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.

We came across this video in Big Think. 

We were so pleased to hear Joi Ito, Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab, communicating the importance of adopting a wide-angle point of view (WEadership practice #1) and facilitating connections between people (WEadership practice #2).

We liked the same quote author Meagan Erickson did:

“The world is full of expertise,” says Joi Ito, “What it lacks is agility and context.”

Thanks to Joi Ito for his brilliance and humility and to Big Think for sharing it.

This post originally appeared on LeadChange. It is the third in a seven-part series summarizing the findings of a one-year study of workforce leadership in which we identified six practices next-generation leaders are using, comprising a new model of leadership we call WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

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WEadership and the Crowd

The idea that leaders “control” the people, information, and resources within their organizations is no longer plausible – if it ever was. Today people use social technologies to connect, share, and collaborate with peers and colleagues who can help them get things done, regardless of position or organizational affiliation.

This shift has created new demands for “transparency” on the part of organizations in public, private, and non-profit sectors alike. Employees, customers, shareholders, citizens, doners, etc. – increasingly, all of them want to make the businesses of doing business more transparent, more visible, and ultimately, more accountable.

Leaders can adapt to these changes by opening up the way they listen, share, and engage with employees, customers, and communities to solve important problems.

Openness in the Organization

Many of the 519 leaders in our study reported that the most important thing leaders can do to open up their organizations is listen. It seems simple, but in a media-saturated environment in which customers tweet, employees blog, and people of all kinds have conversations that can be shared with millions in minutes, listening has become complicated. But listening is critical because conversations about your issues are talking place, with or without you. The insights freely available to good listeners can make a business, while ignoring them can make a business irrelevant.

Sharing, too, has taken new forms. Open leaders are discovering the difference between broadcasting and sharing, and finding the latter a more effective approach to building brands, delivering services, and delighting customers. These leaders are:

• Using social media to host conversations
• Making complex data accessible, beautiful, and easy to understand
• Sharing “drafts” of planned changes to products, services, policies,and business models so they can be improved (rather than rolling out a finished product that meets yesterday’s need).

All of these practices speak to a more iterative approach to problem solving and one that involves more than the experts.

Collaborative Networks Within and Across Organizations

The “org chart” may reflect where people in an organization sit, but rarely how they get their work done or the relative value of their contributions to the enterprise. This is more true today, as employees maintain extensive social networks outside of their organizations. Open leaders understand this. They find ways to invite broad participation in problem-solving within and outside of their organizations. For example, leaders in our study reported experimenting with:

• Social networks that made the knowledge and expertise of individual employees known to everyone;
• Crowdsourcing platforms that invite people to share ideas, knowledge, and opinions at significant scale; and
• Convening partners (who might also be competitors) to develop collaborative solutions to common problems;

Sharing Leadership

Open leaders invite others to share leadership responsibility. They understand that leadership is a role, not a title, and that leadership can come from any corner of any organization or community, not just the management tier. For traditional leaders, this is a significant change. But it also represents a tremendous opportunity to engage more people in more meaningful work toward more significant ends.

Leaders, their organizations, their boards, and their communities will all have to find the particular combination of open leadership practices that is right for them.

Openness is a matter of degree, but it is also inevitable.

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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 EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

This post originally appeared on LeadChange. It is the third in a seven-part series summarizing the findings of a one-year study of workforce leadership in which we identified six practices next-generation leaders are using, comprising a new model of leadership we call WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

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“We can now keep what used to be weak links [...] within our grasp, and build on them. This is a sea change affecting all industries and it won’t go away. [Leaders] need to learn to leverage this powerful asset.”
– Kim, Program Director (IA)

Networks. They are everywhere. They link our devices. They link us to one another. That leaders need to build diverse networks almost goes without saying. But we’ll say it anyway because it’s that important, it’s never complete, and because actually doing it is not always so easy.

Let’s unpack the meaning of the practice, word by word.

Build.

First, “build.” Not just network, build networks. Our research demonstrated that effective leaders seek out people from whom they can learn, personally and professionally. They invest time and do at least as much giving as getting, building relationships within and outside of their professional fields or disciplines, and connecting
others in the process (this practice is also called Network Weaving).
Effective leaders don’t stop at meeting new people, they follow-up with action—by sharing information, collaborating on small projects, or engaging people in more formal ways.

Diverse.

Effective leaders take diversity seriously. They seek out diverse talent, perspectives, and opinions. They engage racial, cultural, and sexual minorities in meaningful ways, inviting them into decision-making processes not just consulting with them.

One area of diversity with which the leaders we consulted struggled was experiential diversity—or what many called “rank.” There is constant pressure on senior leaders to interact with similarly ranking people, especially in formal settings, even as these leaders know they also need the insight and engagement of junior colleagues in their organizations and communities. Importantly, leader-to-leader engagements often compromise others kinds of diversity, since there are still fewer women and people of color in the top tiers of many industries and organizations.

Effective leaders find ways to engage people of different rank and tenure meaningfully in shared activities. Here are two simple practices our leaders reported using:

• Inviting junior staff or community members to Board meetings, not as note-takers or errand-runners, but as contributors. And not in that strained, obligatory sort of way that asks one person to speak for his or her generation, but in a way that normalizes such contributions and creates an expectation of learning from them. Engaging across generations with purpose, sincerity, and respect invites other senior leaders to engage with their junior colleagues in similar ways.
• Creating new mechanisms for engagement (or redesigning old ones)—social media platforms or cross-generational workgroups, for example. This strategy not only opens communication channels acrossgroups, but helps make visible the formal and informal knowledge and skill sets within whole organizations or networks so that everyone can tap into them more effectively.

Creating new ways for people of different ages to work together—and experience a shared sense of accomplishment—is one of the best ways to overcome biases that inhibit collaboration among colleagues from
different generations.

Networks.

Networks are not just “groups” or “teams,” they are people connected to one another in a wide variety of ways. They have specific structures which lend themselves to particular outcomes. Technology—including social media—has helped us visualize networks and spawned accessible applied methodologies for growing and improving them. Effective leaders—especially those in public interest or policy fields where relationships drive change—are learning how to shift from strategies rooted in organizations to more flexible network-based change models: a competitor in one line of business might be a collaborator in another; the most junior staff might be the lead on an important project because he or she maintains a relationship with a client or partner.

Network approaches can disrupt traditional hierarchies,creating tensions between colleagues of different rank or straining relations between traditional and new partners, but they can also extend the reach of leaders and their organizations, and improve leaders’ ability to tap into needed resources.

Diverse networks can help leaders improve what they already do, and link to new ideas and fields of practices so they can better adapt to change.

Bibliography (containing many resources on leadership and networks)

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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 EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

Big Changes.

Leaders agree: things are changing. Not just small things, like whether there's a cap on training resources or the timeline for coming board meetings. Big things, like the relationship of citizens to their government and to the institutions they interact with every day: school, work, even family.

Fundamentally, three (interelated) dynamics underlie these changes:

1. Connectivity. As Clay Shirky notes, "More people can say more things to more people than ever before in history." Increasingly, people are moving beyond just talking, they are taking action - action that once required the creation of large organizations and institutions, but no longer does.
2. Innovations in hardware and software. Increased capacity and new devices make it possible to aggregate and manage enormous data sets; better software, much of which sits in "the cloud", makes it easier for people (and not just experts) to organize, understand, use, and share information.
3. Context. We've just experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression - and this one was nearly global. Our shared challenges (as Americans, and as global citizens) now stand in stark relief: we need better ways to work together to meet our needs, responsibly, and within our economic means. It's a daunting challenge made more so with each day's headline - 1 in 7 Americans on Food Stamps or Home Foreclosures Slow (because banks can't keep up); or reports from the latest natural disaster. 

But citizens (and not just US citizens) are stepping up to meet these challenges, collaborating in unprecedented ways. They are:

• Organizing camps, clubs, and other community learning events. This is not just about building individual skills and networks, but making communities stronger by experimenting with new models of "infrastructure" (and "infostructure"), creating new kinds of un-institutions, and even new markets and alternative currencies;
• Redefining businesses and busines models; and
• Partnering with each other and with their governments to improve their communities - all over the world.

What Does This Mean for Workforce Leaders?
Workforce leaders confront many serious challenges - unprecedented levels of unemployment, slow job growth, skills mismatches, etc. Typically, workforce programs seek to remedy these ills by delivering services. But what if leaders sought to create spaces (online ad offline) where people could help each other? Surely the wisdom of a crowd whose members are looking for jobs woud benefit the individuals in that crowd.

Similarly, what if workforce leaders made space for people to help each other learn? Basic skills, job skills, even vocational skills - sometime individuals don't need a "credential", mastery of a set of skills will suffice. This is particularly true in emerging industries whose jobs are more difficult to define and describe. What if workforce leaders saw independently-organized unconferences (e.g., jobcamps) and similar events as part of a broader community response to workforce challenges - and promoted and participated in them, too?

And what if workforce leaders thought seriously about how to help people find not just jobs, but "gigs?" With unemployment a stubbornly high 9%, and as many as eight times as many job-seekers as jobs, there are simply too few jobs. While many workforce leaders are engaged on the long-term job creation agenda, far fewer are advancing entrepreneurship, self-employment, or other initiatives that can help people sustain themselves while they build new careers. Only seven states offer a Self-Employment Assistance program that allows individuals to start their own businesses with their unemployment insurance.

And the Video?
The video above is from a recent TransparencyCamp convened in our nation's capital earlier this month. It's a good example of many of these trends coming together. It's a camp-style event in which participants organize and share content with the aim of partnering with government(s) to solve problems. And while it's about open government, it might just say something about what it looks like to lead on workforce issues in the future.

It's More Than Breakfast
This is me at Research Club Brunch in Portland, Oregon, April 30, 2011.

Research Club is a community based think-tank. It offers "classes" that support professional development and, well, life - how to plant a victory garden or make kimchee, for example. And once a month, it hosts a brunch: we all bring food, and a few community members present what they are working on to whomever attends. Presenters apply in advance and organizers schedule presentations. Here is the Research Club Mission Statement (I particularly like #3).

What Gets Shared?
Presentations at recent brunches covered subjects like:

• The effects of mining on the lanscapes and identities of communities in the west;
• Native American influence on economic and community development along key trade routes in Oregon; and
• The evolution of creative co-working and innovation spaces in Northern Europe (and separately, in our own Portland, Oregon!)

Bruch typically includes a musical (or other artistic) performance - this time it was the charming Ciara Caurrthers on her ukelele (I have been listening to ukelele music ever since).

Who Attends?
Presenters comprise a mix of working professionals, small business owners, students, and grad-students, though Research Club does hold particular appeal for people who work long-distance and those engaged in "gigs" rather than traditional jobs, as both groups have less physical interaction with colleagues than people who work in more traditional environments.

How Did Workforce Leadership Wind Up On The Agenda?
In March of this year, I was discussing the Enhancing Workforce Leadership project with Research Club Co-Founder, Nim Wunnan, who encouraged me to apply as a presenter. Given how much our project team has emphasized engagement in the project overall, I couldn't say no. But I did wonder, "Are people going to know what I'm talking about? Will they care? Will they scream and yell about the absence of job opportunities in their fields or communities?"

I presented. And people cared.

Also in attendance that day were:

• Global Alien, a group of Asian and European performance artists exploring immigration and globalization - they engaged me in a discussion about labor policy in Korea, Germany, and the UK;
• Ilie Mataru, a journalist (who writes about jobs) and serial entrepreneur about to launch his first social venture - or whatever you call a business that is about mission and not just money (Stake Magazine coming soon);
• Max Ogden, Code for America (CFA) fellow who asked if I knew about the US Department of Labor project with CFA intended to support returning veterans transitioning into civilians jobs, school, training, or their own business (I did not know about this).

These and others in attendance helped me see the connections between our respective fields in new ways. And engaging like this helps me communicate complex information about workforce development issues, systems, and policy in ways that invite people to find themselves in the content I'm sharing.

It's reassuring to me that people ("the public") are not only interested in public policy but want to improve it, even participate in solutions. What I didn't expect was that they, too, are reassured by the knowledge that jobs, education, and prosperity are worked on and worried about in a serious way by workforce leaders every day.

Other Takeaways
These kinds of activities are part of my own DIY-U effort. But they also suggest something important about how information and knowledge is shared in our increasingly connected world.

• Learning can be community organized - outside of school and other traditional institutions.
• Networks enable the kind of serendipty that not only accelerates innovation, but is a delight to experience.
• A lot of deep knowledge - especially that involved in system and community change - is cross-disciplinary.

Research Club is not a substitute for the basics of math, reading or principles of electrical engineering, but it does offer an alternative model for learning that also builds networks and leverages ideas, resources, and people-power from communities that just might be interested your cause.

Not change. Transformation.

When it comes to redeploying 1,800 people who lose their jobs in a plant closure, skills are only a part of the picture.

Maytag was the plant; Newton, Iowa, the community. The economic transition story is nicely documented in numerous publications, but we like this portrait in the (unlikely) Audubon Magazine.

In the past decade, Kim Didier, current Executive Director of Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) Business Resources, has worked on the challenge of connecting people and firms in ways that helps each of them and in turn, helps her community to thrive. She's worked on the corporate side, then in economic development. She ran a business innovation network, then served as the Executive Director of the US Department of Labor WIRED (Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development) project in her region.

She has learned a lot about what it takes to advance big change in economic and workforce development.

"It's hard to prepare people for major transitions - it as much about culture as anything else," she notes while describing workers' experiences moving from a workplace characterized by traditional hierarchies to flatter organizations that require a different kind of personal initiative.

"There were demonstrable skill-gaps - we can assess those and help people address them. We're getting better at offering flexible, stackable training that leads to a credential. But there are also those soft-skills..." The ability to work in teams, personal effectiveness, communications skills - these determine whether people will make it long enough to demonstrate their credentials. Building comfort in these areas takes more creativity at every point in the transition process.

It's Not Just About Transitioning Workers
Responding to what was, at the time, an enormous crisis also required policy makers and service providers to step out of their comfort zones. Some leaders stepped up immediately, others took their time, but the effort that seeded a whole new industry in rural Iowa demanded broad, deep, and sustained collaboration. "For workforce, we had to move the conversation from 'training and placement' to 'talent development;' for economic development, we had to shift from 'creating jobs' to 'growing economic opportunity.'" This required:

• Working with data in a whole new way - looking for trends, not opportunities for transactions;
• Exploring self-employment and entrepreneurship as viable career options (and providing necessary supports); 
• Building diverse networks that invite innovation and new ideas; and
• Tolerating failure - without which there is rarely progress.

Big Ideas Matter
While Newton, Iowa now punches above its weight in the alternative energy industry, it wasn't always this way. "People had to imagine the impossible," and then take steps to make the impossible happen. Kim suggests we've got even bigger challenges now relating to the future of jobs, work, learning - and the way technology impacts our major institutions, "What will it mean anymore to go to work?"

An important role for leaders will be to communicate these changes in a way that makes people feel secure, while encouraging the social connections that allow information to flow, relationships to develop, and give rise to community resilience.

This work is not for the faint of heart.

Complexity & Humanity 2.0

View more videos from ResonanceBlog.

What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott