A follow-up to Groundswell, Open Leadership is Charlene Li’s latest book (to be released today). While similar in structure – there’s a very practical kind of “roadmap” quality to it – Open Leadership is ultimately a more important contribution to modern organizational thought leadership and to the efforts of millions of people trying to apply open leadership in their own contexts.

First, it’s focused on leadership. While this might seem obvious from its title, there are thousands of books on leadership (Amazon lists over 61,000) that are really about a particular leader (e.g., Jack Welch), a leadership style, or characteristics of a collection of leaders. Far fewer interrogate the nature of leadership itself. This one does – simply, and in the context of broader social, cultural, economic, and environmental changes. Pointing to the rise of a “culture of sharing” that increased connectivity makes possible, uncomfortable territory for many leaders to be sure, Li states, “At a time when customers and employers are redefining how they make and maintain relationships with social technologies, it’s high time organizations rethink the foundations of business relationships as well.” Open Leadership reflects transformative thinking not just at the level of practice but about how people in organizations and their customers relate to one another.

Second, the book profiles not just private sector firms, but global charities (The Red Cross) and key government agencies (the US Navy and State Department) responsible for some of the world’s most important and dangerous work. This underscores the emphasis on leadership broadly – not just for firms selling products and services, but for all kinds of organizations and institutions.

Third, the “roadmap” chapters (assessments, choices, etc.) offer practical direction not just for CEOs, but for open leadership and social technology advocates at all levels in their organizations. While Li doesn’t quite come out and say it, Open Leadership is a manual for leading openly from wherever you are. I would like to have seen more (and more explicit) emphasis on leadership outside of a firm context (community level government, multiple organizations engaged in humanitarian work, etc.), but these cross-organizational and network-based models could make nice case studies in a future book?

So What is Open Leadership?

“Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.”

There’s an important nuance here – giving up the need to be in control is different than giving up control. The critical point is that social technologies have shifted the landscape so fundamentally that leaders simply cannot exercise the kind of control over information and decision-making they once did. However, they can connect to and collaborate with more customers and partners than ever before, provide a platform for those customers to connect to one another (engaging the collective “we” in problem-solving), and facilitate meaningful relationships along the way.

Li identifies five rules of open leadership:

1. Respect that your customers and employees have power.
2. Share constantly to build trust.
3. Nurture curiosity and humility.
4. Hold openness accountable.
5. Forgive failure.

And then the book delves into roadmap territory (10 elements, assessments, models, checklists, etc.), so you’ll have to pick it up for yourself to make use of them. Importantly, these chapters (more than half the book) frame choices. How open do you want to be? About what issues? What kind of structure supports the kind of openness you want to achieve?

If you are an aspiring open leader, these alone are worth the price of the book as they will prevent you from having to reinvent a wheel or two. [Note: The chapter on structuring openness provides sage advice, and a myriad of examples, but if you need more, a host of social media guidelines or policies is here on the Altimeter Group wiki].

A Closing Note

While many of the examples cited in the book (Best Buy, the Obama campaign, Cisco, Comcast, Ford, etc.) have been the subject of inquiry many times before, Open Leadership presents them as unfinished stories rather than tales of hero/ines. This does a couple of important things.

First, it strengthens the case for open leadership on the grounds that ever more connected markets, communities, firms, and people both accelerate change, and make it less predictable, a condition for which open communications and information-sharing systems are well-suited.

Second, it portrays leaders as learners for whom adapting to the changing technology environment is mission critical – not just “fun.” Whether it means blogging, tweeting, or platform building, these leaders are not only embracing these practices but making them central to their work.

Anyone who has ever stood in front of a room full of skeptics trying to explain what a wiki is must have cheered at Paul Levy’s defense of CEOs blogging. [If you haven't been in such a position, imagine yourself trying to convince someone like Justice Antonin Scalia that Twitter matters.]

Finally, and on a personal note, I don’t know Jeremiah Owyang, but I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time now. I also read his blog and catch one of his webinars or videos now and then. I appreciate the wisdom he’s shared and sense that I would like him. I was surprised by the story in the chapter on failure (now you’ve got to buy the book), and felt at once supportive of his effort to “get back on the horse” and less embarrassed by my own open mistakes. We’re all learners really. And social technologies, used well, help us share experiences so we all move forward faster.

That’s Open Leadership.

Note: This review is cross-posted on Networked Publics.

Share/Save

Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo Romaní in Flickr.

NOTE: This is the third in our recent “let’s share the findings from all those OECD reports with each other (and the world)” series. Again, the content is not likely scintillating, but it’s important to us, and we’re happy to let you in on it.

The OECD Designing Local Skills Strategies Report (2009) focuses largely on questions of balance in locally designed workforce strategies: balance between short- and long-terms needs, balance between training and placement, balance between meeting the needs of people, firms, and communities, and balance between workforce players – private, non-profit, and a diverse collection of government agencies at different levels.

Authors Francesca Froy, Sylvain Giguère, and Andrea Hofer offer case studies of the following communities:

• Shanghai (China)
• Michigan (U.S.)
• Choctaw Tribe (Mississippi, U.S.)
• Mackay (Australia)
• Malmö (Sweden)
• New York City (New York, U.S.)

While, other communities are also cited in the narrative, these communities’ launched initiatives representing what the report calls balanced strategies, the authors’ recommended approach. Balanced strategies focus simultaneously on:

• Attracting and retaining talent
• Integrating disadvantaged groups
• Upskilling those in employment – though in most cases, this was the most difficult strategy because of its complexity (designing opportunities for working adults, often with families).

The report concludes by recommending that local workforce actors seeking to implement effective (and balanced) approaches focus on five key strategic issues:

• Access to relevant data and information. Local actors need to understand their “skills ecology” and its impact on the wider economy to be able to design appropriate policy and program interventions.
• Balanced and long term strategies. It is tempting for local actors to focus on only one or two strategic objectives. Focusing on all three areas is more difficult, but also promises to deliver more substantive impact over time.
• Batter mapping of skills provision, for example through “career clusters” or “career ladders.” This provide a focus for otherwise disjointed systems and creates opportunities for individuals to advance in meaningful ways. However, careers advice is a key (and often lacking) component of this approach.
• Building strong relationships with employers. While necessary to ensure effective connecting of supply and demand, public-sector and non-profit entities can play an important role in emphasizing long term needs and suggesting changes in workplace practices in ways that round out employer’s tendency to focus on short-term needs.
• Look to the future and anticipate change. Skills strategies should be subject to regular review and change, and should build toward local areas of “flexible specialization” (sometimes called workforce or talent competencies, or clusters of talent) that encourage the development of local talents and skills that are specific enough to make the community distinctive, but broad enough to avoid dependency on narrow industries or occupations.

Not rocket science, but it does take determination – people who do this work rely on persuasion and trust, not hierarchy.

Leadership and Governance Really Matter

While the report does not emphasize leadership and governance as a theme, the frequency with which the difficulty of this work is noted in the narrative is striking.  Meeting many diverse public and private needs, balancing the short and longterm, collaborating with large and changing networks of partners absent a structure, meeting shared national policy needs and in a local (and sometime divergent) context, developing and allocating resources fairly and in ways that deliver results – this is complex work all over the world, and speaks to the level of management expertise and leadership talent it takes to do well.

What’s our strategy for developing the workforce workforce?

Share/Save

Thanks to Flickr pal woodleywonderworks.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the series we warned you about a few days ago. We are summarizing several large reports for each other (members of the Community Team at CSW), but we’re doing it here so you can benefit too – you know, if you are interested (since you found your way here for some reason). You won’t find a lot of wit, but there might be some wisdom for the taking.

One thing we love about OECD reports (and international comparisons generally for that matter) is that they remind us that the challenges we face are more universal than we think – and we can learn from looking up and out. On this count, More than Just Jobs: Workforce Development in a Skills-Based Economy does not disappoint.

At its core, the paper argues that although workforce development – the ecosystem of people, policies, and organizations concerned with the intersection of people, skills, jobs, and the economy – has been primarily concerned with narrow targets, transactions, and sets of activities, the field has an increasingly important role to play in improving the prosperity of communities. Author Sylvain Giguère suggests a broader goal for workforce development than the field (on the whole) has adopted to date:

“The comprehensive management of human resources, so as to better meet the demands of a global economy at both the national and local levels, through improving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.”

The reports names governance - leadership, policy coordination, adaptation of policy and program to diverse local conditions, and community engagement – as among the most significant challenges faced by workforce organizations seeking to advance this important aim. It calls for local policy to reflect a better balance between national aims and local needs and greater experimentation throughout the system, tempered with efficiency and accountability.

Policy Recommendations
A comparison of policies in seven OECD countries (United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and Korea) yielded the following recommendations:

• Inject flexibility into management. Decisions about strategic priorities in the implementation of public programs and services should be made locally, using a management by objective framework negotiated with central government.
• Establish an overarching management framework that embeds local flexibility to ensure alignment while also encouraging differentiation and experimentation.
• Build strategic capacity. Local staff should have strong knowledge of local economic conditions as well as effective human resource development practices, and the analytical and strategic capacity to be able to set priorities and development methods for addressing them.
• Build up local data and intelligence. The ability to aggregate and organize data in a way that supports local strategy development is essential and could be better supported by national level efforts to develop tools that adapt to local circumstances.
• Improve governance mechanisms. Labor market and workforce organizations should collaborate with education, economic development, business, and civic organizations. There is no governance mechanism for this kind of collaboration, but networks of partnerships go a long way in increasing and extending the capacity of workforce organizations.
• Improve administrative processes. Aligning policies through institutional reform is a difficult challenge, exacerbated by the scale of larger countries. Still efforts should be made to review the cross-agency implementation of broader workforce policy with the aim of better promoting collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Other Findings

• Workforce development matters because it directly impacts four drivers of economic growth: Skills, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Social Cohesion.
• Three major obstacles impede adoption of the broader goal of workforce development: 1) speeding up education and training systems; 2) fragmentation of local decision-making and workforce resources; and 3) lack of willingness to look long term. All of these could be ameliorated though larger investments and more serious support for governance (collaboration).

Case Studies: Out of Date?
Warning: Although the paper was published in 2008, the analysis of the U.S. Workforce System is very dated. It builds from the original six Workforce Investment Act (WIA) principles (one of which was “strong boards” which was summarily eliminated from WIA implementation documents within a matter of months). Baldridge work (ancient history when I realized I’d become part of the “field” of workforce development in 2003 or so) features prominently, and some of the organizations named in the local case studies have long since been replaced, some more than once.

Having some context from my work in the UK from 2001-2003 (in economic and workforce development), I could see that the U.K. case study was also quite dated, though Departmental names, and configurations change more frequently there (often coinciding with budget reviews).

This made me somewhat suspect of the case study portions of the report, but the larger trends and recommendations identified in the content chapters seem quite sound.

Share/Save

Thanks to NJ.. on Flickr

Last week we were drafting a set of policy recommendations for a project. We’d drafted an introduction that named demographics, technology, and the competitive landscape as among the most significant domains of change in the workplace during the past decade. At that point I realized how many times I’d seen this collection of words and phrases in a bulleted powerpoint list, or similarly glibly treated as if the meaning (and implications) of these change were self-evident.

We decided to say what we meant. Here’s the list we came up with in answer to the question “How is the workforce landscape different today than ten years ago?” We know it’s not complete, but it’s a start. We’d love to know your thoughts.

Key Workforce Trends

“Growth minus Jobs.” While economists debate the causes and implications of the trend, job growth following the last two recessions has been far lower than what was expected. In our current “job-less recovery,” the seven million private sector jobs lost in the 20 months between December 2007 and August 2009 are returning an anemic pace (and many of them do not pay family-sustaining wages), while labor force continues to grow by 1.3 million people per year.

“Millennials and Boomers Sandwich Gen-X.” For the first time in our history, it is commonplace for four or even five generations to occupy the workplace at the same time – challenging tradition hierarchies, management practices, and raising serious equity issues as “baby boomers” delay retirement and firms resist taking on new (younger) full-time employees who are far more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than their more senior colleagues (and peers).

“Wanted: Life-long Learners.” The demands on all workers to develop new and more diverse skills throughout their working lives – as the baseline required for good jobs increases – raises complex challenges for employers and government (who pays?), difficult decisions for workers (“Do I train for two years in hopes I get a job at the new Google facility?”), and disrupts assumptions about what it means to be a student (non-traditionals are the new traditionals).

“Anywhere, anytime, any device connectivity.” We’re only at the beginning of understanding how connecting people to data, information, and each other will change the way we live work and learn, but the implications for workers – who’s talents can be tapped globally, firms – who’s value chains now include customers and competitors, and communities – which will thrive based their uniqueness and desirability, are significant (and mindbending).

“Show me the three Rs (Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle).” Questions about the sustainability of our consumption-based economy and its role in climate change are causing a massive rethink of public policy around energy, water, food systems, and how these and other natural resources are used in industry and commerce. This is already changing what it means for workers, firms, industries, communities, and nations to be competitive in the new new economy.

These shifts show no evidence of slowing. Public policy must also change with the times.

And today, there are few areas of public policy more important to the nation’s economic competitiveness than the skills, ingenuity, and health of its 139-million person workforce.

Share/Save

We just reviewed Regions Matter (OECD, November 2009). It’s chalk full of bits and bobs we’d picked up (and learned ourselves) while studying, conducting research, or providing technical assistance to stakeholders in regions, but offers a difference level of coherence than we’ve seen in some time.  We thought we might share.

Key Policy Messages about Regional Economies and Development (the “Big Picture”)

• The intent of regional policies is evolving: they are increasingly about fueling growth and not just limiting (or reducing) disparities.
• There is no consistent relationship between urban concentration and economic performance – simply concentrating resources in a place does not necessarily lead to growth.
• Public policy matters in maximizing the potential of assets in regions.
• Leading and lagging regions are both important – when lagging regions improve, they make important contributions to growth and equity, opportunity.
• The use of productive assets (labor, capital, technology) are correlated with growth, but no single factor explains improved performance in a region. It is the interaction and interdependence of key assets that matters (suggesting flexible and integrated policy approaches).
• Investment and governance are important dimensions of regional innovation and change, but there is no blueprint for these. Policy should be developed in the context of the specific assets a particular region offers.
• Research- and technology-driven innovation is highly concentrated, but public policy can impact growth and capacity in regions with assets in emerging fields.
• Innovation policy is not just about inventing the next new technology, but also about its adoption or application. Different regions have different innovation assets and can and should develop these based on their unique capacities. Some regions will invent; others will deploy or scale.
• Innovation capacity is moving East (to Asia, where there are high concentrations of skilled labor and dense supplier networks). This mean regions in OECD countries must be mindful of how they develop knowledge capital that allows them to compete.
• Rural regions offer innovation potential but in different ways – social innovation around environmental issues, better public services (on which most rural areas are highly dependent), and new cooperative arrangements for living, working, and managing communities hold promise.
• Sustainable urban growth is widely recognized as a key policy priority.
• Regional policy is difficult to manage at the national level. It would benefit from coordination and multi-year co-financing.
• Learning, knowledge-sharing, monitoring and evaluation need to be coordinated across levels of government.

What turns places with concentrations of assets into agglomeration economies? (from Krugman, 1991)

• The sharing of unique, place-based facilities (labs, universities, creative space, etc.)
• Gains from producing complementary products in a wider array of facilities
• Gains from a wider array of suppliers (and supply chain connectivity)
• Deeply and broadly skilled labor reduces risk of adjusting to market shocks
• Matching mechanisms (connecting workers and jobs, suppliers and purchasers, distributers with buyers and sellers, etc.)
• Learning mechanisms based on the generation, diffusion, accumulation of knowledge and the systems that cultivate and disseminate it.

Results of OECD Growth Model Analysis

• Human capital and innovation positively influence regional growth (as traditional growth theories suggest).
• Elements from new economic geography theories (e.g. agglomeration economies) are also relevant and reveal a spatial connection to growth.
• Infrastructure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth – it is only relevant if human capital and innovation are also present.

Time also matters in regional development efforts…

• Infrastructure and human capital shifts require three years to positively influence growth
• Innovation is even longer-term, netting positive effects after five years.

Governance in Regions

Regional development depends on efficient governance. Accountable and credible leadership is important, but it looks different than a generation ago:

• It’s network-based, not organization based.
• It’s championed by collaborative leaders, not individual heroes.
• It’s more likely to be university or public sector-based than private sector based (and that’s okay, as the attention of private sector leaders is now often global, not local).
• It manifests in shared public-private ventures that can take a variety of forms.

Share/Save

Promising Practices in Regional Economic Development: Northeast Ohio

Last week, I attended an event focused on the importance of regional planning, partnerships between government, workforce, education, and economic development, and how encouraging entrepreneurship in regions can help spur economic growth and prevent further population loss.

My own organization, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), has initiated or has involvement in several regional strategies in Michigan, Arizona, and across the country. Though CSW is not working in Northeast Ohio, this region won notoriety in its efforts to transform the region into a global economic competitor. We can learn from this example.

Regional Strategic Planning

In 2003, philanthropic and corporate leaders committed themselves to building a strategy from the ground up. I was living in Cleveland at the time and took part in the focus groups called Voices and Choices that informed the region’s efforts.

Moving to Action

Advance Northeast Ohio, the region’s economic action plan was launched in 2007 and creates a common vision for more than 80 partner organizations, institutions and leaders from business, philanthropy, and government. The 16-county partnership is committed to collaborating and implementing strategies that help create jobs, increase incomes, and reduce poverty, collectively strengthening the region.

Clear Priorities

The partnership has identified four clear priorities to guide its work:

• Business Growth and Attraction
• Talent Development
• Racial and Economic Inclusion
• Government Collaboration and Efficiency

Regional Investors

A regional funders collaborative, The Fund for Our Economic Future, emerged to support the region’s effort, and demonstrates how corporate and philanthropic partners can invest in a common vision.  Of the over $60million raised, most of the resources have been granted to regional economic development organizations that work to start, accelerate, attract, and grow companies in the region.

Tracking Progress

To monitor progress, partners, assisted by George Erickcek of the Upjohn Institute, created a community economic dashboard which is now updated annually by Cleveland State University. The dashboard is an index, tracking indicators in the following nine areas:

• Skilled Workforce and Research & Development (R&D)
• Legacy of Place
• Urban Assimilation
• Racial Inclusion and Income Equality
• Locational Amenities
• Technology Commercialization
• Urban/Metro Structure
• Individual Entrepreneurship
• Business Dynamics

Award Winning Practices

Jumpstart is northeast Ohio’s venture development organization that invests in early stage businesses and ideas. Through the end of 2008, it invested in 34 companies, which have raised more than $100 million in growth capital. The program was recently recognized for Excellence in Urban or Suburban Economic Development by the U.S. Economic Development Administration.*(See footnote)

Community engagement, regional action guided by strategy and clear priorities, consistent investment, and innovative practices—these are key ingredients in a recipe for regional transformation.

* Other finalists in the same category: Composites Kansas (WIRED Initiative, Wichita, Kansas); Conway Development Corporation (Conway, Arkansas); Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (Los Angeles, California).

Share/Save

Thanks to deanmeyersnet on Flickr.

Really high unemployment among youth.

One of the most alarming bits of bad news in a sea of unwelcome statistics about unemployment, is just how bad it is for the young American worker these days. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) finds that the proportion of young people employed in July was 51.4 percent, “the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948.”

Where is this headed?

This is the future of our country being handed a raw deal. It is the responsibility of workforce professionals to think outside the box and create new methods of mentoring, offering career ladders that make sense, and nurturing an entrepreneurial culture to foster innovation.

“When I was coming up…”

When thinking back to my own career and its challenges, I realized that I know something about looking for work during a recession. In fact I was born during the recession of 1958.

Overqualified and underemployed.

I graduated from college in the recession of 1981. I turned to the government agency to help me and my employment counselor told me my BA was worth “bugger all”, and it wouldn’t help me contend with the dearth of good jobs. I waited tables until American Motors was hiring, found work there, and got laid off three months later. Entering the workforce during a recession ensured I would remain underemployed until I decided to go to graduate school.

“Hey, does anybody give a rip?”

The unemployed person is in a vexing solitary cycle of rejection. This recession amplifies the alienation the unemployed experience, possibly more so for young people who are used to the support and camaraderie of a social group. When you look for work, you’re on your own. Some blame a higher minimum wage for higher youth unemployment rates, and make comments like “Most of these teens and twenty-somethings aren’t worth a damn even when they are “employed”

Bootstraps and all that…

When you are young, you are often undervalued by your elders. You’re told to work hard to get ahead but no one tells you how, and you have to find your own way. We love people who succeeded through adversity with hard work.

Can we have some collaboration please?

But if we are to successfully transform this great challenge into opportunity, we all need to counter the pessimism and negativity floating around America right now by offering help, wisdom and compassion. Here in Southern Arizona we are at work on a community collaboration platform called (AZ)WeToo.^TM Initially created as a platform for supporting entrepreneurs in Michigan, we are finding new applications for WeToo^TM in other communities.  It could be used to help aggregate job-finding (or job-making) resources and connect these young people to each other. Whether through this tool or others, we need to connect young people around work in the same way we connect them socially or around other common interests.

WorkBook

I propose is that Workforce Boards, One Stops, all levels of government create a FaceBook for workers, a WorkBook if you will, where young workers can find information, mentors, networks, and each other. While web tools alone are not the solution, they do address many of the vexing problems of alienation and isolation that create a sense of hopelessness in the face of so much adversity. Online profiles lead to visibility, visibility leads to connection and a sense of community. Job opportunities can come as a tweet, and mentors can offer advice and wisdom from their BlackBerries.

It’s time to act.

We should all pay attention to this serious problem of youth unemployment. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to help them help us create the eventual recovery and a sustainable economy.

Share/Save

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

Share/Save

Beets in Detroit by ellievanhoutte

Unemployment in Macomb County

I recently met with a Macomb county commissioner whose district is embedded in the metro Detroit region of roughly 5 million people. The commissioner was concerned because, despite state unemployment in excess of 15%, county unemployment exceeded 16%, and pockets in her district face rates as high as 25%. “We’re heading toward a brick wall,” she noted.  ”We just don’t know when we’ll hit.”

What New Jobs?

The commissioner voiced concern about moving forward job training strategies when, really, the potential for new job creation has no hope of matching—even remotely—the rate of job loss. “I  sometimes actually wonder if we should do what New Orleans did and offer to help people relocate to places with more opportunity.”

Exclusive Collaboration?

This commissioner, like so many public officials, economic and workforce developers, community organizers, and even citizens, is overwhelmed by the immensity of the employment challenge in Michigan and daunted by a lack of public resources to make a difference. “I know there’s the Recovery Act—I just don’t know what we’re getting out of it.”

Moreover, she expressed confusion over facing these challenges in a large geographic region where, certainly, people are working overtime to shift economic gears, but the results are dispersed, and her constituents are her neighbors who don’t see a direct or immediate benefit.

Home-grown Efforts

She knows about a host of home-grown efforts, including the New Economy Initiative (NEI), Road to Renaissance, and others, she just don’t know anyone who is part of these efforts. How can she connect? She can’t be everywhere at once. How can she learn whether and where her county benefits from these efforts?  Is it enough for community “big dogs” to drive community change, and can they do so successfully—or at least meaningfully—without bringing other community stakeholders on board?

Resilient Outcomes and Communities

Having a resilient community means recognizing the importance of social capital and having an engaged and informed community, both organizationally and individually. People at all levels need to feel they are contributing to solutions or, at the very least, feel in touch with them, and there are many ways to do this:

• IdeaMinnesota is an effort of the state community foundation, which has asked community residents to share their ideas to address community problems and has agreed to fund the best ones.
• “My Region” in central Florida has asked community members, “How shall we grow?”  Roughly 20,000 people have responded through surveys, videos and other means, and many have invested out-of-pocket in the effort, which has driven several community-change initiatives.

Michigan’s Defining Moment has engaged 2,000 people in outreach efforts to express their views on Michigan’s future. And One D’s online scorecard allows organizations to show how their efforts are moving forward key community indicators. How can these efforts be channeled to engage regional community stakeholders in thinking about solutions for the region’s future but in conjunction with stakeholders like NEI that are investing resources in solutions to improve it?

Solutions-driven engagement

Some fear that community engagement may open the door to unwarranted critique and judgment, but the alternative could remain the sense of disconectedness and concern like that expressed by our county commissioner.  And, yes, community engagement is time intensive and difficult, but investing in it is questionable only if viewed as an end in itself.  The ultimate goal in engagement should be to connect real people to the development of real outcomes and solutions and, ideally, investment in them.  This will give participation true meaning and foster a sense of pride and ownership in the outcome.

After all, is innovation really game changing if only some people feel part of it?

Share/Save

Students, educators and others can access syllabi, lecture notes, audio and video for almost every MIT course offered today, and over 50 million have done so. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of education has done a meta-analysis that shows that students who take all or part of their classes online generally perform better than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction (results are statistically significant).

The Web Makes it Possible to Support Learning and Work in New Ways

The way society thinks and learns is changing faster than, well, the speed of digital transmission. This opens doors to new ways of helping students and workers meet education and training demands in the midst of constant innovation and increasingly tough competition for jobs.  But there are still
those who cannot imagine the extent modern technology foretells for work and learning.  They point to social media tools like FaceBook and Twitter and oddly-named collaboration tools like wikis and blogs and wonder about, if not challenge, their relevance in today’s talent landscape.

The Web Helps People Help Themselves and Each Other

Yet 85% of college students use FaceBook – 3.85 million users.  Of these, 60% log in every day, 85% at least once per week, and 93% at least once per month. These figures will pale with recent new accessibility for high schoolers.  And while much of the usage is social, it also includes tracking and collaborating homework assignments, arranging study groups, and more.  Adults are also heavy internet users: According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, over 1/3 of adults have participated on online social networking, and 69% of all Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession, including finding jobs and ways to upgrade their skills. (This includes using social networks to land employment, an increasing phenomenon in today’s economic climate.)

It’s Not About The Tools Alone, But the Tools Accelerate Broader Social Change

The truth is, like the Commodor 64 and Atari, some – if not all – of these social networking and collaborative platforms are likely to be replaced by more powerful, agile, and ubiquitous versions themselves. But their legacy will remain, meeting demand for transparency, collaboration, and the ability to teach and learn any time, any place, on any subject imaginable, at increasing speed and diminishing cost to the end beneficiary.

We’re Only At the Beginning

There likely will always be a place for traditional work and learning systems, but not without integration of online tools, resources, and even social networking platforms that add to the richness of the educational experience through easier-maintained relationships with educators and peers.  The future of work and learning is today, it includes online tools, content, and networks, and there is no going back.

Lisa Baragar Katz
@katz_lisa

Share/Save