 7, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

“At this point there was a terrible cow manure smell that came across the lake.” I came across this sentence as I was reading through the minutes of an annual general meeting that I attended some time back. It appears as its own paragraph, in the middle of the document, in italics.

Dancing with Zenith Cleaners

June 16, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

I was reading through the Zenith Cleaners blog recently and came across a reflection written by our friend Tolu Ilesanmi titled Invitation to the dance. In it he describes the kind of reciprocal relationship he works hard to create with his staff, clients and suppliers.

Conscious technology

June 2, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 7 Comments

Just thought I’d preface this post with a note about my general relationship with technology. In short, I don’t like to be around it. I find computer monitors mind numbing. Keyboards send sharp pains up my right arm. I spent many years resisting pressures to buy a cell phone. True, I did organize my entire […]

More adventures with Jonathan

May 26, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 1 Comment

Last year, we wrote a blog post highlighting the work of Jonathan Glencross. Jonathan’s approach to environmental advocacy has helped spark some dramatic sustainability initiatives at McGill University. We thought you’d enjoy listening to a TedxTalk that he gave a few months ago to an audience of 700

“Interviewing” Gandhi

May 11, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Many of us are familiar with the phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world,” so much so that it has become a bit of a cliché. I’ve been wondering for a while now what else Gandhi said that relates to expressive social change, a concept that is at the heart of […]

Distributed voice

April 24, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 3 Comments

I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for […]

The people in the room

March 25, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Gregory Branch is a doctor and public health official who also happens to direct an unusual gospel choir in Baltimore. We knew Gregg a number of years ago when we lived in Maryland, and for a little while we even sang in the choir. Gregg is a fiercely kind man with a large spirit and […]

Appreciative feedback triads: Kupa humbowo muhutatu

March 7, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 1 Comment

At Kufunda Learning Village, we’ve recently experimented with a powerful exercise called ‘Appreciative Feedback Triads’ or ‘Kupa humbowo muhutatu’ in Shona. Here’s how it works…

Sounding

February 24, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 4 Comments

The most catalytic organizational practice I’ve encountered lately is humblingly simple. It involves nothing more than pausing in the middle of a meeting or discussion and going around the room to hear from each person how they are actually experiencing the issue at hand – right now, in the moment. It seems like an obvious […]

Unbinding continued

February 13, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 3 Comments

Tana’s recent post on “unbinding” reminded me of some reflections I had made in a paper I wrote a few years ago. In a section that was actually called “The Unbinding,” I was thinking about how difficult it can be to recognize exactly what it is that binds us. For someone like Tana (disciplined, orderly, […]

Unbinding

January 26, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 11 Comments

I have to admit, my yearning for control often outweighs my yearning for a better world. My visions are large, but my daily interactions are laced with an urge to put things in nice orderly lines and boxes. My ‘shoulds’ outnumber my ‘what ifs?’ Literally. I use the word ‘should’ promiscuously (I had been doing […]

Turn to wonder

January 16, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

Several years ago, when I was in the thick of major organizational shifts at COCo, I came home one evening in a fit of tears and with a back full of knots. I felt horrible about how things felt at work and frustrated that my attempts to move things to a better place seemed to […]

A simple practice that caught our attention

December 10, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 9 Comments

We are in Cape Town for a few weeks and just got back from a meeting with Nathan Heller at The Hub, a co-working space for social innovators. Although The Hub Cape Town only recently opened its doors, the model has been around for a while and there are over two dozen Hubs worldwide in […]

Organizational hacking

September 22, 2010 | Expressive Change | Alex Megelas| 1 Comment

My friend Jim is a hacker. Not the kind of hacker who sits at a computer trying to break into highly classified computer systems – that’s a highly simplistic portrayal. No, he’s the kind of hacker who approaches many of the aspects in his life with a mindset that is critical, analytical and creative. And […]

Zenith Cleaners

September 16, 2010 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 5 Comments

My friends Tolu and Ronke run a cleaning company that is unlike any cleaning company I have ever come across. They see Zenith Cleaners as a vehicle through which they can create the kind of world they want to live in, a world that is not just healthy and aesthetically beautiful, but deeply rooted in […]

Beware of applicant

September 1, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock| 2 Comments

The other day I was quite struck by a seemingly ordinary sentence at the end of a job posting that I received from Santropol Roulant. “We encourage applicants to drop their CVs off in person.” I was a bit taken aback, less by the statement itself than by my own reaction to it. It felt […]

Fierce intentions, humble means

August 21, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 1 Comment

Inscaping is too broad a concept to explain some of the variation we see in the capacities of different organizations to become true social innovators. Many organizations might reasonably describe themselves as good at inscaping. They are relatively open and honest. The members of the organization care about each other and are willing and able to share their experiences. Yet these organizations often struggle to fully develop their capacities for meaningful, resilient social change. Why?

Why 'what' follows 'why': Organizational archeology

August 12, 2010 | expressive-change | Cameron Stiff|

In memory of Penny

August 5, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 4 Comments

Last Saturday, Tana and I went to the funeral of Penny Parkes. We had gotten to know Penny through our work with Santropol Roulant. She was a client, volunteer, and board member there and reflected the spirit of the place in a beautiful and charming way all her own. Penny struggled with a degenerative disease, […]

A conversation with Turi

July 20, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| No Comments

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that Tana and I had with my sister Turi Nilsson. She is the Director of Instruction and co-founder of Southwest Baltimore Charter School, a place of great inspiration and learning for us. We’ve written about it in previous posts. RENNIE: What would you say are the […]

My life as an organization

July 13, 2010 | Expressive Change | Alex Megelas| 3 Comments

What would it look like if my life was an organization? This is the question I was left with last evening. Friends from different circles had come over to talk about sustainability in the home (windowsill gardening, composting, etc.) It was a nice, lively discussion that I’d been inspired to organize for a few months […]

Learning in relationship

June 20, 2010 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 1 Comment

Learning in Relationship, by Ronald Short, is a book that I find myself re-reading again and again. I quoted from it in my post Inscaping at COCo a couple of months ago, but feel it’s worth revisiting because I think it contains a tremendous amount of wisdom. It spells out in simple and concrete language […]

Managing relationships not people

June 5, 2010 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 6 Comments

“The smallest divisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” –Tony Kushner, Angels in America A few weeks ago, Rennie and I had the pleasure of convening a conversation about expressive change with a handful of folks in Montreal’s […]

Unknowing

May 30, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 1 Comment

The theme of vulnerability that Tana introduced a few posts ago is an important one for me. Like Tana, I have noticed that one of the strongest threads running through expressive organizations I have spent time with is their willingness to face up to and explore their vulnerability. At a personal level, people share their […]

Vulnerability as a strength

May 11, 2010 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock| 9 Comments

I recently finished reading the book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, by Adam Kahane. A number of the themes he raised in the book have had a kind of haunting effect on me. One point that I keep revisiting is the idea of approaching vulnerability as a source of wisdom rather […]

Inscaping

March 13, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 18 Comments

Brandon, a teacher’s aide at Southwest Baltimore Charter School once said to me, “The weak link isn’t necessarily the person who doesn’t do the job well. It’s the person who doesn’t do the job from within or truthfully.” This is why, I think, that the most deeply engaging organizations I’ve encountered seem to be rooted in small, daily acts of personal revelation. […]

The experiential turn

February 25, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 3 Comments

If expressive change or The Giving Field was the first big ah-ha for us, the second was something we might call “the experiential turn.” If we want to create a social change dynamic rooted in the actual lived experiences of the people who make up our organizations, it makes sense that, no matter what specific […]

The giving field

February 4, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson| 14 Comments

“The smallest divisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” –Tony Kushner, Angels in America A few weeks ago, Rennie and I had the pleasure of convening a conversation about expressive change with a handful of folks in Montreal’s […]