Inspiration Week Highlights

Written by Rebecca Perlmutter, Innovation Network Senior Associate

Inspired by our friends at CEI, who begin every January with two weeks of independent study, we decided to pilot a similar week for the first of week of January. The purpose of the week was to seek inspiration and insight, and we intentionally did not create any rules or guidelines about how to use our time.

What did we do?

We’d like to share some of the resources related to learning, evaluation, and social change that resonated most with us during our week. We hope you also find some inspiration in these resources, or are motivated to look further into similar topics!

Two of us read books on emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy and Holding Change.

• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. This book is an introduction to emergent strategy, which is about “how we shape and generate complex systems and patterns through our own relatively simple interactions.” We found in it a helpful reminder that we are trying new things in order to create a better world, and trying new things requires that we slow down as we feel the change and learn what works for us.
• Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. This book provides ideas for incorporating emergent strategy practices and principles in your facilitation and mediation practice and also includes essays from Black feminist facilitators. We are always seeking to deepen our wisdom as facilitators, and this book helped remind us of the importance of using facilitation to build relationships, help groups surface answers, and center each person’s humanity.

Two colleagues explored different ways to tell visual stories. One took a creative data visualization course with Gabrielle Merite (Gabrielle also offers some free resources on her website) and one took a course on non-fiction comics for writers.

• The data viz course combines digital illustration and collage techniques to help you create engaging data visualizations.
• The comics course demonstrates how to transform research, interviews, and articles into graphic storytelling.

We found the book Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation by Annette L. Gardner and Claire D. Brindis to be a great way to refresh our understanding of the different approaches to the complex world of advocacy evaluation.

• This book provides an overview of the concepts, designs, methods, and tools for conducting advocacy and policy change evaluations. It is informed by a large-scale survey of evaluators working in the field and includes case studies that provide concrete examples of advocacy and policy change evaluations.

So what did we learn?

This was a successful experiment for us! Beyond learning about the different topics in the books we read or courses we took, we had some broader reflections about what an inspiration week meant for us individually and as an organization. These reflections may be useful if you are considering holding your own inspiration week.

• The openness of the week was empowering and enabled each of us to best choose what we needed for personal development and to prepare for the year ahead.
• It was important to be intentional about how we used our time. We all tried to use the time for things we may not have space for during busier periods of the year. For a lot of us, this meant spending time with longer materials, like an entire book. At the same time, having a mix of learning options was key, which for us included videos and courses in addition to books.
• Doing this right after our end of year break was the perfect way to ease into the new year, before client meetings and other commitments crowded our calendars.
• Four days were both too slow and too fast! We realized it was important to create space to process what we were learning, rather than just moving on to consuming the next product.

Have you ever had an independent study or inspiration week at your organization? How did you spend your time and what did you learn? Let us know your thoughts, and any recommendations you might have for our approach, in the comments!

Inspiration Week Highlights was originally published in InnovationNetwork on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.