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1. 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, 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. 

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2. 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 pursues 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. 

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3. 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 potential 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. 

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4. Chasing inter-species communication: what marine mammals are telling us about our oceans

   https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsad030  

   Moore, Sue E ( March 2023 , ICES Journal of Marine Science)

   Browman, Howard (Ed.)

   Abstract I describe my path through a series of opportunities that provided stepping stones from childhood years in the landlocked US Midwest to a 45-year-long career focused on cetacean behaviour and ecology. My early interest in the ocean and dolphins led me to switch from majoring in journalism to biology during my undergraduate years. While pursuing a master’s degree focused on bioacoustics, I was employed as a contract scientist with the US Navy’s marine mammal laboratory. During 20 years there, my work ranged from dolphin calling behaviour to marine mammal distribution in Alaskan waters, culminating in a Ph.D. dissertation on cetacean habitats in the Alaskan Arctic. Subsequently, I enjoyed a 20-year career with the US NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service. There, I developed and advanced the idea that marine mammals can act as sentinels of ocean variability. To interpret the messages that marine mammals convey about the ocean, we must broaden science discourse to include Indigenous Knowledge and lessons from the experiences of people whose livelihoods depend on the sea. My advice to students and young professionals is to follow your passion while seeking the perspectives of colleagues from a variety of disciplines and people from all cultures and backgrounds. Coupled with a healthy dose of luck, this approach worked for me. 

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5. How Did I Get From There to Here?

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2022CN000159  

   Gordon, Arnold L. ( November 2022 , Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists)

   In this memoir I trace the trajectory from childhood to a career in physical oceanography. The trajectory was not based on a well thought out plan, but I had a sense of my interest in the ocean and atmosphere. One is faced with many career opportunities in life, choosing the best for you depends on your interest and talents. The better you understand them, the better you recognize “opportunity,” but be flexible, opportunity is never likely to be a perfect fit (it might actually be better fit to your “passion”). My research quest, as an observationalist, is to develop a clearer, conceptual, picture of ocean, how it “works,” with a tilt toward its role in the climate system. I have worked in the cold southern polar regions to the hot tropics, and in‐between; from the top to the bottom of the water column. Here I discuss a few discoveries that led to new insight into interocean exchange and deep ocean ventilation, which are now widely explored: Southern ocean: two modes of convection, along the margins of Antarctica and in the open ocean of the Weddell Sea; Agulhas Leakage: Indian Ocean invades the Atlantic, essential to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation; The Indonesian Throughflow: tropical Pacific water spreads into Indian Ocean, part of the global interocean thermocline exchange.

    

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