Brown Bag: Leadership Tools & Practices for Large-Scale Change in Cities, with Ahmad Mansur

“The world’s public and private sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation in ‘complexity’ is the biggest challenge confronting them.… They identify ‘creativity’ as the single most leadership competency for seeking a path through this complexity.” – IBM CEO Study (2010) Leaders face enormous challenges in cities, regions and communities, from low-performing educational systems, public safety threats to crumbling infrastructures, housing shortages, workforce challenges, and environmental concerns. These problems are complex, multi-directional and cannot be solved with one leader, entity or […]

The Power of Sitting in Circle

One early January morning two years ago, Jeff Conklin, Eugene Eric Kim, and I met at the Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Fairfield and drove on to Sacramento together. We went to talk with longtime stakeholders in the California Delta about a different way of thinking about the wickedly difficult problems of  water and the Delta. Last week was our penultimate meeting of the second phase of the project that resulted from that Sacramento trip: the Delta Dialogues. Over the […]