Getting to Know Deanna (An excerpt from the book Share This!)

[Cross-posted, with minor edits, from the Zanby blog. -LU]

My good friend, co-conspirator, social media maven, and all-round diva of awesomeness Deanna Zandt has a new book out. And it mentions Zanby! Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler) is chock-full of anecdotes and case studies drawn from her own life as a social activist, artist, and media maker. Deanna illustrates the many ways social media improves our relationships and enables new forms of political and social expression that are changing the world for the better.

One of those anecdotes recounts how Deanna and I met up in Brooklyn two years ago. (And it gives a nice plug for Zanby.) We barely knew each other before that, having met in passing at a conference. But, thanks mainly to Twitter and Facebook, we were able to connect, build trust, and grow a friendship with a depth and speed that would have been virtually impossible just a few short years earlier, considering that she lives in Brooklyn, I live in Seattle, and we see each other once a year, if we’re lucky.

Here, with Deanna’s permission, is an excerpt from pages 41-43 of Share This! where she tells our story:

Your Life Makes History

Now that relationships and trust influence how we receive and manage digital information, we’re becoming more connected, and thus we have the capacity to be more empathetic. That trust-created empathy will lead us away from the isolation and resulting apathy that we’ve experienced as a culture, arising from the 20th century’s focus on mass communications and market demographics.

Here’s a story about how building trust through social networks has worked for me. A couple of years ago, I spoke at a conference in northern California. After my song and dance, Leif Utne, the vice president of community development for the software company Zanby, came up to introduce himself. He was working on a project that he wanted to get my employer, Jim Hightower, involved with. We exchanged contact info and became Facebook friends; later we started following each other on Twitter.

About a year and a half later, Leif messaged me to say that he was coming to Brooklyn for a visit and wanted to know if I’d like to get coffee. Sure! Of course! When we sat down a few days later, I asked him how the baby was–he and his wife had spent a long time adopting a baby from Guatemala, and Leif had even lived there for ten months. He lit up and showed me recent photos, and then asked how my dog, Izzy, was adjusting to life in Brooklyn. I had adopted her from a rescue organization, and we laughed at how the processes for adopting dogs and children were eerily similar.

Leif asked if he could show me a new online service that he’d taken a job with, one that would give groups a way to connect their memberships. Absolutely, I said. We did a run-through, and he talked about some of his company’s successes. I started thinking of clients who could really use something like this tool and offered to put him in touch with them.

My online friendship with Leif is significant for several reasons. Social media enabled a kind of “identity authentication” between us. I was aware of Leif’s family’s work with the Utne Reader before I met him, but being connected via social media gave me insight into some of his values and interests. And vice versa. More important, though, it allowed us to collect seemingly unrelated fragments of information about one another over time, and to create a wide-angled picture of the other person with those fragments. Technology writer Clive Thompson calls this phenomenon “ambient awareness” of the people around us.

It doesn’t impact my life at all to know that Leif is heading to the airport, and he probably doesn’t care that I spent an extra 30 minutes with my dog in the park this morning. But over time, we are able to see a portrait of one another’s lives take shape and feel connected. While Leif’s trip to the airport doesn’t affect my daily life, if he misses his plane, I feel bad for him. There’s the empathy, simply by being aware of another person’s “mundane” activities. Our portraits of one another facilitated an in-person conversation that otherwise would have been stilted and awkward:

“So, you, uh, have kids?”

“No, you?”

“Yeah, one. A little boy.”

“Uh-huh.”

Instead, we were able to tap into what we care about pretty quickly, and the landing into the “business” end of the meeting was much smoother.

Admittedly, experimenting with what it means to share different parts of our lives can sometimes be uncomfortable. Chip Conley, the CEO of a family of boutique hotels in northern California called Joie de Vivre, offers a case in point. In 2009, he wrote about the fallout from photos he posted to Facebook from his latest Burning Man trip. Some workers were surprised to see Conley in a tutu and a sarong. The complicated part wasn’t that he didn’t want them online, or that his investors or board members didn’t want them online; it was that some employees struggled with seeing their fearless leader show a carefree side of himself that didn’t “fit” with the standard work environment. We’re all still determining what we each individually consider acceptable amounts of information, as well as what we’ll tolerate organizationally and culturally.

Thanks to the alienating effect of mass communications, our ability to converse directly with one another, and to engage with the larger culture in a meaningful way, has withered. While no one has figured out a precise formula for what amount or mix of sharing creates empathy, presenting real pictures of real lives indisputably frees us from our pigeonholes. Social networks give us the opportunity to reengage with one another.

Order Share This! at your favorite bookstore, or online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.

Time-Lapse of 2009 Winslow Cohousing Gingerbread Bake

Here, thanks to the photographic and filmmaking prowess of our neighbor Adrian Quan, is a time-lapse of the gingerbread bake-o-rama Cilla and I organized last Saturday, December 19. Cilla made the yummy gingerbread dough in the classic Swedish style. Together with about 40 of our neighbors, we baked, decorated, and built a delicious scale model of the entire Winslow Cohousing community, where we live on Bainbridge Island. The process, which took nearly 6 hours, is rendered here in just under 3 minutes. Cilla has a yellow bandana and blue-and-white striped t-shirt. That’s me in the green apron.

A higher-quality version is posted at Vimeo.

What is Leadership?

Chief Oren Lyons reflects on leadership

Being a leader is a lonely and difficult business, says Chief Oren Lyons, of the Onandaga Nation. The toughest part is often dealing with the people closest to you. If you can stick to what you know is true and face the inevitable attacks that come from your family and friends when the going gets tough, you will have passed one of the true tests of a leader.

It’s the second morning of the Tällberg New Leaders Program, and we’re huddled around the Chief’s feet as he regales us with his reflections on leadership, gesturing grandly out at the sweeping view from our perch on a rocky hilltop high above Lake Siljan.

He reminds us to think like the Iriquois, who always consider the effects that any decision they make will have on the next seven generations. And by seven generations, he says, they mean seven entire lifetimes — nearly 500 years. That’s thinking long-term! He urges us, too, to stand up and speak out for nature. Pointing to a large pine tree nearby, he reminds us that it took hundreds of years for that tree to grow, yet a chainsaw could take it down in the blink of an eye. It will take great leadership to save these trees.

I don’t wear the “leader” label comfortably. There’s something intimidating about being called a leader. What or who am I a leader of? I don’t run an organization. I don’t have employees. I don’t hold public office. I’m a salesguy for a small software startup. Sure, we’re building online communities for organizations and movements that represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. But the buck doesn’t stop with me. I would almost rather the New Leaders Programme were called the New Leadership Programme.

Still, I accept that I am a leader in certain ways. I can speak powerfully about things I care about. And at least some people listen. People do turn to me for advice and opinions on a variety of issues. And I’m a good networker. I have a talent for connecting people to each other to facilitate collaborations that sometimes yield powerful results.

Plus, 20 people sponsored me financially to help facilitate my participation in the NLP. So at least they think I’m a leader, or that it was worth investing money in developing my leadership potential.

The introduction to the NLP reads: “Successful leadership stems from seeing the early trends, understanding the path forward and having the courage to act.”

I’m going to keep chewing on this question. I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Who are your favorite leaders? Why? Do you have any favorite books or resources on leadership? Please share them in the comments below.

My Still Life: 5 objects that show what matters most

My Still Life: 5 objects representing what matters most to me

One of the most powerful elements of the Tallberg New Leaders Program was an exercise called Still Lives, led by British portrait photographer Elizabeth Handy and her husband, author and social theorist Charles Handy. Inspired by the 17th century Dutch tradition where aristocrats would commission still life paintings featuring objects that said things about their wealth, education, travels, etc., Liz decided to update it for this century.

The idea is simple: choose five objects that say something important about you – your values, your work, your family, your life story, whatever matters most to you – plus a flower, to add beauty to the mix. The objects can be just about anything, with a few key exceptions – no gadgetry (cell phones, laptops, etc.), unless they’re really unique to you; no photos of other people, they’re too easy; and no more than one book, to keep the objects diverse. Next, arrange them to be photographed. Finally, share the image with others as a way to explain what matters most to you.

On the second day of the NLP, we made our still lives, photographed by Liz. On the third day, we broke into small groups to share our images with each other. Later in the week, Charles asked me to share my still life with the full Tällberg Forum audience in the main tent.

Here is the video of me sharing my still life (4 min).

My five objects (plus a flower) were:

• Rock – This small black stone is a piece of volcanic rock I pulled from a river of molten lava near the summit of Volcán de Pacaya, one of Guatemala’s three active volcanoes. I stood twirling the clump of molten lava on a stick for nearly an hour, until it had hardened and cooled enough to carry home. It represents my son Mateo, who we adopted from Guatemala in 2007, because, like him, it’s a thing of immense beauty that came from a hot and violent place.
• Clave – This Afro-Cuban percussion instrument is what keeps the pulse in much of Latin music. “Clave” literally means “key” in Spanish. It represents my wife, Cilla, who is the key to keeping a steady rhythm in my life. She reminds me when it’s time to turn off the computer and come to bed.
• Flute – The instrument I’ve played since 4th grade represents creativity, passion and mastery. When I heard Malcolm Gladwell’s notion that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, I realized that the flute is the one thing I’ve probably come closest to spending 10,000 hours working on.
• Notebook – A Moleskin notebook, like Hemingway and other great storytellers used, is a place to record ideas and inspirations. It represents my work as a thinker, a journalist, and a storyteller.
• Moss – The bed of moss in the back represents my work in the world, building networked communities, fostering interconnection, interdependence, and symbiosis. This patch of moss contained what looked like at least four different species of moss. I found it on a rock in the woods next to the hotel where the New Leaders Program took place. Knowing that this patch of moss could be decades old, after the photo shoot I returned it to the spot where I found it.
• Lupines – The flowers I chose were 3 blooming stalks from the same purple lupine plant, ranging in shades from deep royal purple to light lavender. I chose these to represent the importance of diversity, of multiple perspectives and facets that can exist, and should be nurtured, within a single being.

For me, the Still Lives exercise was a profound tool for exploring what matters most to me. It was fun, creative, and deeply emotional. It’s easy for me to get stuck in my head, viewing things from an intellectual, analytical perspective. This exercise invited me to explore my own story, and my own hopes and dreams, by asking myself what the objects I carry with me say about me. And it provided a deep window into the lives of my classmates in the New Leaders Program. I won’t share their stories here. But you can see the touching videos of two of them Lagu Alfred Androga and Anu Bhardwaj.

Try this exercise yourself. What five objects (and what flower) would you pick to show what matters most to you?

Tällberg New Leaders Program

The midnight sun over Tällberg, with Lake Siljan in the distance.

STOCKHOLM — “Damn you if you don’t put what you learn here to good use.” It was with that somber admonition that Bo Ekman welcomed me and 21 of my peers to the Tällberg Foundation’s New Leaders Programme (NLP). Ekman is the 73 year-old founder and chairman of the Tällberg Forum, an annual gathering that draws some 600 scientists, activists, entrepreneurs, artists and world leaders to a village in central Sweden every June to discuss the world’s problems. The former head of strategy at Volvo is a bit fatalistic about humanity’s odds for redemption in the face of the converging economic and ecological crises.

During the three days leading up to this year’s Tällberg Forum, June 22-25, I had the immense privilege to attend the NLP, an intensive workshop designed to give “people in early positions of responsibility an opportunity to think through their wider role in society… to improve the sensitivities and skills that will make them more effective leaders in their organisation and in society.” It was a chance for my cohort to meet some of our elders, reflect on our own paths as leaders, and build personal connections with peers and mentors to help ease our entry into the larger Tällberg Forum community that would descend on the town several days later.

Whether it was youthful naiveté or a necessary coping mechanism in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds, I’m not sure. But our group was decidedly more sanguine, even audaciously hopeful, about the future than Mr. Ekman.

This year’s NLP class was an impressively diverse group of 22 young activists and social entrepreneurs in our 20s and 30s. There was a journalist from Bangladesh, a Chinese student environmental leader, a socially-responsible investment adviser from South Africa, a Mexican entrepreneur, a Saudi princess, a foundation director from Berlin, a Tanzanian political consultant, a Zimbabwean sustainability consultant living in Sweden, an Indian-American clean-tech investor based in Toronto, and a New York-based management consultant who was born in Sudan and raised in a Kenyan refugee camp, among others.

Tom Cummings

The program was designed and facilitated by Rebecca Oliver of the Tallberg Foundation and Tom Cummings of Brussels-based Executive Leadership Partners. Following Cummings’ “Leadership Landscapes” model, the program shifted focus from the personal level to the organizational to the global and back, alternately giving participants opportunities to meditate on our personal stories, values, hopes and dreams; our roles as leaders in our families, organizations, communities, fields/industries, and the wider world; and to engage in a dizzying array of presentations and conversations with experts and leaders in sustainability, diplomacy, health, human rights, business, and science.

I won’t give a play-by-play of the entire program. That would take far too long to write. Instead, I’ll focus on a few highlights.

The “Oh Shit” Briefing

The opening afternoon of the NLP was a bit like boot camp, where they first try to break you down, so they can build you back up even stronger and more effective. After a brief ice-breaker and a welcome from the facilitators, we were treated to a mind-blowingly depressing briefing on the converging global crises from Carl Mossfeldt, VP of the Tällberg Foundation and a former financial industry executive. “I can proudly say that I designed the risk models that led to the failure of two banks,” he related with a wry smile.

Mossfeldt went on to explain how Phase I of globalization was characterized by economic growth leading to localized ecosystem crises. Now we’re in Phase II, in which localized ecosystem crises have started to interact with each other, leading to global system crises. Global systems are reaching tipping points – “planetary boundaries” – beyond which change begins to snowball so fast it’s impossible to predict accurately what the effects will be. In response to these ecosystem crises, social systems are breaking down – for example, the hollowing out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; or the crisis in Darfur, which is linked to desertification, which is driving northern Sudanese Muslims to migrate south, causing land disputes with the villagers of Darfur. One economist even argues that the current economic meltdown can be traced to the 5 hurricanes that hit South Florida and the Gulf Coast earlier this decade. Billions of dollars in insurance claims, the argument goes, destabilized the industry, which in turn destabilized the mortgage business, causing the chain-reaction that brought Wall Street to its knees.

Meanwhile, looking at climate change, the gap between what scientists know about the severity of the crisis and what the public and governments know is widening. “The tools we have available to address these crises are not working,” Mossfeldt says. “The questions we’ve been asking are not working. So what are the questions we should be asking ourselves now?”

Against that uplifting backdrop, Tom and Rebecca invited us to peel ourselves out of our seats and spend the next few days pondering that question, and to imagine our own roles in the answers. “Your life probably has plans for you,” said Tom Cummings.

What those plans are, I’m still not sure. But I came out of my week at Tällberg with a much clearer picture of the direction I’m headed, and a renewed sense of purpose and hope. I’m here on Earth at this point in history to help shepherd humanity through these crises. And my role in that process is to be a facilitator and community builder, using social technologies – both face-to-face and online – to help build stronger, more interdependent, more resilient communities that can weather the storms that are already engulfing us. The planet will still be here in 500 years, but will we?

As architect and social philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Dancing With the Stars

Me and Gro

I have to pinch myself when I realize that Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister and head of the UN commission on environment and development, actually spent nearly 3 hours with me and my peers in an intimate, wide-ranging conversation on everything from her upbringing in a prominent political family to tips for maintaining personal energy and balance (“always get enough sleep”) to the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. We need a funding mechanism to pay for mitigation and adaptation to climate change that is automatic, Brundtland said. Perhaps 2-4% of all revenue from the global CO2 cap-and-trade system should go into a fund administered by the UN. “I don’t trust parliaments,” she says. If it’s not an automatic mechanism in the new climate treaty, then she fears governments will inevitably renege on their financial commitments to the fund.

My classmate Graham Sinclair and I even had the chance to explain Twitter and Facebook and discuss with Brundtland the merits of engaging in social media.

Other superstars we got to spend some quality time with included: Anders Wijkman, Sweden’s outgoing member of the European Parliament; Jan Eliasson, former UN special envoy to Darfur; Christine Loh, CEO of Hong Kong-based think tank Civic Exchange; and Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Stockholm Resilience Centre.

My Mentor: John Elkington

John Elkington and me

Each of us was also paired up with a mentor – an experienced sustainability leader who had been to Tällberg numerous times before, who could show us the ropes, introduce us to others and help us navigate the crazy gathering that was ahead of us.

My mentor was John Elkington, the British author who coined the term “triple bottom line” – i.e. people, planet, and profit – in 1994, which he elaborated on in his 1997 book Cannibals With Forks: Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. A true guru of green business, he is now the director of Volans Ventures, a London and Singapore-based company that is “part think-tank, part consultancy, part broker and part incubator,” focusing on scaling social innovation. Volans recently published The Phoenix Economy: 50 Pioneers in the Business of Social Innovation.

I’m not sure ours was truly a mentor/mentee relationship. It felt more like meeting a colleague. John is incredibly approachable, and despite his lengthy resume, comes across as virtually ego-less — just as interested, if not more so, in learning about what others are doing, than he is in talking about himself. Meeting John was truly a highlight of the trip. I look forward to collaborating with him in some capacity in the future.

More to Come…

There were many other highlights of the NLP, several of which deserve their own posts. Check back soon for more…

Gingerbread Winslow Cohousing Tour

Today Cilla and I organized a gingerbread bake with our neighbors in the Winslow Cohousing Group, where we live on Bainbridge Island. Enjoy this little tour.

Social Media 201: Blogging and Social Networking for Social Change

Here are the slides from a presentation I gave recently on how activists can use social media tools for organizing and advocacy, including case studies on PowerVote.org and TheUpTake.org. I gave this talk at the Western Organizers Summit in Seattle Nov. 17, 2008, sponsored by Democracy in Action and the New Organizing Institute.

It leaves a little to be desired without any audio. Plus, this is my first time using SlideShare, and the formatting of the bullets on some slides got a little messed up in the translation from PowerPoint to whatever format they use. If anyone has tips on how to fix that, I’m all ears.

Singing my favorite song

What’s your favorite song? That was the topic this morning on the first hour of Weekday, the AM talk show on KUOW, one of Seattle’s NPR affiliates. It was interesting how many people’s favorites were positive, uplifting tunes. I hope they post a complete song list on the website. Not so surprising, considering it’s election day, was how many songs had a political edge — Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Curtis Mayfield’s “There’s a Change A-Comin’.”

I called in and sang a few bars of my (and our son Mateo’s) current favorite, Michael Franti’s latest single “Say Hey.” You can listen to today’s show here (I start at 00:31:35).

My Last UtneCast (for now)

After nearly two years as host of the UtneCast podcast, I posted my final episode last week, at least for the time being. Check out UtneCast 40: Gaining Ground: From Green Building to Sustainable Cities, featuring excerpts from my interviews with observers and practitioners of green building — including Paul Hawken, John Knott, Pamela Mang and Bill Reed — on the growing “green cities” movement.

The UtneCast will continue, though not necessarily in the same format or frequency as before. And I’ll still be an occasional contributor.

Meanwhile, Dean Landsman (who edited my UtneCast episodes for the past year) and I are cooking up some exciting new projects. So stay tuned…

/Leif

On the Sale of Utne Magazine

People keep asking me how I feel about the sale of Utne Magazine, my employer for the past 8 years and the family business for the past 23, on June 1 to Ogden Publications of Topeka, Kansas. I left the staff the day of the sale. Rather than continue typing out the same email over and over again, as I’ve been doing for the last 3 weeks, I’ll just summarize my thoughts here, so I have a place to point people.

I feel, in a word, good. Really good, in fact.

I’m happy for Nina Utne, my beloved stepmom and former boss, because she gets back a chunk of the change she sank into keeping the place afloat for the past 7 years, and she’s no longer burdened with endless fundraising and nail-biting cash flow meetings.

I’m happy for the magazine because it gets to continue sustainably (and hopefully profitably) into the future as a crucial platform for launching ideas into the culture. I think Ogden’s a really good fit and I trust that publisher Bryan Welch will be a good steward of the Utne mission. They also publish Mother Earth News, Natural Home, Herbs for Health, The Herb Companion, and several niche collector magazines. I’m confident that I’ll be able to look with pride for a long time to come on the publication that still bears my family name.

I’m happy for my former coworkers, who got to keep their jobs (well, all but 5 of us), and, according to Ogden, will stay in their very cool workspace in Minneapolis.

And quite honestly, I’m happy for myself. After 8 years at the magazine, I had already been thinking for awhile about making some kind of professional move. My wife, Cilla, has been commuting to Seattle for the past year to attend grad school. Now we’ve decided to spend the coming year out there, living on Bainbridge Island while she finishes up her green MBA. Plus, I get to keep working for Utne as a freelancer, contributing story ideas, writing articles, and producing podcasts.

I’m not sure yet how I’ll be spending most of my time over the coming year, but opportunities have been coming at me from every direction ever since the moment I left the magazine staff. There are some exciting possibilities in the works, which I’ll be sure to update you on here.

Of course I have mixed feelings about the sale. The magazine my father founded, the family business for 23 years, is no longer owned by my family. That makes me sad. And it’s sad that an independent, single-title thought leader (that’s Utne’s category in the advertising world) magazine publishing company cannot be sustainable under a for-profit model in this country. Just about every other one in our category — Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive — has either been sold to a larger company or gone nonprofit.

Like so many other industries, the economics of the magazine business have changed so much in the past 2 decades that small independent publishers are an endangered species.

But all things considered, I’m really happy about how all of this has gone down. And I’m excited to start my new life. To mark the occasion, I even shaved my head. I’ll upload a video of it soon.