Organizational design has enabled Patagonia to envision transformation at the systems-level and live out their mission to “use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

Most traditional goal setting methods, such as SMART goals, overvalue the importance of setting goals without offering a reliable process to make progress. These tools or programs tend to overemphasize goal-achievement as the ultimate marker of success. Strengths-based goals replaces a static timeline of action steps and due dates, with real-time adjustments and iterative planning.

Five teaching modules designed to help cooperative organizations train new worker-owners to cultivate a culture of mutual learning and collaboration.

When workers and cooperative businesses recognize, advocate, and design mechanisms to fulfill human, worker, and cooperative rights, it creates ideal conditions for workers to choose to live into their social interconnectedness.

When my planning mind demands to know and be certain, I can remind myself of the wisdom of taking one small step at a time.

Design is a creative process that produces ideas that haven’t existed before. Going beyond a win-win to a win-surprise. By sharing what we know in the research stage, to prioritizing outcomes rather than winners, we can create something of meaning and value.

Just sharing your experience and giving feedback to researchers is not itself a creative act. Designers must not fall into the trap of separating experiences from the people who lived them.

A knowledge intervention often assumes a lack or deficit in people, which is to be conveniently filled by another individual who “knows more.” We fall into the trap of judging individuals for “not knowing” or blaming them for “not knowing better.”

My insights from skateboarding suggest balancing is not static, rather it is a series of responsive movements. Leaders seeking balance are better served by moving with a changing environment rather than attempting to arrive at a steady state.

When feedback can throw basic elements of our self, relationships, and understanding into question, it is no wonder that many people are terrified of feedback. If a strategy of radical avoidance isn’t desirable, what other choices do we have?