LIBRARY RESOURCES & BLOG
This area is filled with how-to articles, engaging conversations, and tons of examples of Catalytic Thinking in Action including actual planning sessions. Much to explore and learn from!
What a joyful exercise it has been to design a sleuthing effort to engage conversation with people who care about accomplishing Creating the Future’s mission! Using Catalytic Thinking, we are finding the potential not just in ultimately partnering with people with common goals, but the potential in the process of discovery itself. During our February … Read more
Creating the Future has been developing a plan to find true partners for building out our efforts to accomplish our mission. Our approach to identifying the fit for those partners will be a sleuthing effort, engaging in conversations rooted in inquiry and a real desire to connect and share the work we are doing. Our … Read more
Creating the Future is in build-out mode! Having established a track record in our start-up years, the 10-year clock towards “Mission Accomplished” officially kicked off last year – full steam ahead to a world filled with systems that bring out the best in us all. As we asked, “What will it take to accomplish the … Read more
The next meeting of our Sleuthing-for-Partners design effort will be Wednesday, February 14th from 1pm-4pm Pacific time. The meeting will happen right here. For details on how to participate, head to the bottom of the post. For a summary and the video / audio of the first meeting, head to this post. That first meeting … Read more
What is different about movements vs organizations? This question is of critical importance to Creating the Future’s mission, as we are experimenting with different structures guided by the singular question, “What structure will most effectively accomplish social missions?” The chart at this link has been the basis of our explorations as we’ve sought to answer that … Read more
NOTE: This post is Part 2 of Creating the Future’s “Theory of Everything.” You will find Part 1 – the theory – at this post here. Catalytic Thinking is a set of practices that make explicit the simple factors that create positive results, so those results can be consistently replicated and scaled. The Back-Story In 1998, … Read more
Ever since our founding, everything about Creating the Future has been an experiment to discover and share systems (i.e. “the way we do things”) that bring out the best in everyone. With that mandate, one of the systems that has repeatedly cried out for change has been the variety of systems for funding social change. … Read more
In early July, Creating the Future launched an experiment in online learning. The experiment combined various aspects our team has wanted explore, from the way the content was presented, to the way questions were encouraged, to the way tuition was structured. Tomorrow, we will be debriefing from our first toe-in-the water with this experiment. In … Read more
I wrote the following observations in The Pollyanna Principles back in 2008. The words feel even more true — and an even more necessary message — in today’s troubling times. Our Animal Nature Consider the phrase “Human Nature.” Do we invoke that phrase when we are talking glowingly about our brethren? Hardly. We use the phrase to focus on our greed, our … Read more
The following is Part 2 of a two-part post, the draft Statement of Our Values in Action. For background to provide context for this statement, please click to Part 1 here. On June 12th, from 1pm-3pm ET (US), Creating the Future community members will discuss an updated Statement of Our Values in Action. Based on … Read more