In January, at the height of the omicron surge, our kid’s school was shut down for the third time in as many months. Our four-year-old was initially excited: more time to play with mom and dad! Her hopes were dashed when she remembered that being home during the week wasn’t…

Covid changed everyone’s work, including mine. What changes will stick? — For several years, my work has centered on facilitating collaborative processes. Some engagements are limited to workshops, while most use facilitation in the context of broader changes in organizational strategy, campaign strategy, coalition building, or organizational development. That work has continued under Covid, with notable changes. The first and obvious…

A lot of organizations made it through the “fog of 2020” by the skin of their teeth, first scrambling to adjust to Covid and then trying to keep their work going in one way or another. The pandemic still rages in most of the world, even as privileged pockets with…

Hey, it’s strategy refresh season! Some organizations started 2021 by pausing to reflect on their strategy, but maybe you’ve gotten halfway through the year without making that space. What’s holding you back? Oh—is it the challenges of balancing remote work, budget crunches, childcare demands, living through a global pandemic, and…

Think back to the first few weeks of the COVID pandemic and the way it turned the world upside down. That was probably sometime in March, depending on where you are in the world. Most organizations spent those first few weeks scrambling as they adjusted to Peak Uncertainty. By late…

I have a dozen things I need to do and a half-dozen more ideas for what I could do differently, alongside a crushing sense that three-quarters of it doesn’t matter in the face of a global pandemic—but I don’t know which three-quarters. Then there’s the siren call of twitter and…

There’s an important idea from the humanitarian sector that famines are not natural disasters. They’re not caused by crop loss or droughts or even a lack of food. There’s always enough food in this world: it’s just not reaching the people who need it. Famines are caused by market failures…

Ask anyone if they have a strategy, and the answer is usually “yes”. But ask them to show it to you, and they might sheepishly admit it’s not written down. …

The social change sector circles the wagons when criticized by outsiders, but among ourselves, we cringe thinking of the ways we could do our work better. Often we’re constrained by legacy systems or too focused on delivering the work to make structural improvements. …