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LfS site update: Focus on social elements of sustainability

This posting provides a brief introduction to new resources that have been added to the Learning for Sustainability (LfS) site – http://learningforsustainability.net/ – in the past few months. The accompanying site newsletter provides direct links to new papers looking at complexity, engagement and adaptation.

The LfS site highlights the wide range of social skills and processes that are needed to support constructive collaboration, and indicates how these skills and processes can be interwoven to achieve more integrated and effective outcomes. It brings links to several hundred annotated on-line resources from different sectors and geographic areas together in one easy to access place, and it concentrates on providing links to open access materials. The featured links in the site newsletter are drawn from some of the new sections updated recently. Direct links to these papers are provided through the on-line update at http://learningforsustainability.net/newsletters/sep11.php – and they include the following:

  • “Taking responsibility for complexity”- This ODI briefing paper aims: to give readers the tools to decide when a problem is complex, outline why this matters, and provide guidance on how to achieve results in the face of complexity. [go to newsletter]
  • “Liberating structures: A new pattern language for engagement”- This recent OD Practitioner paper by Lisa Kimball looks at how managers can generate meaningful engagement that constructively transforms
    work and organizations. It shows that to facilitate significant, transformative changes in organizations we need to make a profound change in how people interact, not just at off sites and other special occasion meetings, but in all the get togethers that make up daily life in organizations. [go to newsletter]
  • “Forests and Climate Change: Linking Adaptation and Mitigation”- Climate change can be addressed by mitigation and adaptation. However, there is a need to explore the linkages between these two options in order to understand their trade-offs and synergies. This paper explores this issue using Latin American examples. [go to newsletter]
  • “The Role of ICT in Building Communities and Social Capital”- This paper examines the debate around the impact of ICT and argues that ICT supplements and transforms social capital rather than diminishing it. [go to newsletter]

This update is posted on an occasional basis (around 3-4 times/year) – please feel free to forward to interested colleagues. Feedback is welcomed, and visitors are encouraged to suggest papers, reports and other material to add. Thanks to those of you who have pointed to papers and other links for inclusion and sharing among the wider global community of practice in this area. The site has now been operating for more than 10 years and receives more than 600 visitors each day, with the highest number of visits in any one day being in excess of 1500. You can visit the Learning for Sustainability (LfS) site directly at http://learningforsustainability.net and your ideas and suggestions
for links are welcomed.

2011 10 03 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Crisis mapping: A new field for development and disaster relief

Increasingly the development of crisis mapping – merging social media, location-based networking, and volunteer support – is showing its potential to help in a range of development and disaster relief initiatives. It’s an emerging technology that has seen great use in Haiti, for example.

Improvements in mapping, mobile, and social media technologies have helped facilitate the development of tools to help first responders quickly and efficiently address crisis situations worldwide. “Crisis mapping,” as its called, is a processing of collecting mobile and map information and crowdsourcing, visualizing and analyzing that data. Mapping can be undertaken by researchers, first responders, agencies, NGOs, and citizen scientists.

Haiti.ushahidi.com (testimony in Swahili) is a crisis map of Haiti that allows for people on the ground there to report emergencies and missing persons after the January 12 disaster. As the MobileBehavior blog points out, by simply texting to a single number, Haitians can report their location and their needs — things like food and medical supplies, lists of survivors, even amputations. The service is being promoted on the ground by FEMA, the Red Cross International, and the U.N Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and others. In addition to SMS, reports can be contributed via web, email,  radio, satellite phone, Twitter, Facebook, TV, listserves, livestreams and situation reports. All the collected  information is mapped in close to real time on the site.

Tomorrow will see the start of the 2nd International Conference on Crisis Mapping – Haiti and beyond -   (ICCM 2010) being held in Boston. ICCM 2010 aims to bring together the most engaged practitioners, scholars, software developers and policymakers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping to address and assess the role of crisis mapping and humanitarian technology in the disaster response to Haiti and beyond. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently noted in a policy speech in Washington DC, “The technology community has set up interactive maps to help us identify needs and target resources” in Haiti. The question is, how did we do and how can we improve?

Key emerging platforms for bringing together a structuring the sharing of information for development or disaster management include the following:

SwiftRiver: This is a free and open source platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. The SwiftRiver platform was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in this tool for other industries, such as news rooms and brand monitoring groups. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include the media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more.

Open Street Map:  This  is a free editable map of the whole world. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. Anyone can map, code, bring your expertise, translate, create user manuals, contribute and collect data using walking-papers.org. Go ahead and add missing information to the map.

Sahana: Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

Ushahidi/Crowdmap: The Ushahidi Platform allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server.

Frontline SMS: This application allows you to text message with large groups of people anywhere there is a mobile signal.

2010 10 01 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

2010 Canterbury earthquake recovery resources

Whichever way you look at them, it is not easy recovering from a disaster. People get affected in different ways – physically, emotionally and financially. At 4:35 last week (September 4) we were woken by the magnitude 7.1 Canterbury earthquake striking around Christchurch the South Island of New Zealand. Luckily, for a range of reasons (the time of day, good building codes, type of quake, etc.) there were minimal injuries. But these things pan out slowly …. Five days on and we have had 11 aftershocks of magnitude 5-6, 71 between magnitude 4-5, and 247 between magnitudes 3-4 … meaning less sleep and more damage in many cases. Even in the midst of this people are out cleaning up, coping and helping out … really amazing stuff. One way some are helping is in using the Internet to share information, so here are some links to useful, and interesting, Canterbury quake online resources.

I’ve included a range of resources. The official local and national government sites provide first point of call information for all government services, and official updates from different agencies. There are a range of graphical resources, such as maps,that have been created to graphically show what’s happened in Canterbury over the past few days. These include time lapse graphics of the earthquake affected areas. A range of resources are provided to help people deal with individual, family and community stress. Other resources provide links for finding accommodation, and donating.

If you know of other useful resource sited for those within the Canterbury earthquake zone please let me know and I will post links to them on the Learning for sustainability 2010 Canterbury earthquake page.

More resources on community resilience are available through the Learning for Sustainability portal.

2010 09 10 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

The biology of business: 11 rules from complex adaptive systems

I just came across this slide show through a post on the Aid on the edge of chaos blog. Its interesting to see how Sharon Vanderkaay from Farrow Partnership develops the presentation to bring together considerations of complexity and living systems for organizational leaders.

The presentation highlights 11 “enabling rules” for leadership to work in better alignment with dynamic social systems:

  • Pursue agility and resilience (not predictability)
  • Consciously learn from daily experience
  • Allow solutions to emerge
  • Pull don’t push (or, invite don’t force)
  • Seek diversity
  • Rely on vision and boundaries rather than control
  • Appreciate messiness
  • Expect non-linear progress (ups and downs)
  • Cooperate (rather than compete) to create abundance
  • Promote grassroots initiative
  • Create fully human spaces

It would be interesting to hear examples of where people have seen these rules working in practice, and how they may be fine-tuned to work in specific situations.  Equally what barriers commonly stand in the way of embracing these rules?

2010 09 03 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Using community capitals to support positive community development

Asset based community development (ABCD) is an approach to community-based development, based on the principles of appreciating and mobilising individual and community talents, skills and assets – rather than focusing on problems and needs. It emphasises community-driven development rather than development driven by external agencies.

The Community Capitals Framework supports asset based development by showing how communities use different types of capital.  The framework was developed by Cornelia and Jan Flora with Susan Fey in 2004 and has since been used to gain more uinderstanding about constructive community development. Based on their research to uncover characteristics of entrepreneurial communities, these Iowa University researchers found the communities that were most successful in supporting healthy sustainable community and economic development paid attention to all seven types of capital: natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial and built.

At the heart of the framework lie a number of key goals which can serve as rallying points for development initiatives. These are typically goals such as healthy ecosystems, vital economies, social well-being and healthy people.  The “seven capitals” can be seen as lenses for examining different community assets and the interrelationships among those assets. They can be leveraged together to improve the quality of community life. The application of this framework range from measuring what the community currently has, to identifying what potentials exist, and determining what capitals are needed in order to bring about a desired state.

Natural capital refers to those assets that abide in a particular location, including weather, geographic isolation, natural resources, amenities, and natural beauty. It shapes the cultural capital connected to place.
Cultural capital reflects the way people “know the world” and how they act within it, as well as their traditions and language. Cultural capital influences what voices are heard and listened to, which voices have influence in what areas, and how creativity,
innovation, and influence emerge and are nurtured.
Human capital is understood to include the skills and abilities of people to develop and enhance their resources and to access outside resources and bodies of knowledge in order to increase their understanding, identify promising practices, and to access data for community-building. Human capital addresses the leadership’s ability to “lead across differences,” to focus on assets, to be inclusive and participatory, and to act proactively in shaping the future of the community or group.
Social capital reflects the connections among people and organizations or the social “glue” to make things, positive or negative, happen. It focuses on healthy interactions that help people feel welcome in their community and region. It helps individuals participate more fully in everyday relationships that build a stronger sense of place. Ties to place, whether emotional or pragmatic, are necessary to build commonwealth and increase well-being.
Political capital reflects access to power, organizations, connection to resources and power brokers. Political capital also refers to the ability of people to find their own voice and to engage in actions that contribute to the well being of their community.
Financial capital refers to the financial resources available to invest in community capacity-building, to underwrite the development of businesses, to support civic and social entrepreneurship, and to accumulate wealth for future community
development.
Built capital, finally, includes the infrastructure supporting these activities.

When it comes to project results, this framework recognizes that project gains and benefits are often more than what is initially indicated in traditional project objectives. Gains are likewise realized with other capital and assets of the community, with  improvements in one asset contributing to the enhancement of other assets. A number of studies are also pointing to the importance of social and human capital as key prerequisites as effective building blocks for gains in related capitals.

More resources on community resilience are available through the Learning for Sustainability portal.

2010 08 10 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (2) Permalink

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste – moving from blame to redesigning more resilient systems

Aerial view of oil being burned from the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, May 19, 2010.

Aerial view of oil being burned from the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, May 19, 2010. U.S Coast Guard photo by Chief Petty Officer John Kepsimeli

A few weeks ago Naomi Klein provided us with a very close-up yet systems-like view of looking at this disaster in her Guardian column – Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world. In this article she takes us into local meetings, and looks at wider policy initiatives. As she says, “the most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely.”

The calamity that is the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has been at the forefront of world media for almost 90 days now. The death of the 11 oil-rig workers, the loss of countless fish, turtles, birds and other marine life, and the impact on local jobs are all inextricably linked, and yet each is a tragedy in its own right. Clearly there’s a lot of blame to go around for the ongoing disaster in the gulf. As the Grist writers point out in the weeks since the Horizon rig first came unglued, all the principals in this mess have taken turns pointing fingers at one another. They even created a pie chart showing their estimation of “Who’s to blame for the Gulf oil gusher“. However, as Marilyn Paul says in an article in The Systems Thinker a few years ago titled, “Moving from Blame to Accountability,” “Where there is blame, open minds close, inquiry tends to cease, and the desire to understand the whole system diminishes. . . . Blame rarely enhances our understanding of our situation and often hampers effective problem solving.”

Making people and organizations accountable is important. But more importantly we need to take the opportunity to look at the underlying system that led to this crisis and develop long-term solutions that help prevent future crises. This may require us to look hard at our energy dependency, and look again at the risks it poses in terms of environmental damage and global change. Russ Linden reminds us that Paul Romer, a Stanford economist, coined the term “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” in his blog of the same name. This view encourages us to look beyond the immediate challenge inherent in crises to look for the opportunities. As Linden points out when a crisis arises a number of opportunities that can support a more positive systems change also emerge:

    • Resources become available
    • Different priorities come into focus
    • Rigid rules and regulations suddenly become pliable
    • Leaders pay attention and are accessible
    • Change, even far-reaching change, is possible

What is important that we involve the right people in this process, and that means involving more than the usual suspects. Solving problems associated with developing more resilient societal systems is not just about changing the behaviour of individual actors, businesses and communities, but about seeking new ways of thinking about systems, neighbours and holistic planning. While individual stakeholders may make the ultimate decisions on-the-ground (e.g. do we use as much petrol or electricity this month), others play an active role in creating the context that enables – or inhibits – constructive change (i.e. what policies will support constructive change here). Consequently, an important part of successful change is about engaging stakeholders in the process of learning and adaptive management and about negotiating how to move forward in a complex world, where we do not have all the information. Seen in this way engaging with the bigger problems are not just the mandate of national and regional agencies and government, others from science, business, and the requisite public interest groups all hold keys that are important to support overall change. Nor is there likely to be one big answer, it will be a case of all these different groups making their own tweaks and adaptations to the way they go about their daily business.

Central to this more collaborative approach are tools for systems thinking and the development of platforms for dialogue and negotiation to occur between and across different stakeholder groups. the Learning for Sustainability page on negotiation and dialog provides a range of resources concerned with improving opportunities and techniques for this active interaction.

In a recent Leverage Point Blog post on this subject, Janice Molloy reflects the more positive move to collaborative reflection and action that is happening saying – “If there’s any bright spot, from what I’ve seen in the media, more and more people seem to be acknowledging our collective role in the larger issue at stake–that of oil dependency. And as systems thinking teaches, when we acknowledge that we are part of the problem, then we can start being part of the solution. … Let’s assume collective responsibility for creating a better future by working to ensure that the current crisis leads to fundamental changes–at all levels.”

More resources on community resilience and systems thinking are available through the Learning for Sustainability portal.

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2010 07 18 Will Allen environment
systems thinking Comments (0) Permalink

Learning for Sustainability site update (April 2010)

This portal site has been updated on an ongoing basis over the past few months. This newsletter provides a brief introduction to new resources that have been added. In the reading section links are provided to three useful literature reviews, covering partnerships, leadership and participation respectively.

The Learning for Sustainability site - http://learningforsustainability.net – brings together resources that help address the social and capacity building aspects of managing collective interests within complex and adapting systems. The site highlights the wide range of social skills and processes that are needed to support constructive collaboration, and indicates how these skills and processes can be interwoven to achieve more integrated and effective outcomes. This site brings links to several hundred annotated on-line resources from different sectors and geographic areas together in one easy to access site.

The featured links in this newsletter are drawn from some of the new sections added recently.  Direct links to these papers are provided through the on-line update – http://learningforsustainability.net/newsletters/apr10.php

  • “Perspectives on partnership: A literature review” – This paper by Doug Horton, Gordon Prain and Graham Thiele reports on a wide-ranging review of the literature on partnerships and other closely related forms of collaboration. It identifies and analyzes key cross-cutting themes and success factors, highlights gaps in current knowledge, and identifies high-potential areas for further study. <more>
  • “Leadership in Sustainable Urban Water Management: An Investigation of the champion phenomenon within Australian water agencies” – This report by André Taylor develops and communicates a suite of management strategies that can be used within water agencies to: create a supportive leadership process at different levels. These include: fostering effective champions at an executive level (‘executive champions’); attracting, recruiting, supervising and developing the leadership abilities of champions at a middle management level (‘project champions’); and encouraging distributed (group-based) leadership. <more>
  • “Stakeholder participation for environmental management: A literature review” – This working paper by Mark Reed points to the need to focus on participation as a process. It then identifies a number of best practice features from the literature. Finally, it argues that to overcome many of its limitations, stakeholder participation must be institutionalised, creating organisational cultures that can facilitate processes where goals are negotiated and outcomes are necessarily uncertain. The paper acknowledges that seen in this light, participatory processes may seem very risky, but there is growing evidence that if well designed, these perceived risks may be well worth taking. <more>

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2010 04 05 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

should 90% of climate change research be social science?

In recent weeks it seems that attention is being given to the idea that while we have a certain level of understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes around climate change, in order to change what’s happening, we need to look at the social systems which are contributing.

A few days ago Nature’s Climate Feedback blog talked about the need for more social science in climate change: IHDP: should 90% of climate change research be social science?. It started from the keynote of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), quoting Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research.

Another recent article in Seed Magazine: The Last Experiment, also argues for more social science to be used in climate change research and development initiatives.

“One needs social science at the absolute center of the strategic decisions being made in this area. It has to be on an equal footing with the natural sciences, with engineering, with economic analyses,” Fischhoff argues. “If it’s at the end, then it’s too late to shape the policies in ways that will have any meaningful impact.” To fix this, Fischhoff envisions an NIH-like social-science corps, a “substantial institution that would provide social-sciences resources for people willing to take these issues seriously.” If legitimate and properly funded, it could finally attract more top scientists, the kind of people who are “more concerned with making this work than publishing another limited disciplinary paper,” as he puts it.

Though it’s too early to tell, the sleeping giant of government funding may be stirring. Social scientists increasingly play a role in projects funded by NOAA, and a major forthcoming National Academies study called “America’s Climate Choices” will be led, in part, by social scientists. A recent report from the National Research Council observed that the US Climate Change Science Program “is hindered by its limited research into the social sciences,” as a press release mildly put it, “…and the separation of natural and social sciences research.” Social science spending has never risen above 3 percent of the program’s budget.

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2009 05 14 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (6) Permalink

Bloom – helping people tackle climate change their way

Bloom web page The BBC has recently launched a website – ‘Bloom’ – an interactive site for those who want to tackle climate change but are not sure how to go about it. In addition to providing news and blog commentary, the site handpicks individual actions for the viewer, and allows comparisons between these and other actions by how much carbon dioxide they save, how cheap they are, and how easy other ‘bloomers’ have found them. Each feature has hard facts, expert opinion and topical debate to provide a sense of how much difference particular actions can really make.

With everyone leading different lives, Bloom helps individuals to pick the actions that work for them… ‘pick a seed, plant it to represent your action, and watch your flowers bloom’!

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2009 04 07 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (5) Permalink

Six habits of highly resilient organizations

EcoTrust’s web magazine People and Place has an interesting article by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in which they propose Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations:

1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

As the authors write:

Most companies live fast and die young. A study in 1983 by Royal Dutch/Shell found only 40 corporations over 100 years old. In contrast, they found that one-third of the Fortune 500s from 1970 were, at that time, already gone.

What differentiates success and failure, resilience and collapse? The Royal Dutch/Shell study emphasizes shared purpose and values, tolerance of new ideas, financial reserves, and situational awareness.

More recently, Ceridian Corporation collected best thinking and strategies to publish an executive briefing on organizational resilience. They highlighted the paradox that successful, resilient organizations are those that are able to respond to two conflicting imperatives:

  • managing for performance and growth, which requires consistency, efficiency, eliminating waste, and maximizing short-term results
  • managing for adaptation, which requires foresight, innovation, experimentation, and improvisation, with an eye on long-term benefits

Most organizations pay great attention to the first imperative but little to the second. Start-ups often excel at improvisation and innovation but founder on the shoals of consistent performance and efficiency. About half of all new companies fail during their first five years.

Each mode requires a different skill set and organizational design. Moving nimbly between them is a tricky dynamic balancing act. Disruptions can come from anywhere – from within, from competitors, infrastructure or supply chain crises, or from human or natural disasters. The financial crisis has riveted current attention, but it’s just one of many disruptions organizations must cope with daily. Planning for disruption means shifting from “just-in-time” production and efficiency to “just-in-case” resilience.

2009 03 05 Will Allen Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink