Creating the Future's
Board / Community Meeting:
Monday, January 13, 2020
10am - 12pm Pacific time
Topic:
Clarifying our board's new role and determining next steps in building that!
Watch / listen to the meeting at the bottom of this page
Creating the Future's board has spent the past several years designing an organizational structure that feels more aligned with accomplishing our mission. (Click on the Category Link for "Organizational Structure" to see the history of these discussions.)
Redesigning the work of the board is a big part of that organizational design.
In discussions earlier this year, we defined the board's work as "upholding the integrity of the organization, ensuring we are walking our talk and meeting the expectations of anyone who has expectations of us. You can see summaries of those discussions at this link.
At our November 2019 meeting, we began the intense work of engineering the actual work of this new board. What will the board members need to know in order to do the work of an "integrity board"? What will they need to have? What are their conditions for success? You can see the actual discussion (or download to listen to it) at this link. And you can read a summary of that discussion here.
During our December meeting, we began parsing these big, hairy "doing" issues, leading to aha's and deep rumination about what exactly we are building. That is the conversation we will continue during our January meeting. Acknowledging that we are building something with no blueprint - that we are building the plane while we're flying it - these conversations balance between deliciously stimulating and seriously mind-bending. Our intent is that we create what is possible, and that is frequently neither a direct nor an easy pathway to take!
As we navigate this new path, we hope you will come along on January 13th, to be part of that discussion!*
How to Prepare
To help you feel as up-to-speed as possible on this meaty topic - the "doing" stage of a 4-year effort to determine the structure that will best accomplish our mission - you can read more about this journey in this summary post here.
You will find a post about what we envision the board to be - the "Integrity Board" - by reading this post. You will get a strong sense of what we began building at our November meeting. And you will get a sense of the nonlinear nature of determining just what this board will look like by listening to our December meeting (if you listen via YouTube, you can speed up to 2x, if that is helpful). We strongly urge you to review these last three links so that we can all hit the ground running at the January meeting.
In addition, these two PDF's may provide context for our discussion. We recommend printing them out or having them otherwise available during the meeting, to spark your thinking during the discussion.
Catalytic Thinking Framework (with red circle indicating where we are in the process)
Operational Functions found in every organization
How to participate
If you have never been part of Creating the Future's work, all our strategy and board meetings are open and participatory, for anyone who wants to be part of the discussion. You can see more about that at this link.
Where we meet:
The board meeting will take place right here at this post. If the video does not appear precisely on time, please be patient – we are probably just running a few minutes late.
There are 3 ways you can participate in our meetings.
- If your familiarity with and commitment to Creating the Future’s work - or your own experience with re-imagining organizational systems - is calling you to be actively involved in the meeting discussion side-by-side at our online “meeting table,” let us know, and we will send you an invitation to join us online.
- If you want to participate but are unable to be in the meeting itself (perhaps you’re at work, or maybe at home with kids running around, etc.), watch the live-stream in real time and tweet your questions and ideas to us via the hashtag #CreatingTheFuture. We read those tweets aloud during the meeting, just as if you were there. This is a great first step for those who are not as familiar with our work, but want to get more involved.
(Please note: We will only see your tweets if you use the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag. In addition, during the meeting, we will not look at blog comments here at this post. While we will check those comments later, during the meeting we will only be following the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag in the Twitter stream.)
- Lastly, if you want to simply watch, or you want to think about what you’re hearing and respond later – or if you will be watching the recording after the meeting happens – please add your thoughts into the comments here at this post. We will include that thinking into the mix of things.
We look forward to your being part of our discussion on Monday, January 13th!
* All Creating the Future's board meetings are open for anyone to participate, or to watch afterwards. To learn more about the thinking behind this openness - and our experiences with being open - click here.
or, LISTEN TO THE MEETING HERE
or Download the MP3
(To download to your hard drive, right-click {or click and hold on a Mac} on the link above and select "Save Target As".. or "Save Link as"... depending on your browser)
Click here for a PDF of the
Chat Stream and Links from the Meeting.
