In keeping with the Crossland Group’s interest in innovation and the Millennial generation, a particular program, the Millennial Trains Project, recently caught our eye. In its effort to inspire a young generation, and build confidence in America’s potential, this nonprofit uses transcontinental railway journeys to inspire and bring Millennials together.

The trip began August 8 and will continue through August 17. During these ten days, some of America’s most enterprising and entrepreneurial Millennials have come together to share ideas, learn from one another, and take advantage of opportunities for personal development. Along the route, from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C., participants have the opportunity to boost their leadership skills and work together to become better leaders and inspire others in their generation to do the same.

The most interesting element about this project, however, is that it’s entirely crowd funded, or “crowd-hitched,” as it is referred to in this case. To earn a spot on the train, Millennials launched their own campaigns online and in-person, in order to build support for their own concept projects. With the specific stipulation that each project must “benefit, inspire, and serve others,” the first twenty campaigns to reach the $5,000 mark secured a spot on the train.

The train travel takes place mainly during the night. During the day, however, the trains pull into stations across the nation, stopping in Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, before ending up in D.C. At each location, the Millennials and their mentors get off the train and visit factories and businesses and meet with innovators and local leaders. The goal is not only to provide additional stimulus for improving their own projects, but to revitalize the notion that America is not in decline, and that at its heart, is a nation of pioneers.

What are your thoughts on this project? Do you think such a project could have a genuine benefit for society, or does it just benefit the participants? Have you taken part in an immersion program designed to encourage innovation?

Share your thoughts and experiences with us via @CrosslandGroup or comment below.

Read more about the project here, or watch the video below.

In a recent Nonprofit Quarterly piece, Michael Wyland briefly considers whether having co-CEOs leading nonprofits is becoming a trend. With Crossland’s deep interest in organizational structure, the increasing occurrence of joint leadership in the public sector is fascinating.

Noting that such a setup isn’t that uncommon in other industries, notably within the arts, Wyland highlights three recent examples (Teach for America, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), and the Washington Pavilion of Arts) that illustrate how such a trend is picking up steam in the nonprofit world, too. While the reasoning behind employing two CEOs varies in each case, the question is whether or not such a concept should be replicated in other organizations. As noted in the article, Teach for America is promoting two staff members to replace the current CEO, the FFRF are a husband-and-wife duo, and the Washington Pavilion of Arts will have outgoing and incoming CEOs working side by side.

Not enough time has yet passed to judge whether shared leadership offers any substantial benefits to the nonprofit sector. If there are any major drawbacks to this experimental structure, these would likely become evident soon, too—especially in the case of major national organizations, such as Teach for America.

Have you had any experience working for an organization under joint leadership? If so, has it been beneficial or detrimental? And, as Wyland asks, do you think nonprofits require special circumstances to make shared executive power successful?

Share your thoughts with us via @crosslandgroup.

Wyland’s short article can be read here.

A new study published by telecom giant, Telefónica, in partnership with the Financial Times and Penn Schoen Berland, takes a closer look at Millennials and how they will use technology to become leaders in the future. In surveying twelve thousand Millennials, aged eighteen to thirty, residing in twenty-seven different countries and on all six continents, the report bills itself as “the largest and most comprehensive global study of adult Millennials conducted to date.”

There are four main takeaways from the study. First, Millennials are defined by technology, and the belief that being increasingly educated in technology will ensure future successes. While the study found a gender gap in the value that men and women place on technology, it is clear that for both genders, technology has a significantly greater role in their lives than in the lives of those from the previous generation.

Second, the world views of Millennials are different from the views of those who came before them. Not only are economic, political, and environmental issues a concern, Millennials are passionately protective of personal freedoms and much more tolerant of others.

Third, Millennials are typically concerned about progression from a school environment to working life. Evidence of these challenges can be seen even today with the ever-increasing higher education costs here in the United States. This does not deter them, however, as they believe that they can make a genuine difference whether it’s at a local level or on a grand international scale.

Finally, Telefónica identified a small portion of this cohort as “Millennial leaders”—these are the 11 percent of those surveyed who were most likely to drive global change. As you would expect from most leaders, they are passionate about problem-solving and have a persistent desire to succeed. The crucial difference that separates them from other generational groups, however, is that they are defined by technology. These future leaders look set to embrace and utilize the power of technology to succeed and make a positive impact on the world.

Take a look at Telefónica’s findings in more detail by reading the full report here (or view their infographic below).

Following on from our July 9 blog post, which looked at the “nonprofitization of business,” and the intersection of social and private sectors in management practice, a recent post by Mike Burns of BWB Solutions, looks closely at nonprofit leadership. He questions whether nonprofits should change how they operate, and begin to incorporate the business practice of having CEOs chair the executive board.

While the practice of “CEO-as-chair” is commonplace within the private sector, there is a notion within the nonprofit world, that board chairs should be volunteers, free from prejudice and able to provide an objective view of the organization. In the corporate world, however, it is in the CEO’s interest to have influence on all matters of business; therefore, CEOs regularly occupy both positions to ensure they have the “best decisions from their boards.”

In response to the the many challenges that nonprofit CEOs face, such as uncooperative or lethargic boards, Burns suggests that the possibility of having a nonprofit CEO leading the board may not be such a bad idea. As board chairs, nonprofit CEOs will have “every incentive to steer the board right,” including, but not limited to, the fiduciary role. Given his/her vast knowledge of the organization, the CEO can also make meaningful contributions to recruitment, strategy, and overall productivity of the board.

While there is certainly a role for volunteers, in that they provide an unbiased view of the organization’s operation, they often lack the key skills required for organization-specific leadership. Instead of placing them at the top of the table, a volunteer could still occupy an influential vice-chair position, which is ultimately responsible for measuring the performance of the CEO.

We at Crossland Group see many opportunities in the social sector to strengthen the influence and engagement of those who are closest to the work on the board. We also have not seen very many examples where the nonprofit CEO is also the board chair. We have helped boards and CEOs build powerful and impactful working relationships that leverage their respective skills and positions, and incorporate creative decision-making models to lead the nonprofit organization.

Do you know of or work for an organization where the CEO also acts as the board chair? What are the pros and cons of this? Share your thoughts with us.

We are in the midst of a new industrial revolution.

Following on from last month’s “Snapshot” summary, which looked at the “Twelve Disruptive Technologies That Will Change Life as We Know It,” the latest article on this topic is by Greg Satell of Business Insider, and focuses on the cyclical nature of technology. While it is crucial that businesses are aware of, and prepared to integrate the “twelve disruptive technologies” that are coming, it is also important to know the laws behind the digital cycles to get a better sense of the speed at which we are progressing.

In the article, Satell succinctly summarizes the “four digital laws” that govern technological development:

Moore’s Law: The power of microchips doubles every eighteen months. (Computer processing speed)

Kryder’s Law: The amount of storage available (at the same price) doubles every twelve months. (Hard drive space)

Nielsen’s Law: The speed of internet bandwidth doubles every twenty-one months. (Internet speed)

Kaku’s Caveman Law: Primitive desires always win in a conflict against technology, and so design and functionality are set to become even more intuitive, natural, and will “eventually disappear altogether.”

In what Satell refers to as a “new industrial revolution,” businesses would do well to take heed of the four laws, as integrating them into their planning for the future will likely put them in good stead. In a society where technology is king, and where everything will eventually be connected through the “internet of things,” preparedness for this revolution will give businesses an advantage for the future.

In particular, recent developments have seen technology increasingly shift away from the screen, and into the physical world. With great attention now being given to 3-D printing, nanotechnology, genomics, and manufacturing automation, Satell believes that we have entered a “new digital paradigm” where technology will be capable of entirely new tasks.

This topic is of to interest to the Crossland Group, as we continue to be involved in learning how society can better harness the power of technology. From our collaboration with MAYA Designand Mickey McManus (co-author of Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology), to our interest in learning how we should prepare for “the internet of things,” we are keen to ensure that we remain at the cutting edge. One of the biggest changes that we will see will be around the structuring of information, and designing environments for people to experience this deluge of new information in the most effective and meaningful ways possible. That is why we are seeing an explosion in discourse around designing experiences that span the physical, digital, and social spaces, and why the Crossland Group has taken a role in facilitating understanding in this area.

Has the development of technology outpaced you in your workplace? Do you find yourself or your organization left behind because you/it are not prepared? What steps do you think we should take to get ready for the “new industrial revolution” and the “new digital paradigm”?

In a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article by Ken Berger of Charity Navigator, and Jeremy Christopher Kohomban of the Children’s Village and Harlem Dowling, the authors consider whether the business world should look to learn important management lessons from nonprofit organizations.

In what Berger and Kohomban refer to as the “nonprofitization of business,” they believe that there should be a “cross-pollination” of ideas from the social sector to the private sector, and vice versa. This is a marked difference from the status quo, as they acknowledge that, traditionally, nonprofits have been advised to adopt private sector practices to make them more efficient and better organized, rather than being the source of management and strategy advice themselves.

The article then goes on to explain two different areas of where the “nonprofitization of business” can be explored. Titled “workforce implications” and “corporate model evolution,” the former highlights the desires of many employees to have meaning in their day-to-day work. The latter, “corporate model evolution,” on the other hand, looks to bring the values of cultural sensitivity, diversity, and equality that nonprofits are often familiar with, into practice in the private sector.

While the authors are by no means suggesting that nonprofits have it right, and hard-nosed businesses have it wrong, Berger and Kohomban propose instead that the traditional unidirectional way of thinking, where nonprofits should adopt business practices, may be somewhat shortsighted. Nonprofits have plenty to offer, too.

To read Berger and Kohomban’s article in full, click here.

In what ways could your business benefit by taking cues from the social sector? How could your nonprofit gain ground by learning from the private sector? Have you witnessed any situations where a greater understanding of a different sector has led to better decision making and leadership?

With the Millennials (or Gen-Yers) comprising an ever-increasing part of the workforce, Susan M. Heathfield, a human resources expert for About.com, offers some insight on how they like to work, and how employers should manage them, in an article titled, “11 Tips for Managing Millennials.”

Defined broadly as those born between 1980 and 2000, Heathfield writes that Millennials differ from other generational cohorts in that they have a consistent “can-do” attitude, and also that they often require regular performance feedback. As with any group of young and energetic people, they believe they should “take on the world,” but are often reliant on leaders and senior colleagues to challenge them and provide structure in the tasks they are given.

Importantly, Millennials are extremely driven by career prospects, and must understand the opportunities available to them. As their contacts are so broad, and technology makes building relationships so easy, there is a risk that they will “network right out of their current workplace.”

Heathfield believes that there are eleven key pieces of advice that will ensure a successful tenure of Millennials in the workplace. Do you agree?

Provide structure.

Provide leadership and guidance.

Encourage the Millennials’ self-assuredness, “can-do” attitude, and positive personal self-image.

Take advantage of the Millennials’ comfort level with teams. Encourage them to join.

Listen to the Millennial employee.

Millennial employees are up for a challenge and change.

Millennial employees are multi-taskers on a scale you’ve never seen before.

Take advantage of your Millennial employee’s computer, cell phone, and electronic literacy.

Capitalize on the Millennials’ affinity for networking.

Provide a life–work balanced workplace.

Provide a fun, employee-centered workplace.

Have you had experience with working with Millennials? If you are a Millennial yourself, do you think these tips are on point? How have you dealt with generational differences at the office?

Read the full article here, and let us know what you think.

For more information on understanding the Millennial generation, see the infographic below:

Following on from last month’s STEP Inspire Innovation Summit 2013 event (#STEPIS13), this blog post is an update on the events that have taken place as a result. You can read more about the May 21 event here: Magic Happens When You Give People A Voice To Co-Create Solutions.

The Crossland Group and Junior Achievement Worldwide hosted a follow-up session at the Crossland Group’s Boston office on June 4 to make tangible some of the great ideas that came out of the May 21 STEP Inspire Innovation Summit. “Idea Catchers” Alice Peisch, Kate Berseth, and Jamal Grant, along with ten representatives of the STEP student jammers group, committed to come together to progress their solutions around the changing nature of classroom space and homework. Thanks to Alice Peisch, the group met with Jack McCarthy, the Executive Director of the Mass School Building Authority (MSBA) and Jim Daiute, Legislative Affairs Liaison for MSBA.

The students presented their immediate and longer-term ideas to the MSBA team on how to change the physical space of the classroom. Jack McCarthy was well prepared for the meeting, facilitating animated and engaging conversations with the kids.  He told the students that their ideas were “spot on” and were quite similar to what his Designer Roundtable (a group of architects that address school building needs) offered. Needless to say, the STEP students were not only energized by the MSBA taking an interest in their ideas, but were also amazed that they were helping to bring those ideas to life. Kate Berseth had already met with Jamal Grant to talk about the homework follow-through. Joe Giffun from MIT and Teri Riddle from the Crossland Group also signed up to support the follow-on work, with a number of upcoming meetings scheduled to develop ideas about improvements to classrooms and homework with key stakeholders, such as EF Education First, and with continued input from the STEP student jammers.

On June 13, the STEP student jammers, along with Amy Zintl Koch and Jen Bardsley from STEP Inspire, met with Kate Berseth, the EF Education First creative team, and Teri Riddle to begin choosing the physical classroom space attributes and designing the presentation to support the Designer Roundtable meeting. Both the immediate actions and the longer-term plan to move forward with the jam ideas around the classroom of the future were discussed and debated. Once again, the student jammers were blown away at how adults were following through with what was promised on June 4 and progressing their ideas.

The EF Education First team had visuals of classroom furniture on the walls and created several iterations of the flipchart the students had drafted at the May 21 STEP Inspire Innovation Summit. It was a lively and very dynamic meeting that once again reinforced the power of delivering on what you promise, and that having an idea is only as good as your ability to implement it.

During the meeting, students and adults tried to answer two questions: 1) what can we do right now with a specific classroom at the John D. O’Bryant High School (Boston) to make it more engaging? and 2) how can we put a design together for the classroom of the future to be presented to Jack McCarthy’s MSBA Designer Roundtable? Most impressive was the fact that the senior students in the group, who were graduating that week, all committed to work this through over the summer before going onto college, so that they could leave better classroom space behind for their classmates. A truly inspirational group of students.

In an article featured on the McKinsey Global Institute blog, the notion of game-changing technologies is discussed in the context of preparedness. Are we prepared for disruptive technology? Are business and policy leaders ready for the “next big thing”?

A report titled “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy,” produced by the McKinsey Global Institute, claims to have identified twelve technologies that could trigger major transformations in our world in the coming years. While admitting that more things are labelled “breakthrough” than actually are, the team at McKinsey is confident that these twelve technologies will have a truly overwhelming impact on society, and, in particular, the economy, contributing an estimated $14 to $33 trillion per year in 2025.

Crucially, the study notes that if our business and political leaders fail to seize the opportunity to prepare for these coming technologies, then there is a risk that they might not only miss the economic benefits that are expected to accompany them, but also be put in a position where it is too late to react to the consequences. To counter this, the report goes on to offer some core advice for business leaders and policy makers: that they should strive to keep their organizational strategies as up to date as possible, that they invest in continued education and training programs, and that they embrace the coming “internet of things,” where connectivity and interactivity will be king.

The twelve disruptive technologies:

Mobile Internet

Automation of knowledge work

Internet of things

Cloud

Advanced robotics

Autonomous and near-autonomus vehicles

Next-generation genomics

Energy storage

3-D printing (see TED Talk above)

Advanced materials

Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery

Renewable energy

Would you add anything to this list of upcoming disruptive technologies? Do you think that your organization is future-proofed? Will your organization be effected, either positively or negatively, by disruptive technology in the coming years? Join the conversation and let us know.

Last week’s HBR.org blog post by Arianna Huffington caught my drooping eyes immediately—the topic was sleep, or our lack of it. As the mother of two young children who has not slept a full eight hours in more than five years, Huffington’s insights on how lack of sleep affects our ability to function and think clearly prompted me to read further.

Back in 2011, Huffington made a brief but powerful TED presentation about the issue of what she called “sleep deprivation one-up-manship,” wherein people (usually in business settings) brag about their lack of sleep with the aim of conveying just how busy, and therefore, important, they must be. This ties in with another topic we’ve written about before, which is the American obsession with busyness (see Tim Krieder’s 2012 New York Times piece called “The ‘Busy’ Trap”).

In her blog post this week, however, Huffington takes the ideas she presented in the TED Talk even further and suggests that the collective lack of sleep in our culture is actually negatively affecting our organizations’ outcomes. In her research, Huffington discovered that sleep deprivation has the following consequences:

It squelches creativity and imagination

It costs American businesses $63 billion a year in lost productivity

It leads to unethical behavior

It is reflected in facial cues (which potentially sends negative signals to clients/customers)

It leads to lapses in safety and causes other health issues

The good news is that many businesses and organizations are responding to this serious problem with real action. Huffington quotes that 25 percent of large American businesses are now offering their employees some form of stress relief initiative (e.g., yoga, meditation, nap rooms in the workplace). The hope is that as employers react to the data (such as that mentioned above) and start encouraging their employees to take better care of their health by modifying policies and/or the workplace itself, a cultural shift will follow, and hopefully lead to a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce for the future. Now, if only my children would get on board and allow me to catch some more Zs!

Do you think your sleep or lack of sleep is directly tied into your ability to be productive or creative? Has your employer implemented a particularly innovative stress relief initiative? Let us know what you think!

 By Megan Hogan

On June 3, the Crossland Group hosted a dynamic event at its Boston office to present its partner Mickey McManus, MAYA Design CEO and co-author of the book Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology. About fifty clients, partners, and invited guests from the local community gathered to hear Mickey’s no-holds-barred account of both the promises and risks of life in the age of Trillions.

Mickey took the group on a journey through several chapters in the book, offering compelling, and sometimes mind-boggling insights to ponder and act upon. He suggested that “we are facing a future of unbounded complexity, and it is unclear whether that complexity will be harnessed to build a better world, or cause us to fall into an abyss of mind-numbing junk.” The technical, business, and human challenges and opportunities that this technological sea change will bring are without precedent. According to Mickey and his co-authors, Peter Lucas and Joe Ballay, entire industries will be born and others will die as our society navigates this journey.

One of the key tenets of Trillions is that of “taming complexity.” Complexity can be frustrating and unproductive—just think of the last time you filed your taxes. Our natural reaction might be to want to get rid of complexity altogether; but complexity also provides the power and capability for amazing advances in the human condition. Rather than stunting advancement in the name of over-simplification, perhaps we can strive to achieve a beautiful complexity in its stead. And what better example can we think of for this beautiful complexity, than what nature has already provided us?

Nature has had a lot more practice at taming complexity than human beings. Human beings have been banding together in societies for about ten thousand years, and written language has been around for maybe half that time. Even the most commonly accepted definition for the word “information” has only been around for about sixty years. Suffice it to say, we are relatively new players in this game.

Nature, on the other hand, has, for billions of years, been incubating and replicating life in incredibly diverse yet deceptively simple ways: from the complex neural and cellular networks handling trillions of connections in our own bodies, to the stunning biodiversity of evolved life, to fungal networks that allow acres of forest to live as a single organism for nearly eighty thousand years (if you’re interested, take a moment to learn more about the single oldest living organism in the world).

How does nature do it? How can we emulate nature’s success as we contemplate the need to tame the complexity inherent in a trillion node network? Nature uses a uniform building block, DNA, to allow all living organisms to share information and expand in their own ways. This profound process has created a diverse biology of over ten million living species on earth today, all using a universal building block to create vast variations in the expression of life.

But, back to our human condition—how can we harness nature’s success to solve the serious business and social problems facing the world today? The drive to achieve beautiful complexity has forged an emerging discipline called human-centered design, which is reshaping the way products, businesses, and whole information systems are created. Human-centered design is an approach to design that requires interdisciplinary collaboration, an iterative process with frequent prototyping, and engagement with real people. We at the Crossland Group has embraced human-centered design as a core tenet of our own approach to the clients we serve and the challenges we undertake. By combining design, technology, and a relentless drive to understand the audience and their goals, we feel confident that even the most challenging set of problems can be tamed into a beautiful complexity.

Finally, what does this bold new age of trillions of interconnected devices mean for the Crossland Group? While we are already focused on the practice of user-experience and applying the methods of human-centered design, we need to start thinking about trillions of computing devices talking to each other, and what the implications are for the future of our own and our clients’ businesses. How will we manage this unprecedented shift from a using computation to actually living in it? We are eager to help shape this next evolution in the human condition. We hope you will join us in this journey—exciting and provocative times are ahead.

At the recent Wharton Economic Summit 2013, held in New York City, a panel moderated by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach, was brought together to talk about innovation: what it is, how it relates to entrepreneurship, and how, as a society, we can help cultivate it.

In addressing the last point, the Knowledge@Wharton article describing this panel event, discussed the lack of emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation in the US school system. One of the panelists, John Rogers of Goldman Sachs noted that he did not believe entrepreneurship could be learned, per se, but that schools must “…learn how to channel natural, innovative entrepreneurs into places where they can execute and create.”

Another panelist, Ted Dintersmith of Charles River Ventures, commented that a major problem in the mainstream school culture in this country is the belief that failure is to be avoided. Dintersmith believes that a common characteristic among innovators and entrepreneurs is a lack of fear and the level of comfort with failure. If innovation means putting an idea on the table that is different and outside of the norm, and has the potential flop, then someone who is afraid to fail will certainly have difficulty being truly innovative. Dintersmith posed the question: “How many kids in school are being given the message that it’s OK to try things that are different and then fail because you’re going to recover versus how many are told: `Don’t take a course you might not do well in; you’ve got to have a high grade point average?’” (Another recent article from Fast Company entitled “You Just Proposed the Worst Idea Possible? Yeah, Well, It’s Actually Pure Gold,” explores the concept that it is the person who is willing to put him/herself out there and propose an idea [which may or may not be the worst idea] who actually gets the ball rolling for others to brainstorm even better ideas. A Fast Company staffer, Jon Bell, coined this the “McDonald’s Theory.”)

Source: inc.com via Kauffman on Pinterest

This article got us thinking about our partner Junior Achievement Worldwide and its mission to enable kids to succeed in a global economy by giving them the opportunity to experience entrepreneurial education hands on and start and manage their own businesses. JA’s work with young people focuses on three pillars: workforce readiness, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. In the US alone, JA programs reach over four million students in kindergarten through high school every year. So, what is the point of all this entrepreneurial education? What good does it really do? Why, to Rogers’ and Dintersmith’s points, should we provide a way to channel the natural innovative spirit of young people and encourage them to take risks and be creative? Here is what JA’s data says:

JA alumni are 50 percent more likely to open their own business

The salaries of JA alumni are 50 percent higher than non-alumni

JA alumni are 25 percent less likely to be unemployed

JA alumni are three times more likely to hold senior and middle-management positions

Let us know what you think about how we can encourage entrepreneurship and innovation in young people today.

There was an unbelievable buzz at Suffolk University on May 21, 2013, where an innovation event took place designed to bring together students and professionals from a variety of sectors to “jam” about shared challenges in the twenty-first-century classroom and workplace.The innovation summit was hosted by STEP, a Boston-based nonprofit that partners with schools and community organizations to engage, motivate, and inspire teens from underserved communities through an innovative approach to career exploration. The Crossland Group partnered with Continuum, a global design and innovation consultancy to design and deliver the dynamic event.

At the summit, STEP students teamed up with professionals to think creatively and critically through facilitated teams “jamming” on four real world challenges:

1. MOBILITY: How can we make better use of mobile devices to improve learning in the classroom and productivity in the workplace? 2. SKILLS: What changes would we make in how we approach “homework” to improve the way we practice/build “real-world” skills? 3. SPACE: How would we change the physical space of today’s classroom/work environment to improve the learning experience? 4. TEAMS: How can we better equip students/employees to collaborate and work more effectively in teams?

About seventy-five adults and students in six teams presented their innovations to “idea catchers,” a panel of high-profile community leaders in the field of education and youth development. The role of these idea catchers was to listen to and probe insights with fresh eyes. The members of this panel took their job of catching the ideas and taking action on them seriously—all ideas were caught and the follow-up is already happening:

Kate Berseth, Executive VP of Marketing at EF Education First, and Jamal Grant, STEP alumnus, will work with theHOMEWORK team to further their ideas around self-designed homework.

Sean Rush, CEO and President of Junior Achievement Worldwide, will work with theMOBILE DEVICES teams to further their ideas on school mode apps and how to embed technology in desks. Sean also invited all the teams and idea catchers to a lunch at the JA offices in Boston to further the dialogues started on Tuesday.

Alice Peisch, MA State Representative, is working with the CLASSROOM/SPACE teams to get them an audience with folks in Massachusetts responsible for school renovations.

Sylvia Ferrell-Jones, CEO and President of the YWCA Boston, and Susan Swick, MD, MPH, at Newton-Wellesley Hospital/MGH offered great insight to the TEAMS/COLLABORATIONteam (and all teams) and enthusiastically agreed to attend the lunch hosted by JA.

The students involved seemed to enjoy the collaborative exercises and networking opportunities available at the event so greatly that they did not want to leave. This correlates with the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students themselves, which highlighted how the event empowered youth to be arbiters of change.

Some of the key student takeaways from the event are embodied in the following feedback:

“The more you contribute to a group project, the more you learn…”

“I saw that there are a lot of issues that we as youth can address and change…”

“My takeaway is that we have valuable ideas…”

“I saw that adults are willing to hear teenagers’ ideas…”

“I learned that it is important to look at the other side of things even if you have your own opinion…”

“From this experience, I will always remember to keep my imagination…”

As for feedback from the adult attendees, one team member remarked that she was reminded of a January 2012 op-ed piece by Lawrence Summers in the New York Times:

“An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration…collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating… For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on individual effort… As greater value is placed on collaboration, surely it should be practiced more in our nation’s classrooms.”

Summers’ quote succinctly summarizes one of the crucial points of this year’s STEP Inspire Innovation Summit. We believe that by thinking differently about education, and placing more focus on collaboration (particularly between students and professionals), we are able to foster a community which is more closely intertwined and encourages youth to recognize that they have the power to make change happen.

In a fascinating interactive infographic by Christine Congdon and Catherine Gall, directors at Steelcase, an office furniture company, we learn how culture can define the look and feel of the offices we work in. While most are aware that organiszational culture in a broader context can vary significantly from country to country, thinking about how that might impact office design puts the concept in an entirely new light.

In Congdon and Gall’s research, where they studied thousands of office designs from a wide variety of countries, they found that there are six ‘spectrums of culture’ on which different societies can be plotted. These consist of masculine vs. feminine, autocratic vs. consultative, and individualist vs. collectivist to name just a few. By exploring the spectrums in more detail, Congdon and Gall have been able to more effectively provide tailored office solutions that better match cultural expectations. Not only does this provide Steelcase with a better understanding of how to communicate more efficiently with distinct cultures, but it can help in gaining insights for how design offices for different parts the world. Some office cultures use collaborative space regularly, some do not. Other office cultures have an extremely hierarchical system, with the most important employees enjoying a much greater office space than the entry-level staff who often share smaller working areas.

Take a moment to click around the infographic and see how different countries are categorized.

In the last two weeks, a video referred to as “The Earth-Shartteringly Amazing Speech That’ll Change The Way You Think About Adulthood”, has been making the rounds on the internet. Originally a commencement speech for the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College, The Glossary, a videogram production company, have created a dramatization set to the words of the late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace. 

Wallace’s message is both challenging and profound. In his efforts to induct a group of young people into the world of repetitive and boring “average adult days”, he highlights that it can become far too easy to become complacent and arrogant. When our ‘automatic default setting’ is to place ourselves at the center of the universe, we can forget that many of the people that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, may be facing far more personal difficulty than our own trivial issues. He states that the primary benefit of gaining a university education is not necessarily gaining knowledge, but instead has “everything to do with simple awareness”. With over 5 million views in 12 days, the message seems to resonate with many.

The recently published results of the United Nations System-Wide Action Plan on Youth (Youth-SWAP), conducted by the Inter-agency Network on Youth Development (IANYD), brought to light the key issues which the world’s youth face every day. In the summer of last year, the IANYD surveyed over 13,500 young people from 186 different countries to compile their results. While the findings were not entirely unsurprising, the youth cite lack of employment opportunities and limited political inclusion as key challenges, what is particularly interesting is the extent to which their concerns correlate with issues raised by older generations.

Looking specifically within the seven themes of Employment and Entrepreneurship, Education, Comprehensive Sexuality Education, Protection of Rights, Health, Political Inclusion and Civic Engagement, the respondents highlighted what they perceived to be the major barriers to more productive and effective youth development. To combat the lack of jobs, they propose increased training; to solve education issues, they suggest making it cheaper and make transitioning to the workforce simpler; and when it comes to poor sexual health, they call for making sex education mandatory in schools. While many of the stated suggestions are fairly simplistic, and in reality may be difficult to implement in some corners of the globe, international surveys such as this one can be used as a platform for affecting change within UN policymaking and beyond. That the issues raised are also shared with much of the greater (and older) global population, should provide the added impetus to take strides forwards in making the world a better place for people of all ages. With the results in hand, the IANYD is now working to formulate a framework to develop implantation plans for Youth-SWAP so that the interests of the youth can become the policy of tomorrow.

Nicki Roth of Saroga, the Nonprofit Leadership Forum, looks at how important it can be for leaders in the nonprofit sector to recognize that change needs to occur. While typically leaders are quick to deflect blame from their own responsibilities and look to others as the cause of organizational challenges, in many cases, Roth has found that the leaders themselves are the ones that need to implement change. While she notes that in her practice, leaders are usually open to the notion that they might be a part of the problem, the real challenge is overcoming these issues whilst keeping the benefactors on board, and retaining the respect of the staff.

Through the stories of Betheny and Raul, Roth highlights just some of the reactions and challenges faced by leaders who decide that they need to change an element of their leadership style, learn a new skill, or reorganize the way they function. While not all attempts to change are successful, going through the process can be a useful way to not only improve yourself, and discover more about your own skills, but it can go a long way to improving the standing of an organization as a whole.

Have you recognized changes that you need to make to your personal leadership style? Do you think that your organization is currently suffering from a leader who is unwilling to change their ways?