Emily is incredibly fortunate to occasionally contribute her stories and thoughts to the Lift Blog maintained by some management and leadership experts she deeply admires, Bob and Ryan Quinn from the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, respectively. This father/son pair wrote a book entitled “Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Situation” that inspires the blog. This week, Ryan posted a blog that started to analyze an experience Emily had while trying to progress efforts for large scale environmental education and engagement. Ryan takes a first pass at understanding whether or not it matters if people believe in climate change… in this conversation and analysis- maybe it doesn’t.
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“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.â€
A good friend of mine recently emailed me his retelling of a story he heard elsewhere. Here is what he wrote:
…The father was a decorated WWII Air Force veteran whose bomber went down. Everyone on the plane lived, however. The son asked his father “what were the men on the plane doing as it fell?†and the father responded, “bellyaching and crying.†The son said he could understand doing that, but then asked “What were you doing?†To which the father replied, “FIXING THE PROBLEM. Crying never fixed a goddamn thing.â€
(Pardon the language.)
I read this story the first time, snickered a little, and hastily filed it somewhere in my brain with all of the other snicker-worthy quips from feisty curmudgeons. Somehow my brain revisited and realized that the father/veteran in this story was far more than snicker-worthy. Behind the abrasive tone, there is content worth considering, deeply in fact. What could I learn from him the veteran as an advocate for sustainability and student of positive organizational scholarship?
Given that this is all I know of the story, please forgive (and hopefully enjoy) the assumptions, creative license, and inference I make about the context. View Full Article »
From the executive summary of the book found on the website: “We live in a time of massive institutional failure, collectively creating results that nobody wants. Climate change. AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. Violence. Terrorism. Destruction of communities, nature, life — the foundations of our social, economic, ecological, and spiritual well being. This time calls for a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity to meet challenges in a more conscious, intentional, and strategic way. The development of such a capacity would allow us to create a future of greater possibilities.”
An important part of changing the world is changing what we see and pay attention to…
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“”You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.