Strategic thinking
Change projects help us look at the world differently and think differently. This calls us to improve our ability to think, individually and collectively.
The Goals Grid By Fred Nickols and Ray Ledgerwood
Learn how to create your Goals Grid for strategical planning.
Fred Nickols’ Website
Moving Toward Conflict for the Sake of Good Strategy
How to let conflict to be more possibilities, greater connection, and fuller expression for your team as Wildfire Project describes it.
Yotam Marom
Why you think you’re right — even if you’re wrong | Julia Galef
Perspective is everything, especially when it comes to examining your beliefs. Julia Galef examines the motivations behind our mindsets and how they shape the way we interpret information.
TED
Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain
A portrait of the human brain based on the most recent scientific discoveries about how it unceasingly adapts, re-creates, and formulates new ways of understanding the world we live in.
David Eagleman
Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn
This is an essential resource for teachers, anyone interested in cutting-edge research into learning, and parents considering the educational alternatives available to their children.
Sanjay Sarma, Luke Yoquinto
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t
A must read to see more clearly, make better judgments, enjoy the freedom and thrill of discovery.
Julia Galef
Midwest Academic Strategy Chart
This guide may help you develop strategies to address virtually any organizational issue.
Midwest Academy
Encouraging Strategic Thinking Worksheet
A guide for prompting strategic thinking for organizations.
Jude Kay
Ways of Knowing (Theory of Knowledge)
Here’s an academic crash course into some simple concepts that can help us think more strategically.
TOK Resource
Visioning Toolkit
A helpful toolkit for leaders and consultants with a valuable series of articles and best practices for facilitating visioning with teams and organizations.
Social Transformation Project
Ladder of Inference: How to Avoid Jumping to Conclusions
This structure may help turn everyday inquiries into decision and actions.
Mindtools
Growth mindset infographic
Explore how our mindsets lead us to certain responses and results.
Stanford Magazine
Strategic planning
When starting a project with a new team, the first item we always ask for is their strategic plan. The stronger the base of a strategic plan, the stronger a foundation for learning.
Acting Strategically
Where are we now? Where do we want to go? Why? How do we get there? Developing a strategy boils down to answering these four questions. It doesn’t require a special skillset or a convoluted process. However, developing good strategy is a craft, and like all crafts, it takes practice to do well.
Faster Than 20
Strategic planning
This framework may help optimize your strategic planning process.
Just Works Consulting
Emergent strategies
We are grateful for adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy, and have found it a useful starting point for many projects.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.
adrienne maree brown
Creating Breakout Innovation
Understand why and how to move toward open, crowdsourced, user-driven strategies, also known as co-creation.
Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)
SWITCH PATHWAYS
We move through change each day – it is a constant in our lives. These are the building blocks of sustainability for living in this moment and throughout the long road ahead.
There can be a deep sense of urgency for change that drives us to action before we have fully aligned our purpose and outcomes. This can lead to disruptions, unnecessary conflict and ultimately failure of our plans. Here are valuable guides for aligning intention and action to save energy, resources and time.
To make change in our society, we need to understand the fundamentals of how decision making happens, in our teams, through our social identities, and in our systems of power.
Work for diversity, equity and inclusion achieves lasting impact when we orient our energy towards structural change and integrate structural change tools into our programs and operations. This pathway provides support for analyzing structures and transforming them for justice.
Breaking the status quo and opening up new possibilities for equity and freedom in our work requires innovative experiments. Teams must ensure that all members have the ability to act on the vision and goals they are co-creating.
Our minds cannot move toward racial justice, equity or transformation if our bodies are not prepared for change. This pathway offers those preparations that we have found most beneficial to adult learning.
Explore the interviews, frameworks, templates and articles created and published by Up With Community.
GROW COMMUNITY
Giving thanks: We share these resources with gratitude to all of our teachers and with appreciation for the value they have brought us.
The field guide is a living resource that we are consistently adding to. We receive no payment or kickbacks from contributors for sharing. Access and use of these resources should be done at one’s own discretion.
If you see a resource you like, we strongly encourage you to reach out to the author and support their work in the world through contributions, donations or by hiring them. One goal of this guide is to expand the circle of connections for powerful justice and equity work in the world.
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Have a resource to add? We continue to expand the resources we can share. If you have a tool, resource or link you would like to share through the Field Guide, please email us: research@upwithcommunity.org.
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If it’s time to transform your team so they can transform the world, contact us now.