The Peter Block discussion group met yesterday to ponder how to discover and benefit from the abundant intellectual capital and talent in our community. Skip introduced our conversation by reminding us of all the managers, engineers, doctors, writers, architects, and more who are retiring to the Holland area because of its quality of life and affordability. Park Township and Freedom Village were named as two microcosms of talent.
Linda and Judy shared their thinking about how neighborhoods that may appear to be pockets of poverty can be pockets of possibility, once people identify and share their interests, gifts, and passions.
At Herman Miller, where the story of the millwright who was a poet (see http://vimeo.com/10266121) has shaped corporate culture, Kris and her colleagues are trying to discover the talents of people that lie outside of their job descriptions. Should we be more like Google, whose employees may use up to 20% of their time to pursue what they love in order to benefit the organization?
We tend to live and work in silos, often mindlessly. How do we break out of these and discover and the gifts around us and then leverage them to enrich our community? Perhaps these things may help us to move forward:
- invest in deep conversations and deep relationships
- be intentional about connecting outside of our silos and customary networks
- capitalize on our existing networks to get people connected around an issue
- listen for the interests of others and connect them to people in our network (create triads)
- the small group is the unit of transformation – connect with a few people and just get started
Skip committed to getting started. He will talk to a few people from Park Township about the pocket of possibility at Pine Creek School. Linda and others will gather a variety of asset mapping tools to share for our next conversation.
Please join us to share your thoughts on this topic on Thursday, September 16 at 7:30 a.m. at Good Samaritan Ministries, 513 E. 8th Street.
A few books we suggested:
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath, et. al., especially around the idea of finding the bright spot.
- When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Ourselves by Brian Fikkert, Steve Corbett, and John Perkins. Check out Good Sam’s event around this book at http://www.goodsamministries.com/Web/events.asp
