I was checking out some things on the Accenture Web site and came across an interesting article they released in May 2001 called "Leading for a Lifetime:A Preliminary Conceptual Model". It outlines many of the different factors that influence the way individuals make sense of the world and translate that sense-making into an orientation toward leadership. It focuses on the idea of crucibles - catalytic events and relationships that provide opportunities for people to gain deep insight into their world.

One of their conclusions is that while an individual may be the product of his or her era, but what aspects of the era "stick" or influence the leader are also determined by what he or she wants to see, chooses to see, and objectively can see.

Sometime after I left work last night, an evil virus appears to have attacked our work email system and started sending out porn spam using MY EMAIL ADDRESS (but with the cover name of Monika Lewinsky)!!!! Our sys admin is one of the best I've ever met... I wish I knew how whoever it was did this. Then I could hunt them down and feed them Kraft Dinner until they explode.

It has not been a fun morning dealing with people flaming me and asking to be unsubscribed from my list. Worse is not knowing how many more people received the message. My hope is that most of them have just deleted the message unread. I hate the idea that my email address (which is pretty much my name/reputation in a virtual environment) have been associated with pornography - something which I'm passionately against. GRRRRRRR.....

Ronald's "Perplexed" message thread got me thinking more about change processes again. I realized that I hadn't posted anything here about some of the research I've been doing on social and political change processes.

If you can, find a copy of the book "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell (2000). It outlines how the ideas of medical epidemics can be applied to social change and presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. Gladwell's three rules of the Tipping Point — the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context — offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They also provide some direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

Pending approval by city council tomorrow, I've been appointed as one of the 6-8 volunteer members of the Winnipeg Civic Environmental Committee!!! Woohoo!!!

The mandate of the Civic Environmental Committee includes the following responsibilities:
a) To promote actions within the City of Winnipeg based on responsible environmental decision-making and sustainable development (i.e. programs, services and actions that simultaneously achieve environmental protection, economic vitality and social well-being);
b) To coordinate public input into decisions that affect the environment by acting as the City’s key forum bringing together key environmental stakeholders;
c) To review and strengthen current civic policies where necessary, develop and propose new policies in areas where none currently exist, and make recommendations to Council and the administration;
d) To provide advice and guidance to Council on issues that affect the environment;
e) To advise on the City’s strategic and sectoral planning so that environmental sustainability becomes a key integrating tool in planning processes by identifying emerging issues and providing advice on appropriate actions;
f) To facilitate education and awareness and promote an ethic of responsible environmental decision-making and sustainability within all City of Winnipeg institutions; and,
g) To monitor the City’s progress in achieving its environmental targets and to issue an annual "State of the Environment and Sustainability Report".

After years of working at the international level, it's going to feel really good to be able to apply what I've learned at the local level :-)

Ug. Brain hurts. I spent an hour or so last night trying to work my way through an 8-page journal article by Gunderson and Holling in Ecosystem magazine. It was called "Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems" and is an overview of their new book "Panarchy".

Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. By understanding these cycles and their scales, researchers can identify the points at which a system is capable of accepting positive change, and can use those leverage points to foster resilience and sustainability within the system.

I like the concept and my gut feel is that they are on to something. I just need more time to sort through it and to figure out how it fits in with some of the process philiosophy/theology stuff I was reading about last year as well as John Spong's work on transforming theistic religions. I just can't help but wonder whether some of the higher level adaptive cycles that Holling talks about (e.g. value systems/cultures) aren't pretty close to a point where changes in lower level systems aren't going to push them over the edge into collapse and then rebuild into something newer, more flexible and interesting.