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1. Maintaining Innovative Potential Over Time

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Social innovations journal)

   How can you maintain your community’s social innovative potential over the long term to devise new approaches to intractable social-ecological problems, adapt to changing conditions, and scale innovations to catalyze systems change? Leadership practices that foster capacity to generate fundamental social innovation were identified by highly experienced designers and facilitators of learning networks during a dialogue series on how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities held from 2018 to 2020. In their own words, I offer their advice on how to choose an appropriate suite of innovations through co-work that both probes the system for opportunities for change and pursuesmore »harder-to-achieve leverage points for change by building on short-term innovation. I also offer their insights into how to engage your community member’s innovative potential over time and how to generate useful rapid feedback to stay aligned with your goals using measures that enhance your community’s capacity to self-assess. This can both hold the organization accountable and build capacity for self-governance. In my commentary, I suggest how this practical wisdom concretely applies ideas about systems change to the challenges of organizational leadership.« less
2. Jumpstart Virtuous Cycles Within Social Innovation Communities

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Social innovations journal)

   Strong leadership is crucial to fostering social innovation, and yet successful social innovation organizations are often those in which leaders do not play a dominant role. This is made possible by leadership practices that activate a community’s self-organizing and self-guiding potential. In this paper I share some of these effective practices, which were identified by highly experienced designers and facilitators of learning networks during a dialogue series on how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities held from 2018 to 2020. I provide advice from the netweavers in their own words, along with my commentary on how to create this potentialmore »by initiating and maintaining virtuous cycles of exchange and reciprocity, where group members could “pay it forward” without directly expecting something back every time. Many of these leadership practices are simple actions that are common sense practices in our personal lives but often absent in the workplace, such as creating a welcoming environment, assessing what people wanted to give and receive, being the first to give your members something valuable, calling attention to their successes, and underscoring the value that you provide them every time you interact. One powerful way to foster reciprocity that they emphasized was to organize semi-autonomous small-team activities, or co-work. While co-work can and should accomplish useful outcomes, its greatest value may be in how it maintains necessary coherence and coordination while contributing to building ownership and autonomy that supports an organization’s capacity for self-governance.« less
3. Love and Discord: Creating Passion Through Leadership

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Social innovations journal)

   How can a social innovation enhance diversity in ways that maximize its social benefits and minimize its social costs? This challenge was explored in a dialogue series convened from 2018 to 2020, where highly experienced network designers and facilitators (or “netweavers”) explored how to maintain lively, generative innovation communities. This paper provides advice from the netweavers in their own words, combined with my commentary on their ideas for benefiting from diverse membership and building and maintaining connection within social innovations organizations that may have limited face-to-face interaction. I first explore how to bring love to your leadership by engaging selflessly,more »telling the truth, and cultivating a mind and body connection. I recount how the netweavers engaged in ritual, storytelling, and other creative techniques for enhancing intuition and imagination, and how they maintained brief personal connections that were individually tailored to their community member’s needs. Second, I explore how to embrace diversity and disruption. A creative community contains many kinds of diversity, and these differences are useful for innovation work since they cause people to question and broaden their ideas and assumptions. I recount the netweavers’ ideas about how to weave this capacity for creative disruption within a culture of safety and reassurance without letting things get too comfortable and complacent. They concluded that social innovation communities should not cultivate consensus, but rather should create an environment where people see each other as legitimate participants and feel safe to share their differences.« less
4. System Weaving During Crisis

   Goldstein, Bruce Evan ( March 2021 , Japan social innovation journal)

   Strategies for responding to different kinds of crisis were explored by highly experienced network designers and facilitators (or “netweavers”) during a dialogue series on how to maintain lively and generative innovation communities held from 2018 to 2020. During these discussions, netweavers wrestled with the need to enhance the resilience of their organizations to stress while not inhibiting the opportunities for a more fundamental change that a crisis can bring. In their own words, I provide what participants shared about how to give their members opportunities to connect and support one another, reflect on changing opportunities, and rapidly pivot toward time-sensitivemore »opportunities after the COVID-19 outbreak. I also offer their reflections on the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 about the impact of systemic racism within their organizations and efforts to identify and act on changes within their grasp. In both cases, the netweavers stressed that active and latent capacities they had cultivated in prior years had proven essential for a rapid and effective response to shock and stress.« less
5. Unpacking Latent Diversity

   Godwin, A. ( June 2017 , American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition)

   https://peer.asee.org/29062 This theory paper explores how diversity apart from social identities like race and gender is framed in the engineering education literature and how these concepts promote a different but compatible approach to understanding diversity—latent diversity. Latent diversity is a new approach to diversity work that captures underlying affective and cognitive differences that provide potential sources for innovation but are not visible. This approach does not examine other non-visible social identities like sexual orientation, first-generation status, socioeconomic status, etc. Prior literature suggests that diversity in approaches, problem solving, and ways of thinking improve innovation in engineering design more reliably thanmore »does diversity along the lines of age, race, gender, etc. However, the process of enculturating students into engineering through engineering curriculum often creates homogeneity in students’ approaches to problems, ways of thinking, and attitudes. In this paper, I explore a limited set of existing research on diversity from these underlying perspectives including identities, alternative ways of thinking and being, motivation, cognitive diversity, and innovation and creativity. This work synthesizes the findings of these studies to paint a rich picture of how students develop different attitudes and skills to navigate their paths within engineering. Additionally, this work provides an evidence-based argument for the importance of recognizing and understanding latent diversity to promote a more inclusive environment in engineering and recruit, educate, retain, and graduate more innovative and diverse engineers. This paper opens the conversation about a new, but complementary, focus for developing a STEM workforce rich in talent and capable of adapting to the changing STEM landscape.« less