São Paulo 2012 Learning Festival Slide Show
Posted on | March 12, 2012 | Comments Off
Nathan in our San Francisco office created the following video slide show for the recent Learning Festival in São Paulo last month. The slide show is about the origins of Reos Partners and how Reos was founded back in 2007.
Reos Partners São Paulo 2012 Learning Festival Slide Show from Reos Partners on Vimeo.
Tags: 2012 > founding > learning festival > origin > pringle bay > reos > reos partners > sao paulo > slide show > south africa > video > vimeo
Effective Group Facilitation 2012
Posted on | February 22, 2012 | Comments Off
Effective Group Facilitation is back for 2012! First offered in 2010, we are excited to announce that our popular EGF course will once again be taking place this summer in London from the 9th – 11th July.
Have a look at this blog post detailing what you can expect during the three day course: Effective Group Facilitation Course goes live!
See the below flyer for full details of the course in July. Alternatively visit our website or contact leo[at]reospartners.com.
Reos Partners – Effective Group Facilitation – July 2012
Tags: complexity > conflict > course > decision making > effective group facilitation > EGF > facilitation > facilitation course > facilitation skills > facilitation training > facilitation training course > institute > july > learning > london > mia eisenstadt > oxford > power dynamics > reos > reos partners > skills > training > working with purpose > zaid hassan
The Finance Innovation Lab named one of Britain’s “50 new radicals” by NESTA
Posted on | February 21, 2012 | Comments Off
The Finance Innovation Lab – which Reos Partners helped establish in 2008 – was recently named as one of 50 organisations who are changing Britain for the better through fresh approaches in practical and scalable social methodologies.
The award was given for the Lab’s radical approach to initiate change in the financial system, through engaging the wider community to look at solutions to build a financial system which is sustainable for people and planet.
The study was conducted by NESTA in connection with the Observer.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/news_and_features/britains_new_radicals/the_finance_innovation_lab
See here for more information: http://thefinancelab.org/archives/1187
About the finance lab:
Reos Partners worked with WWF-UK to engage the finance sector in shifting towards greater sustainability. In early 2008, WWF-UK, as part of its One Planet Future strategic plan, invited Reos Partners to work with them in this effort.
With the financial crisis unfolding, a joint team from WWF/Reos interviewed forty stakeholders across the financial sector, having in-depth conversations with a range of stakeholders including investors, bankers, insurers, regulators, academics and NGOs. These interviews resulted in the development of an analysis of the current challenges facing the sector, insights into pre and post-crisis thinking. Through a collaborative process this interview data was used to co-create to the purpose of the Lab. New partners were also identified who were both concerned about the situation and prepared to act for change in the finance sector.
As the crisis unfolded in full, WWF-UK, and Reos Partners were joined by a number of stakeholders to engage in strategic conversations. This group considered not just the implications of the crisis but also looked at the crisis as a symptom of deeper structural challenges. In 2009 WWF-UK and Reos Partners were joined by the Institute of Chartered Accountants England and Wales. Together they convened a series of scenario workshops on the future of the financial sector. Working in partnership with the Futures Group at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, these workshops bought together over one hundred stakeholders to consider the future trajectories of the financial system. These “Future of Finance” workshops resulted in the creation of a wider community of stakeholders who had identified a number of leverage points that indicated the most promising areas of innovation within the financial sector.
Over the course of 2009 a prominent group of advisors were invited to join the Finance Lab as Faculty, including well known figures such as Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Paul Krugman and Prof. Muhammed Yunus.
In early 2010, the first quarterly gathering of the wider Finance Innovation Lab community took place and a number of Innovation Groups formed, which will be taking an action-orientated approach to issues such as complexity in finance, risk, and banking models.
The Finance Innovation Lab has evolved to provide a space for innovation in financial systems. This long-term change process is convening a diverse range of institutions and individuals from business, finance, government and civil society to incubate several initiatives to demonstrate what a sustainable financial system serving business, the environment and society would look like.
The Creative Process of Entrepreneurship – Emerge Conference
Posted on | November 3, 2011 | Comments Off
On the 29th October Mia Eisenstadt and Zaid Hassanwere invited to run a session entitled The Creative Process of Entrepreneurship at the Emerge Conference at the Said Business School in Oxford. See http://www.theemergeconference.org/. 120 participants attended the mini-workshop. The purpose of the session was to introduce participants to an experience of the U-process and to co-create physical models of their ideas of social enterprises.
After a brief taste of the U-process, participants began prototyping. We supported them to form teams around interest in collaboration or interest in a shared topic. They created models physically and then pitched them to the wider group. Teams came up with a range of ideas from prisoners learning skills so they could pay back the cost of their prison fees, to . Dell also provided some funding so that teams who were committed to their ideas, could develop them and then pitch them for some start-up funding later in the day.
Participants said that they “loved the session” and that it “set the tone for the rest of the event”.
We also enjoyed running the session and as we ourselves run a social enterprise we are keen to support the emergence of new social enterprises as well as learn about how others experience the work we are doing.
What were our learnings?
- It is possible to run a U-process in a short amount of time.
- Telling a story about an idea is a difficult skill.
- There is a lot of energy, passion and creativity for social and environmentally focused ventures.
Tags: conference > emerge > mia > www.theemergeconference.org > zaid
Social Change Festival – Programme
Posted on | July 21, 2011 | Comments Off
See below for the Participant Programme for our upcoming Social Change Festival!
Hacking the Earth?
Posted on | June 27, 2011 | Comments Off
I’m at a day-long conversation at the James Martin 21st Century School, University of Oxford about how to engage the public on the issue of geoengineering.
Some interesting questions emerging from the discussion:
Firstly, the opening speaker pointed out that geoengineering is a concept. It’s not real, it has not been done and the hybrid technologies involved are at various levels of development. It’s a potential response to climate change. This raises a number of questions. When does research become implementation? If academics want to research the issue of geoengineering, some people worry that even doing computer simulations “makes the unthinkable thinkable” and should not be done.
Given the potential scope and scale of geoengineering, there is an assumption that decisions around the issue should include “the public” who will necessarily be effected. Even if the technology were to succeed (or worse be tried and fail leading to catastrophic unintended consequences), we’re discussing trillion dollar investments. The whole notion of geoengineering thus presents massive policy, decision-making and governance challenges.
Some public engagement has already taken place in this country. For example, the Natural Environment Research Council has conducted some dialogues. Results can be found here.
A UK-based team of scholars, including Steve Rayner, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, has responded to the House of Commons’ inquiry into the regulation of geoengineering, conducted in collaboration with the US Congress. They have come up with a series of principles, the Oxford Principles in order to govern the development of geoengineering:
(1) Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good
(2) Public participation in geoengineering decision-making
(3) Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results
(4) Independent assessment of impacts
(5) Governance before deployment
See here for the full report.
The notion of research in terms of both technological options and the political options is difficult because it challenges the notion of neutrality. How should these issues be presented to the public? The framing skews the response. Should the focus be on the technical and scientific issues or should the focus be on the social and ethical issues?
In some ways geoengineering presents a particular challenge to the practice of research in an academic context.
It challenges the somewhat touching notion of academic neutrality. It challenges the distinctions between “expertise” and “layperson” . While the technical dimensions of geoengineering are complicated, the assumption that someone with a moderate level of education cannot grasp the technical issues is dubious. Of-course, the fact is that someone has been thinking about this full-time will know more than someone who has not, but the sharpness of the distinction is questionable.
Another speaker argues that traditional approaches to technological decisions lead to lock-in of single technological pathways, which given the ambiguities and unknowns involves, this leads to profound problems. A far better approach to “closing down” to single pathways (ie in our expert opinion, we should do this one thing) would be “broadening and opening up” leading to multiple pathways being adopted. Some of the methods involved in broadening could include participatory rural appraisal, do-it-yourself panels, open space, deliberative mapping and more. This could lead to “combining scientific rigour and democratic legitimacy.”
In the presentations I detect a particular faith in rationality.
The approach is almost, but not quite, a belief in presenting the best and most “complex”, that is, our best understanding of the world to politicians and then hoping that they will do the right thing. It’s as if our politicians are philosopher-kings who require some help thinking through the options. The idea that knowledge, science or rationality will inevitably be used in an instrumental fashion to win particular political struggles is not considered.
Copenhagen was, in essence, a defeat of the rational by the power-brokers.
The environmentalists, the scientists and the policy-makers assumed that they could make a rational case for action, an almost “d’oh it’s obvious” case in the expectation that the politicians made decisions on the basis of the rational. Of-course they did not. They made decisions on the basis of political expediency. It could be argued that even those Western leaders who were advocating for a deal did so out of a vested self-interest, as opposed to operating from a rational concern for the environment.
If the debate around geoengineering only focused on the rationality of geoengineering, then the liklihood is that the political reality will eat up and spit out the rational debate. In other words, where we are dealing with an issue as divisive as geoengineering, we are almost certain of a conflict (conflict about the wisdom of geoengineering, conflict about the allocation of resources and so on).
All this begs the question, what role should academics be playing in relation to political decisions? Is the notion of neutrality dead? Are all academics de facto political players like it or not?
The day ended with a talk by Clive Hamilton, author of “Requiem for a Species”, entitled “Rethinking the Ethics of Geoengineering”. The talk is a rebuttal of a Working Paper written by the James Martin Geoengineering Ethics Working Group, The Ethics of Geoengineering. It gives us a prelude to the nature of a potential wider public debate.
Clive criticizes their approach, labelled as “consequentialist,” as being inconsistent with current earth systems science, using the example of Solar Radiation Management (as one of the most likely geoengineering approaches to be advocated or used).
He argues that the underlying conception of the earth in the paper is essentially cybernetic, that is, seeing the earth as a set of well-defined ecological sub0systems. Earth systems science argues that such a view, particularly with regard to the climate is incorrect. To be it in simpler terms, you cannot separate out say the oceans from the atmosphere, whereas a cybernetic conception would assume you can do something to the atmosphere without significant influence on say, the ocean, either positive or negative.
Due to the fact that isolating the effects is difficult, geoengineering is being presented as a response to an “emergency climate event,” which would warrant taking the risk of doing something without being able to properly study the implications. The non-linearity of the climate system means that geoengineering is inherently an irreversible path, which could leave future generations with a hostile environment. “What is a lost species or a lost ecosystem worth?” he asks.
Clive argues for a non-interventionist or “natural” approach because of the potential risks.
The James Martin Group argue that “there is nothing special about the natural” for a number of reasons (such as their claim that nature is not inherently stable or balanced).
There approach can be summarised as an optimal cost-benefit analysis, of benefits and consequences, winners and losers. However, the scientific question is not if an altered climate is better or worse but if its safe or dangerous. Specifying a safe level of warming is difficult. However, the more climate climate scientists look at it, the lower the safe level seems to get.
Clive contrasts “extreme instrumentalism” versus “extreme humility” in our dealing with the natural world. The “extreme instrumentalist” position argues for our right to manipulate the climate for the interests of human.
Note the title of this post comes from an ebook called Hacking the Earth by Jamais Caisco (2011).
The Reos Partners Social Change Festival
Posted on | May 27, 2011 | Comments Off
Please see below for the flyer for our Social Change Festival this summer:
Live-blogging the U-Process course
Posted on | May 26, 2011 | Comments Off
We decided to try out a service called Storify. This is a tool that lets you create a story in real-time. We thought we’d try it out at our U-Process course on the 11th of May:
Ubele: Looking to the future of the Afro-Carribbean community in England
Posted on | May 4, 2011 | Comments Off
In the inaugural edition of the Reos Review, Yvonne Field, Partner at Reos Partners C.I.C. UK posed the “… Big Question” inquiring, “Why have more than 60 years of British social policy, aimed at reducing social inequalities, and promoting social inclusion, failed to build strong and thriving African – Caribbean communities in Britain?” In her article, Yvonne expressed her fears that without new targetted interventions, African-Caribbean communities in Britain would become unsustainable.
Since the publication of this article in November 2010, the Reos UK team has been busily designing The Ubele Project: an innovative model of leadership development and social change for African-Caribbean communities in England- (Ubele is Swahili for The Future).
On April 13th 2011, after months of planning and designing, Reos presented The Ubele Project for critical review to 7 change agents working within the African-Caribbean community representing academia, social work, business, the third sector, mental health, and community organising. The event, aptly called “The Critical Friends Session”, was hosted in conjunction with the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Below we document the key findings from the meeting.
From the group introductions Three Key Learnings on the State of the African-Caribbean community in Britain were established:
1. The struggles of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants have given subsequent generations greater racial equality and immense opportunities in diverse spheres of life e.g. education etc.
2. There is an overwhelming feeling that the community is regressing as British African-Caribbean people, particularly the men, are continually over-represented in statistics concerning underachievement in education, unemployment, the incidence of mental health issues, rates of incarceration and involvement in gun and knife crime.
3. 2011 is the year for change as interactions with young and old African-Caribbean peoples revealed that they are fed-up and want to chart a brighter more successful future for the community.
From these propositions a lively and at times emotionally charged dialogue emerged that unveiled 10 Key Factors for Creating Resilient African-Caribbean Communities in Britain:
1. The importance of Family; What kind of family structures and whose family values do we adopt?
2. The role of Faith Institutions; How can faith organisations arrest the decay of morals and re-introduce/re-enforce ethics and values into the community?
3. The role of Strong Communities; It takes an entire village to raise a child but how can the village raise the child if we don’t trust our neighbours?
Reos Learning Festival, Melbourne
Posted on | March 12, 2011 | Comments Off
The Reos Partners Learning Festival took place between 28 February and 1 March, 2011 at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia. The former Convent of the Good Shepherd is a center for the arts, culture and learning in Melbourne.
Some 80 people attended the Learning Festival with participants coming from as far afield as Japan and Korea, as well as from a broad range of sectors, including public officials, the business community and civil society actors. Following a welcome to the nation by an Aboriginal Elder, Aunty Doreen, participants spent two days, exploring ideas and experiences around addressing complex social challenges.
One participant reported the experience of the Learning Festival as “mind-blowing.”
(Photos by Paul Larkin and Zaid Hassan)
keep looking »About
Welcome to A Reos Retrospective, a blog dedicated to reporting, reflecting and refracting on the work of Reos Partners London/Oxford to date.
Timeline
Visitors
Reos Oxford/London Photostream
