ACCELERATING GROWTH of conscious awareness SERIES

Right action requires clarity and focus. It requires some stillness—sitting with the questions. One generative question may provide the opening you seek.

Sometimes, one good take-away can clear away the fog of uncertainty and renew your resolve. It’s looking increasingly clear that we’re now running a marathon instead of a sprint. Your agility, adaptability, and resilience will be tested…perhaps like never before. That’s why illuminating strengths—yours personally and the best of what is all around you—is essential to your success. Let’s sit together with a question…and see what emerges.

The prototype of this series unfolded between Spring and early Fall 2020 as a way for us to come together during a time of massive collective disturbance. The initial questions originated from my outreach to my network in the early period of the pandemic and related upheaval, asking “what do you need right now; what’s on your mind as you are learning to navigate this unfolding reality?”

And so our questions emerged—all at once—and we placed on the calendar as 16 offerings between June and September. Looking back at the completed first series finds that the topics tended to cluster into recognizable categories.

As your review this list, what questions are you sitting with right now? What questions—if explored even briefly through a spirited inquiry with other professionals—might give you direction and traction?

Send me your best ideas

Clustered Offerings from the 
Accelerating Growth of Conscious Awareness Series

Personal Adaptation: Learning How to Be

  • What is the current environment revealing about me, my team, my organization and its purpose? 
  • If you have the courage to unapologetically draw attention to espoused values and organizational culture, what might you find…and how would you respond? 
  • What does vitality look like on a team, organization, and/or community basis? What might I (we) do to make the best contribution toward that? 
  • What are the greatest lessons we’ve learned so far from our response to the current disruption? What assumptions have been busted? What new truth seems undeniable? 
  • If in your professional capacity, the pandemic afforded you the opportunity to work from home, what key learning do you have about what is the essential essence of your work and contribution to mission? What seemed to just fall away, perhaps becoming superfluous in the new reality?
  • What is really essential for the outcomes you seek? Repacking for this new future – what could be released and what might be brought forward?

Navigating Uncharted Waters for Your Organization

  • What might multiple plausible futures look like for your enterprise? How might scenario thinking foster organizational agility?
  • How can you prioritize in a crisis? How might your image of the future become a filter for determining what’s really important now?
  • How might you reimagine possibilities as if you’re running a start-up?…because, the pandemic [and each successive disruption], proved you are!

Reimagining and Engaging Community

  • How can I navigate the paradox of this moment (e.g., included/excluded, scarcity/abundance, enough/not enough, etc.) in ways that builds and strengthens community?
  • What might the best expression of our commitment look like moving forward if we seek to truly engage our whole community, now that our hearts are broken wide open?
  • What might be possible if an entire community of nonprofits join together in a common imagination of a thriving community?

Leadership 

  • What if your leadership brand is shaped by the questions you ask? What might you change?

Relearning How to Learn 

  • What lessons are we learning now that may have long been the wisdom of indigenous peoples? With our conscious awareness opening a bit, how and what might we learn?

Benefactor Communication During Crisis of Uncertainty

  • What’s the right way to reach out to benefactors right now?

Choosing a Topic of Inquiry That Provides Traction

  • What one or two things are we beginning to do in new and different ways now that you would want to spotlight and have us extend and perhaps keep doing into the future?