FACILITATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Building community, one meeting at a time
Working Principles

1. Choose projects based on expected social impact.
I prioritize my work time by expected impact on things I care about.  I look for readiness of client and context to change, along with the potential for creating social capital, either in a group or in society.
2. Leave behind continuous improvement and learning.
I’ve always tried to build lasting change.  For five years I headed the "Follow-Through Committee" of the Boston Management Consortium, which provided millions of dollars of volunteer management consulting services to City of Boston leaders.  At Fidelity, I led the "Kaizen Learning Network," a community of individuals from across the firm interested in organizational learning;  we eventually defined the homepage for Fidelity's Intranet.
3. Employ systems thinking for organization development.
Ron Lippett at National Training Labs inspired me to make "organization development" my technical field of knowledge.
Any group with shared purpose and interdependence has potential to become, a team, a high-performing organization, or a healthier community.  I assume with Meg Wheatley that systems naturally tend to self-organize (see her book A Simpler Way).
4. "The real bottom line is integrity."
These words from a 1992 values statement for a Fidelity brokerage unit reflect the reality that, in many jobs, honest errors can become media nightmares and financial disasters.  I helped develop more explicit communication about ethics and values across sites and businesses as Fidelity grew from 6 to 30,000 people.  I maintained an ethics practice at Analog Devices too, mediating between different cultures within the company.
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