We loved this explanation of the relationship between innovation and #SOPA - and the example Brad Burnham uses to illustrate his point? It's a workforce example. Thank you Brad Burnham, Big Think, and @danielhonan.

Here are most of the cited links & resources (the commentary is from my email to Greg):

1. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. The examples in the book are a little dated but the overall observations holds. And we’re only at the beginning…

2. Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. I swear I thought we’d have a hundred examples of the Freelancer’s Union by now…

3. Derek Sievers’ How to Start a Movement in Three Minutes. Where I’d quibble with him is on the idea that leadership is overrated. I think it’s just the idea of leader at the top that’s overrated – leadership is a role, not a person, it’s important but can be shared. And the more, the merrier.

4. Charlene Li’s Open Leadership. I reviewed it on my Cisco blog here.

5. Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner’s The Truth about Leadership. I also did a blog post on that one.

6. UsNow – how do I love this?!?! It’s a little dated but continues to inspire! Here’s the clip that gives me chills every single time (at this point, I could narrate this film – click on part 1).

7. Social Innovation Exchange

8. June Holley’s blog is a great intro to Social Network Analysis

9. Here’s my presentation on Crowdfunding from REVV 2011.

10. Learning platforms – here’s a good summary of potential disruptors. Here’s a list of learning platforms.

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An Exploration of Leadership

There was a moment this spring, mid-way through a a project about the changing nature of leadership in the field of policy concerned with work and learning (we call it “workforce”), where we began to feel a renewed sense of excitement and promise.

The last several years have been tough for leaders working to help their communities achieve greater prosperity, especially in those parts of a Europe and the US where the rise of unemployment and corresponding social ills has been fast and severe. The housing crisis, unemployment, the escalating costs of health care and education, and a public sector in fiscal crisis—it can feel like an onslaught.

For policy and community leaders, the relentless push for efficiencies, cost-cutting strategies, and evidence-based practices—each important in its own way—can inhibit deeper thinking about the most critical contributions these leaders and their organizations make to the well being of their communities.

What We Learned

But we found leaders who were thinking deeply about their communities’ most significant challenges and what they could do about them—in partnership with government and non-profit organizations, and with businesses and citizens themselves.

The goal of our project was to explore the changing nature of workforce leadership—what leaders do, in what context, and toward what end, and how these have shifted over the past decade (a more complete explanation is here).

We engaged 519 leaders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors at the federal, state and local levels, documenting our activities on the project’s website along the way. We identified a framework and set of six practices sufficiently different from a decade ago to constitute a new model of leadership—we call it WEadership, a nod to its collaborative nature.

Three Insights Worth Thinking About

Three ideas that emerged during the project that strike us as posing fundamental challenges to the way we organize, manage, and assess investments in workforce.

1. Conversation Matters.

Repeatedly, workforce leaders told us that convening conversation with partners, stakeholders, program providers, local elected officials and citizens is the most important work they do. Not just important work, the most important work.

This will not be surprising to those experienced in the art and science of innovation as it is a social process. The source of much innovation is the blending and mixing of new ideas, technologies, and methods from one sector with those of another. Workforce leaders have long been hosting (both formally and informally) conversations about how to solve the jobs, skills, and economic development challenges in their communities. These conversations inform the actions of not just policy makers and workforce leaders, but everyone around the proverbial table that employs or develops people or supports a business. Such conversations have never been more important.

The problem is that the effects of this kind of work are difficult to evidence, especially in the short term.

As one a respondent in rural Iowa put it:

“When you use networks to move an agenda, it’s influence and momentum thatmatter. Changes can be small, but they are also cumulative—one day you look up and a lot of things are really different. But we don’t always have the ability to say “A led to B.’”

This fuzziness makes some leaders uncomfortable. As a result, we do not acknowledge convening as legitimate work. This means we do not invest in our capacity to do it successfully, and we do not talk about it when we are successful for fear it will be seen as lacking in rigor. But such convening is an essential ingredient in good policy and a necessary one for implementing better solutions to our most intractable problems.

2. Connectivity is a game changer.

The second insight has to do with social technologies. The fact that hundreds of millions of people are connected to one another using technology creates whole new possibilities for engaging in work, learning, and entrepreneurship in very different ways:

The explosion of peer-learning communities in the workplace and web-based platforms like Skillshare, P2PU, and Khan Academy are challenging our ideas about the very nature of educational institutions—is Skillshare school? Workforce leaders are asking themselves how these platforms can play a role in addressing skills gaps or simply engaging people in productive activity.

Manpower and other firms in the business of connecting people to work (even if not in traditional jobs) have been joined by firms like Taskrabbit that enable people to make a living by aggregating “gigs.” In the absence of sufficient numbers of jobs—even if there were a perfect match between the skills firms need and those job-seekers can supply—workforce leaders are asking themselves how these ‘unjobs’ can offer opportunities for those who need them, and what role policy can play in realizing them.

Peer-lending, microphilanthropy, and crowdfunding are helping us reimagine what it means to launch a venture. While nearly every local workforce leader with whom we spoke indicated that job creation was a workforce issue, the linkage became more tenuous at the state level (except in the seven states that maintain self-employment programs) and almost invisible at the federal level. But social ventures of the kind typically supporting through platforms like Kickstarter are a kind of hybrid. They can enable people to make their own jobs (or ‘gigs’) by aggregating investors (“backers”) who support specific projects or initiatives. Again, workforce leaders are exploring how such platforms might connect people to opportunity in nontraditional ways.

3. Boldness wanted.

Finally, across the board, workforce leaders expressed a desire for bolder experiments. Too often, the theories of change driving what are called “innovation initiatives” are determined at the top (whether by foundations or federal agencies) with little input from the field, and reflect the risk-averse culture of their organizations. As a result, local leaders often feel like they are working very hard to improve existing programs or approaches they know should be wholly reinvented. In addition, where innovation does occur, there are few mechanisms to share it with the field.

And yet, many, many leaders we spoke with persevere, seeking to maximize their impact on the economical health and social well being of their communities. Today, leaders at all levels and across sectors need to find ways to learn together, and to better support each other in solving what are absolutely critical community problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months. The entire project is documented at EnhancingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership

“As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will face.”
Jim Clifton, Gallup Management Journal (September 2011)

“Jobs Wanted.” While the jobs bill (America’s Jobs Act) commands the attention of elected officials in our nation’s capitol, state and local leaders have struggled with employment issues for decades. They know there is no single solution because there is no single problem.

Most communities face some combination of the following:

• Too few jobs (especially those offering health insurance and family-sustaining wages)
• Skills gaps among applicants competing for good jobs that do exist and those in emerging industries
• Young workers having difficulty making the leap from job to career (or from school to job)
• Older experienced workers who cannot afford to retire or simply want to remain engaged but in different roles than they play today
• Labor markets that lack transparency (e.g., applicants submit hundreds of resumes into “black holes“)
• Persistent poverty, especially among communities of color, which limits access to job
  opportunities and to the social networks that help people advance
• Overcrowded and underfunded public schools and institutions of higher education struggle to cultivate the talents of all of their students
• Ongoing economic shocks—not just unanticipated layoffs, but also natural and weather-related disasters of which there have been 83 in 2011 (a record high in any calendar year)

No one challenge, no one solution. These challenges are not for the faint of heart, and cannot be solved by a single leader,organization or sector. But they are among the defining challenges of our day. And courageous leaders in public, private, non-profit, and civic sectors all over the country are quietly stepping forward to tackle them—increasingly, in partnership with one another.

Adopting more collaborative, open-minded, and entrepreneurial approaches than in years past, these leaders prioritize the goal—community well being and prosperity—above the means, be it program, funding, agency precedent, or political jurisdiction. We call this new approach WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

Collaboration required. One of the most important opportunities this collaborative approach offers is the potential for shared learning and experimentation in ways that spread the risk and share the benefits. Here are three examples:

• Volunteer-run services. In one California community, the need for workforce services had so overwhelmed a strapped public agency that staff began encouraging clients (job-seekers) to run their own activities. To their surprise, many job seekers jumped at the chance. Staff trained a small number of clients to use some basic organizing tools and allowed them to use the agency offices and equipment to run job search clinics, industry meetings, and other activities. As a result, volunteer organizers learned new skills, grew their networks, and were engaged in ways that made them feel valued—some secured jobs as a direct result. In addition, more job seekers could access a wider range of services (including those offered in the native languages of the organizers) at no additional cost. And other community leaders noticed. They valued the agency’s flexibility and creativity.
• Returnships. In communities whose key industries are shifting, public, private, and non-profit leaders are working together to provide adult internships (sometimes called “returnships“) for individuals who are returning to the workforce after caring for children or families or who are transitioning from one industry or field of practice to another. These experiences can help job seekers gain tacit knowledge and build networks that enable them to secure longer-term employment or launch their own ventures. Because adults demand specific learning and development opportunities, these internships tend to be carefully structured, not just provide an introduction to the workplace as many youth-oriented internships do. This focus can build the capacity of host firms and organizations to provide higher-quality internships and development opportunities for younger interns and existing workers, as well as returners.
• Social innovation. In grassroots communities everywhere, social innovators in state and local governments, tribal nations, and nonprofit and
  private sectors are organizing their communities in ways that enhance economic opportunity. From helping aspiring entrepreneurs crowdfund small ventures on Kickstarter to organizing off-line peer learning communities around on-line learning and professional development platforms like P2PU and Skillshare, to promoting bartering on NeighborhoodGoods or “gigging” on Taskrabbit, social innovators are increasing access to work and learning, even if not in traditional ways. These experiments can even complement or incent changes in programs and services offered tradition institutions

Many small steps. Workforce leaders (who can come from any level, sector, or jurisdiction) are innovating in ways that can be hard to recognize because their innovations comprise many small iterations, rather than one headline-grabbing breakthrough. And often, they are disconnected. But these small steps matter. And leaders who take them are demonstrating ways in which can all play important roles in solving our most significant problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

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Photo credit: Senator Mark Warner on Flickr.

It just re-surfaced. Since it covers a number of the themse we have explored in the Enhancing Workforce Leadership Project, we thought we'd share.

Leaders: Are you ready for:

1. Democracy in the workplace?
2. Employees who are people first, with lives, ventures, and businesses outside of your organization?
3. A living, breathing approach to innovation that is embedded in your organization not just housed with all of the other non-DNA-changing initiatives?

Increasingly, your employees are.

As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will face. – Jim Clifton Jobs and economic security. These are the most important issues on the minds of Americans [...]

Read More

What challenges do workforce leaders face? What's different about leadership today? How do current workforce leaders cultivate the next generation of leaders?

Weadership: The Future of Workforce Leadership from SPRTAT on Vimeo.

Here are five leaders who generously shared their time and insight with us, so that we could share with you.

Thank you:

• Social Entrepreneur Fred Slone (Palo Alto, CA)
• Executive Director Kris Stadelman (NOVA Workforce Board)
• Mayor Sam Adams (Portland, OR)
• Education Advisor Kali Ladd (Portland, OR)
• The Oregon Consortium & Oregon Workforce Alliance CEO Kris Latimer (Albany, OR)

The whole collection is available on the Weadership Vimeo channel.

From the Enhancing Workforce Leadership Team

Vinz, Kristin, Alison, Ricki, Michelle, Trace & Sam

@wfleadership

We're glad you found us and hope you will find the material we've aggregated, developed and shared useful in your next great leadership venture.

There's a lot here, but we suggest starting out with the following:

• The project's Video Trailer
• About us
• Collections
• The Weadership Framework
• Our "Favorites" (a resource guide)

UPDATE

We are pleased to announce the release of our comprehensive Weadership Guide. It is available here (PDF) or in hardback via Blurb here.

Kristin Wolff (kwolff@thinkers-and-doers.com, @kristinwolff)
Vinz Koller (vinz_koller@spra.com, @kollerv)
@WFLeadership