follow up: Creating A Cultural Shift

Following up on a previous post, further evidence of the cultural shift within the World Economic Forum:

• I see that they have selected "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" for the theme of their 08 Annual Meeting in Davos - a theme well outside the imagination - collaborative, collective, or otherwise - of the Forum only a couple of years ago.
• The WorkSpace has continued to get prominent placement and widespread engagement this year, with return deployments to the Middle East and Africa, as well as inaugural trips to China (including sessions entirely in Mandarin) and India (coming in December).

Tomorrow Makers continues to partner with The Value Web and the Forum, where our role is to help shape the WorkSpace sessions, offering mentoring and guidance to the Forum team as they learn the art and science of collaborative design. Most recently, I worked with the China team to develop a workshop in which the participants explored eight different biological systems - ranging from rain forests to meerkat mobs - mapping characteristics and behaviors of those systems that could provide insight into the challenge of creating and maintaining a sustainable enterprise. The session was conducted twice - once in English, and another in Mandarin.

Comments

[alicia]

On metaphors from Dalian - This metaphors module was a first for the Forum. I new it would be great even as I crossed my fingers. With only minimal hesitation the participants embraced the excercise. After the workshop a participant remarked to a member of the Value Web that when he entered the breakout and saw the assignment he thought we were crazy. Twenty minutes later he thought we were genius. The metaphor gave him space to look at the sustainablility of his organization in whole new ways. Very exciting!