Current e-Journal

July 08, 2025

That’s an awesome question!

In this week’s Systems Change Newsletter…

Invitations and Announcements
Catalytic Thinking Exercise: That’s an awesome question!
Resources to Further Your Practice

Invitations & Announcements

How the U.S. Budget Bill will affect nonprofits around the world
Last week, the U.S. Congress passed a sweeping bill that not only set the federal budget for the coming year, but established some extreme policy changes for the entire U.S. government. This will affect not only people living in the United States, but nonprofits and other changemakers around the world in a variety of ways.

To keep up with how these changes will affect your work wherever you are, we encourage you to follow the National Council of Nonprofits on social media. We also encourage you to follow the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s social media and to subscribe (a subscription is only $8 per month). Information is power!

Catalytic Thinking Exercise:
That’s an awesome question!

Readers of this newsletter know that Catalytic Thinking is a framework rooted in QUESTIONS that help shift the mindsets and approaches that keep changemakers stuck.

The result of these shifts is a radically inclusive, radically strength-based, and radically visionary approach to creating real change.

This week’s Catalytic Thinking exercise is all about your own self-assessment. What has shifted since you started asking different questions?

When we begin practicing a different way of being, at first it can feel clunky. Once things start feeling more natural, though, we often forget that we ever did things the old way, making it difficult to assess what has actually changed.

This week’s newsletter is therefore an opportunity for self-assessment and growth. If we’re going to build strength out in the world, we need to build and assess our own strength as changemakers.

That goes for assessing our own work here at Creating the Future as well. As you assess your own growth, you will be helping us assess our own success in sharing these approaches with you!

Refresher: The Catalytic Thinking Questions
The questions in the Catalytic Thinking framework are about people, purpose, and resources, as follows:

Questions about People:
Question 1: Who will be affected by what we are considering? What would it take for them to lead / make decisions about the direction we take?
Question 2: What are we listening for? For all those people who will be affected, what do they aspire to? What strengths do they have to build upon? What are their core values?

Questions about Purpose:
Question 3: What is the best possible ultimate result of what we are considering doing – the highest potential outcome?
Question 4: What conditions need to be in place for that high potential outcome to be reality?
Question 5: What actions will create those conditions?

Questions about Resources:
Question 6: What needs to be in place internally, within our group, in order to take those actions?
Question 7: What strengths do we have to build upon? Who in our community already has / is doing what we need?

The Assessment:
To help you think about your own growth, and to help us assess our own efforts, we have made this assessment as simple and personal as possible.

Please think about the following and hit reply to share your answers with us.

For those who are already practicing with the framework, an opportunity to assess your growth…

Which is your favorite Catalytic Thinking question? Which is the question you find yourself asking over and over – your go-to question? (If there is more than one, please think about each one separately.)
What is it about your experience with that question that causes you to keep coming back to that one again and again?
Is there a question you have tried, that has not been as successful for you? If so, which one, and what was your experience with that question?

For those who have been curious but have NOT yet been practicing with the framework, an opportunity to take a first step towards asking more effective questions…

Is there a Catalytic Thinking question in particular that intrigues you, that you’ve wanted to try?
What is it about that question that calls to you? What intrigues you about it? What are you thinking it might shift in your work or your life?

We hope you will take this week’s questions as a way to think about your own growth, both actual and anticipated.

And please, hit reply to share your answers with us, as part of our own self-assessment.

We look forward to learning from you!

Resources to Further Your Practice

READ: This article from Stanford Social Innovation Review provides great examples of Catalytic Thinking in action. Read it here…
REVIEW: This page summarizes various aspects of the Catalytic Thinking framework, with text and videos. See it here…
LEARN: Our self-paced classes are a great way to dive into the questions. Dive in here…

Help Keep Our Programs Freely Available
Creating the Future’s eJournal is free. And there are no financial barriers to our classes – tuition is whatever folks can afford. Because we never want money to stand in the way of people learning.

If you value our content and our approach, please donate here – and please consider becoming a monthly supporter of our work.

eJournal Archives:
If you’re new to our eJournal, or just want to remind yourself of past practice exercises we’ve shared, check out our eJournal archives here.

Creating the Future's Mission

Teach people how to change the systems they find themselves in,

to create a future different from our past -

all by changing the questions they ask.

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