Category: Tools We Love

Here are tools for success that we support and/or utilize

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Tools We Love: Story Telling

Storytelling is important… 

This weekend my cousin jokingly told me I went from trash to treasure. She was right and in more ways than just my relationship. Few people outside of close friends and intermediate family know all that I went through in 2014-2015. I didn’t think I would ever recover or bounce back. I got so tired of calling on friends to come and rescue my daughter, Zorah and me. I got tired of looking for places to stay so that I could sleep safely only to be woken up by nightmares.

I remember riding on the passenger side of my car believing my ex was about to drop me off at work. I remember feeling the vibe was off and that I should keep quiet. I remember being relieved that we were almost at my work and that I had managed to miss another one of his episodes. Then he turned around and in no time, we were driving 120mph on the interstate. He said I thought I was “somebody” because I had a new job. He told me that, “I wasn’t better than him” and that “we both were about to die.” I remember him leaving the right driving lane to veer towards some construction work and then all of sudden he stopped. He drove me to work and I walked in with a smile on my face.

I should have left then, but I had left before. I figured why try to leave again. In so many words, that day I had accepted my fate. Along with that acceptance, my idea of what a nuclear family should like & my fear of being a single Black mom caused me to stay longer than I should have. My settling for trash in my relationship caused me to settle for trash in other areas. I didn’t think I was valuable enough to be a great mom. I didn’t recognize the value of my skill set and settled for a low salary. I WAS LOST.

Not only was I lost, but I felt alone. Some friends, who didn’t understand why I stayed, walked away. It was difficult. I will never deny that, yet, it gets better. I know that for sure. IT GETS BETTER!

You don’t have to settle for half love, abusive partners, unappreciative jobs, or anyone for that matter that doesn’t value you. You may not leave the first time, or the second, or the third but know that you are not alone. Know that our stories have made us kindred and that I honor you for your story.  I believe in the power of sharing our stories. We give power to ourselves by telling our truth. I pray that you will see the glory in your truth and grab ahold to it. The book of Romans tells us “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” I’m telling you that the Glory is already upon us. I hope this helps you to see your Glory more now than ever before. 

 

 

A little more about storytelling….

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Sites We Love: We Are Salt

Salt is an online magazine that focuses on convening positive social change agents and mobilizing them.  Salt focuses on these categories: New Economy, Positive Impact, Sustainable Solutions, Inspiring Leaders, and Future Inc.  The magazine is based in London but thankfully can be utilized by the world. Check out their ‘What We Stand For‘ page and see Salt’s focus. We love them because their values align with ours. The number one rule of being a change agent is know who your tribe is. Salt is our tribe.

There is so much information that they have one the site.  Also, check out their Facebook Page. Here is a little more to give you a teaser…

 

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Workshops: Practicing Facilitation Techniques

We created a new workshop to practice facilitation techniques that easily apply to many different situations while looking at how proper facilitating parallels with guidelines in transformational leadership.

The objectives of the workshop were:

  1. Focus on and practice three facilitation techniques. All these facilitation techniques can access the knowledge and skills from the participants.
    • Using a talking stick
    • Crowd Sourcing
    • Creating smaller groups
  2. Know where to find the tools for new facilitation techniques. (That is the purpose of this post)
  3. Identify how transformational leadership aligns with facilitating groups. 

Transformational Leadership Guidelines used:

We are referencing specifically the book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky. This is a terrific book with tools for bringing transformational leadership to change yourself, your organizations, and your surroundings.

  1. Get to the Balcony
  2. Determine the Ripeness of the Issue in the System
  3. Ask, Who am I in This Picture?
  4. Think Hard About Your Framing
  5. Hold Steady
  6. Analyze the Factions That Begin to Emerge
  7. Keep the Work at the Center of People’s Attention

 

Facilitation Technique One: Using a talking stick

Talking sticks or center points for someone to use in replace of a talking stick are useful for many reasons.  Here are 5 great reasons. Really, they are great for providing space for someone to talk and others space to listen.  Talking sticks can easily be brought into other conversation formats such as a fish bowl, conversation cafe, or board meetings.  We practiced using them in everyday conversations and how that changes the space.

Here are a couple other wonderful links about talking sticks:

Facilitation Technique Two: Crowdsourcing

We looked at how crowdsourcing can be used formally and informally.  Often, we need it informally to bring a group to one focal point or use it to find common ground as in basic conflict management.  The idea is to find out what each individual’s opinion is about a topic or argument and begin working from there.

When we need to document what a group’s ideas or action steps are, we tend to use more formal crowdsourcing.  We often see this happen on social media or on the street polling. For our workshop, we used the very useful 25/10 Crowdsourcing structure.  It is a lot of fun and gets a group uniquely working in a similar direction.

Facilitation Technique Three: Separation Techniques

Often the most skilled and knowledge filled people in a group is not the facilitator, but are the participants.  Many different fantastic facilitation structures are ones where participants are split into smaller groups, triads, or even pairs to work with each other.  To practice this, we used Troika Consulting.  It is an excellent way to get groups of three together and allow each participant equal time to focus on one single question or obstacle.

Other Separation Techniques include:

Many of the structures we use are Liberating Structures.  Check out how much we love Liberating Structures!

***If you would like more information on how Project Kinect can facilitate this or another one of our workshops for your team, email us: workshops@projectkinect.com.

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Tools We Love: Liberating Structures

This week we are using a lot of Liberating Structures and figured now is the best time to highlight these amazing tools.  We could write a ton about this tool, but it has already been done for us. Below is an except from the Liberating Structure website. Enjoy and reach out if you have questions.  There are Liberating Structure user groups and we often use them in our workshops. 

Liberating Structures make it easy for leaders of all levels to create conditions for people to work at the top of their intelligence and creativity. In this environment, people thrive and enjoy their work. It is also the path to top performance.

Practice is the only way to discover the amazing differences that Liberating Structures can spark. Since practice is also the only way to master the use of Liberating Structures, we focused our attention on “how to” descriptions.  We have tried to make them practical, easy to follow and concrete.

We have chosen not to copyright any of our work and instead publish it under a Creative Commons License. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to feel free to use, copy, and disseminate this material and make his or her corner of the world a better place.

Here is a fun video with Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, the creators of Liberating Structures.

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Voices We Love: Dan Kipp

One of the newest voices to be added to voices we love is Dan Kipp.  He is young, but that detail cannot dispute his boldness. He holds courage to speak the truth and the ability to provide people assurance when dealing with difficult subject matter. Kipp works for the Young Adult Abuse Prevention Program in Maine. He brings to this responsibility his sociology and women’s studies degrees.  His blog, Calling Out, Welcome In, is his vehicle to sharing tools, his thoughts, and daily experience with the world. According to Kipp, “The way I see it, these are two essential steps to take: (1) Calling out, or holding men accountable for the messed up actions we’ve taken or beliefs we’ve learned from a sexist society, but doing so in the spirit of (2) Welcome in, or inviting men to be introspective and to seek positive change from within.” To Dan, this cycle is empowering.

This post is also categorized as ‘Tools We Love’ because Kipp has provided an amazing list of resources for young people who are facing abuse.  Share this list with anyone who you think may need it.

Here is a piece of one of Dan’s posts called Lesson #2.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.  Check out Calling Out, Welcome In. It has a lot to offer and you get to experience this young, active, change-making voice for your self.

 

Dismantling the Part-riarchy

Violence, superiority, entitlement: these are things that all men in a hetero-sexist, patriarchal society learn (albeit, to varying degrees).

They are attitudes that are normal, active, even functional for men in such a society.

They are attitudes that lay dormant in a man who has not questioned this version of masculinity, who has not had any positive role models to show him an alternative way to be a man.

This makes the line between a “good guy” and an “abuser” scarily thin. It’s why, when I’m playing the role of the abuser, I try to win over the male students in the classroom early in the skit. If I can get them to identify and laugh with “Jake” before they see his abusive side, it helps to show that abusers aren’t just monsters, or sociopaths, or skeeveballs we can see from miles away. An abuser could be our friends, our fathers, our coaches.

I don’t say this to scare you.

I don’t say this to condemn men as a group.

I say this to call you in.

Once we realize the scope of the problem, it demands of us some collective work:

To examine masculinity. To question masculinity as it exists within ourselves as individuals, but also within our friends, family, school, and wider culture. To unlearn masculinity-as-sexism. To unlearn masculinity-as-violence.

To examine what it means to be fully human. To encourage the boys and men in our lives – but also the schools we attend, the culture in which we partake – to treat others with full humanity. To learn masculinity-as-respect. To learn masculinity-as-nonviolence.  

We need to rewrite the script on what it means to be a man in America, and we need everyone to play their part.

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Tools We Love: Sustainability Options for Nonprofits

We hosted a workshop at Madison Nonprofit Day this year titled, ‘Sustainable Business Plans for Nonprofits.’  While there are some amazing ideas on how to make nonprofits less reliant on grants, taking action to accomplish this is going to take some time.  We must change our frame of mind from, “We need support and assistance” to “We offer greatness to everyone and our business is better than just measuring success.”

The workshop focused on using the expertise in the room. We all know that no one really knows the scene better than the people working in it.  They just sometimes need some love, support, and space to think about what else is possible. Here is a list of resources we wanted to offer to them and figured it should be shared with everyone.

 

Sustainability References

 

Nonprofit with a For-Profit Business

 

Forming a For-Profit Partnership or Subsidiary

 

Miscellaneous

 

Additional Notes From Workshop

  • Let’s remember that sustainability does not only mean fiscal sustainability. How do we better become sustainable with volunteers, mental health, and capacity building?
  • Remind yourselves what your doing takes a lot and remember how amazing you are!
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Tools We Love: Periscope

Recently on a project with Peacework, we were introduced to Periscope.  If you haven’t heard about it yet, let us have the excitement to introduce you to it.  Periscope, similar to Meerkat, is a new social media platform that allows you to broadcast an event, meeting, conversation, or whatever, live for a much wider audience. The app also allows viewers to become interactive in the conversation by adding insight, asking questions, or just emoticons. We suggest you play with it and begin sharing it because we see it as an amazing vehicle to build bridges among diverse communities.

Here are some tools to help you better utilize Periscope: 

  • Here are two videos to help you a little bit. The first video comes from ‘Here is Your Guide‘.

 

 

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Tools We Love: Satire

It is difficult to dispute that majority of our media is not objective and does not report the news.  It is skewed, often has an agenda or is just commentary about what other commentators are saying about the “news”. Someone who we enjoy though is Chris Hayes. Some time ago, he shared a satirical story about white mob crime in efforts to demonstrate how different black and white people are portrayed in the media.  Then, one of Project Kinect’s favorite voices, Franchesca Ramsey, wrote an article about it on UpWorthy. Please check out her article.  This link will provide a bit more about her if you would like to check it out.

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Tools We Love: Public Speaking Tips

Recently we came across an older article in Entrepreneur about the gifted Simon Sinek and his public speaking ability. The author, Kim Lachance Shandrow, put together these 7 Powerful Public Speaking Tips From One of the Most-Watched Ted Talk Speakers.  Its a nice little article to read through if you are still a nervous public speaker or want to develop more as you work on your presence before crowds.  Here are a couple of Shandrow’s tips.  Check out the article for the entire list.

Enjoy!

1. Don’t talk right away.

Sinek says you should never talk as you walk out on stage. “A lot of people start talking right away, and it’s out of nerves,” Sinek says. “That communicates a little bit of insecurity and fear.”

Instead, quietly walk out on stage. Then take a deep breath, find your place, wait a few seconds and begin. “I know it sounds long and tedious and it feels excruciatingly awkward when you do it,” Sinek says, “but it shows the audience you’re totally confident and in charge of the situation.”

4. Speak unusually slowly.

When you get nervous, it’s not just your heart beat that quickens. Your words also tend to speed up. Luckily Sinek says audiences are more patient and forgiving than we know.

“They want you to succeed up there, but the more you rush, the more you turn them off,” he says. “If you just go quiet for a moment and take a long, deep breath, they’ll wait for you. It’s kind of amazing.”

 

Here is another Project Kinect article on Simon Sinek.

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