Articles

by Laura Kennett and Eleanor Finger Introduction What a year! Full of disruption and adaptation, over and over again. If this sounds like a pattern, then you are correct. Although life is full of patterns, the emergence of COVID-19 has given us an excellent opportunity to hone our pattern recognition skills.  Large-scale, sustained and rapidly spreading global “shocks” like the pandemic trigger a

Analytics and strategy help us navigate the fog of war, but don’t necessarily make us responsible or wise. The ascendance of analytics and its importance in strategy today is truly remarkable. One only needs to admire the seemingly simple act of a Google search to marvel at how analytics is affecting our ability to adapt and learn. Yet with this

The Human Venture publishes a list of books annually. The list of books includes those that were either drawn on in 2020 to support our on-going explorations and programming or were acquired in recognition that they filled a gap and could be useful in the future. The Human Venture community has read all of the books on this list and

It’s amazing to think that Ken has been with the Human Venture community for 20 years now. With that in mind, he wanted to share something that happened around this last Remembrance Day 2020 that overlaps with the solstice season. As usual, Ken had a book that he was going to recommend during one of the bi-weekly Human Venture Associate

One of the functions of pioneer leadership is to build others’ capacity to understand and act in their contexts in more adaptive ways. This means helping others see “what to do and how to do it in a given situation” (Human Venture map 12.3). Even though we work with a lot of different groups, ultimately, our goal is to build people’s capacity for adaptive learning.

I wrote Part 1 of this article, Systems in Converging Crisis, in the spring, when I listed an array of crises that are intensifying around us, including: Now we have entered summer in the northern hemisphere and this list is already obsolete.  I need to add the explosive response to the killing of George Floyd which served to highlight the long and ongoing

“I hate black people.” – Four-year-old white girl. These are words you never wish to hear spoken at all, let alone to hear them coming from your own daughter. But they did. I remember we were driving in the car. I don’t remember where we were driving to or from, only that we were together in the vehicle when she

We are not only in the midst of a global pandemic; we are also experiencing a convergence of several global crises that are shedding light on glaring weaknesses in our systems, including:  What kind of a cluster f&#% are we in? And will the systems that we have come to depend on rebound into utopia or dystopia? It’s very hard to

“There seems little doubt that we are currently in the midst of one of the great critical transitions of the human journey, and yet it is not at all clear where we will end up once our current system resolves into a newly stable state.”  (Jeremy Lent1) “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” (Winston Churchill) While incredibly challenging

I was inspired to write this poem after an Alumni Community Call, reflecting on the voices we pay attention to in order to understand current events and possible paths forward. It is quieter now. Listen. Do you hear the deep voices? Not the voices of people or current events, Not convention, authority, or habit voices,  Not rules, the majority, or