In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation: (more…)

This past week I was in Yachats attending the Mindell‘s seminar, and pondering the question they were posing, what moves you? Writing about motivation, leadership and learning, we can begin to forget this question and think that I move myself. I decide. I lead. I determine a course of action, what strategies to take, what directions to pursue. But it’s not so simple. The “I” is not necessarily a unified thing. We each have multiple and conflicting parts, drives, desires, reactions, needs. (more…)