Featured News

Featured News

Power, Love and Justice
Rebecca Freeth -
May 4th, 2012
Over the past several years, Adam Kahane has articulated a fresh way of thinking about how to navigate the complexities of social change by drawing attention to the dance between power and love. This kind of navigation evokes for me images of a tango, with two people paying exquisite attention to their own individual embodied scripts while deeply attuned to each other: taut and fluid, alert to the possibility of the moment and submerged in timeless sensuality. This tension between power as self-realisation and love as connection strikes a deep intuitive and conceptual chord with audiences whenever I see Adam present it. It has been a rich resource to my own work as a facilitator.
 
In this article, I’d like to add the element of justice to the power-love configuration and explore what this combination might mean for all of us who navigate social change. In the tango, our eyes may be drawn to the couple in the middle of the dance floor, but the dance doesn’t take place in isolation. We still need to take into account the music, the other dancers, the audience – and even those excluded from the dance hall altogether. I have found that the presence of injustice is a significant stumbling block to social change. Every country has its own brand of injustice. In South Africa, where I work, it is most evident in terms of racial discrimination, past and present.
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Innovation as if the World Matters: Creating Action on 21st Century Issues with Multi-Stakeholder Groups
Mia Eisenstadt -
Dec 14th, 2011
In this article, I argue that the time is right to innovate as if the world is at stake. We are at the point where we know where we want to go, whether it’s building a green economy, creating a massive number of jobs, or decreasing global carbon emissions. Now we need to move beyond bringing groups together to discuss vision, or the potential of collaboration and begin implementing action, one step at a time. Where we lack the know-how to get to where we want to go, we need to experiment and create prototypes until we reach our desired outcomes.
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The Generative Limits of Creativity
Nathan Heintz -
Oct 7th, 2011

Usually, when we think of limits, we think of restrictions that hold us back, impeding our free energies; we think of what we cannot do. In fact, limits are necessary characteristics of every phenomenon, person, organisation, and creative pursuit. Limits, edges, and boundaries are the determining factors that give things their appearance, structure, and definition.

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Capacity-Building for Systemic Change
Mille Bojer -
Jun 18th, 2011
Every change effort we engage in at Reos Partners has its own distinct purpose and objectives specific to the system we are trying to influence—be that child protection in Australia, business sustainability in Brazil, or food security in South Africa. At the same time, in our work with diverse Change Labs, we have found that these projects commonly generate four key intermediate results that together help to achieve systemic change.
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The Power of Art for Social Change
Mia Eisenstadt -
Mar 22nd, 2011

In this article I make the case for presencing as a vital tool in addressing our most complex issues. I discuss nature solos as a starting point for presencing but argue that art is an alternative route for reaching states of presencing with groups. I discuss the role of art in social change more broadly and suggest the huge potential of art as a means of people connecting with their own creativity, as well as connecting to purpose and highest future possibilities for our communities and the planet.

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“Building Together for Our Children”: Lessons from a Journey of Collaboration
Marianne Knuth -
Dec 9th, 2010

In 2007, I had the privilege of becoming part of a collaborative effort to demonstrate to people throughout South Africa that it is possible to take care of all of our children. In response to the overwhelming number of orphans and vulnerable children in the country, the Hollard Foundation initiated a process, in partnership with the Department of Social Development, to work to shift the system of childcare in the geographical location of the Midvaal municipality (some 40km south of Johannesburg). One of the goals was for the lessons learned from this initiative to serve the country as a whole. To help them in this undertaking they brought in Convene Venture Philanthropy and Reos Partners.

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World Cup 2010: Why We Must Not Forget What Just Happened
Colleen Magner -
Sep 6th, 2010

Like many others locally and abroad, I have been curious about how we as South Africans have changed as a result of our hosting of the recent World Cup football tournament. In case you missed it, the event was a great success, and the international press and FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) depicted South Africans as efficient, friendly, united, world-class hosts. People from across the country, of all races and classes, came together to welcome the world and celebrate, despite the fact that their national team, Bafana Bafana, didn’t make it passed the first round.

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Social Sculpture: Enabling Society to Change Itself
Jeff Barnum -
Jun 15th, 2010

In our work at Reos, we help stakeholders from across an entire social system come together to see their challenge from a whole-system perspective. With the whole picture in view, they then design, test, and evolve ideas for initiatives that they believe have the potential to address their challenge. 

A key part of this process is uncovering and identifying the mindsets deep within the fabric of the social challenge: core beliefs, paradigms, assumptions, world views, dogmas, and identities that in turn shape behaviour, relationships, policies, and other structures that profoundly shape our lives.
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Laboratories for Social Change: Towards a Theory of Systemic Action
Zaid Hassan -
Mar 8th, 2010

CURRENT APPROACHES TO ADDRESSING COMPLEX SOCIAL CHALLENGES ARE NOT WORKING. There is much to celebrate in terms of the number of people involved in change initiatives, in the increasing amounts of money being invested, and in the attention being given to innovation. The underlying trends, however, from accelerating species loss to ballooning public debt to rising rates of obesity, continue to deteriorate. The social fabric is increasingly strained under loads it was never intended to contain. In the face of increasing injustice, direct action has either become a strident call for someone else to take action or the frantic alleviation of symptoms that leave underlying causes largely intact. For instance, we feel increasing pressure to change our behaviour, particularly around environmental issues, in what sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as an attempt to find “individual solutions to systemic contradictions”.

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An Introduction to Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change
Adam Kahane -
Dec 9th, 2009

Beyond War and Peace

Our two most common ways of trying to address our toughest social challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peace. Neither of these ways works. We can try, using our guns or money or votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others want—but inevitably the others push back. Or we can try not to push anything on anyone—but that leaves our situation just as it is.

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