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The Dragonfly is travelling at the moment.
Travel has amazing potential to open our eyes to new ways of thinking and new ways of understanding the world we live in. But it takes an inquisitive mindset to reap these benefits, in travel as well as in life and in our organisations.
The good apostle Paul of New Testament fame wrote something along the lines of ‘empty yourselves of all the things that make for bad stuff’. Well maybe not exactly that, but people have been misquoting him for centuries.
He also said women should remain silent in ‘church’. And astonishingly some people still take this advice seriously!
But back to the ‘empty yourself’ advice. What does that have to do with strategic planning?
What would it mean for a strategic planning process if it began with something akin to a ‘mind enema’? An emptying of all the noise and clutter, the chatter and unconscious yet chosen meanings, the assumptions and presuppositions, from the deepest parts of the mind? Read more
To collaborate or not to collaborate? The ‘C word’ raises a key challenge for not-for-profit service providers – how to collaborate and compete at the same time? It would seem to us that in putting social impact first, collaboration can only be a benefit. Read more
Back in 2011, we were sitting in a café talking about what really matters. We were frustrated by the can’t do, don’t do and won’t do people – the ones who want to play by the rules and play it safe. We talked about injustices that exist in our community (current Government policy on asylum seekers is a perfect example) and the ways we could bring about change. By the end of the conversation, we had written the business plan for The Dragonfly Collective on a napkin. Read more
Organisations can act without morals or ethics. The past several years have exposed corporate disgrace in many places. For-profit greed, hubris and narcissistic power has led to crisis after crisis (see John Harris’s article ‘politics and corporate disgrace’ in The Guardian Weekly). But one could enquire why we would expect anything else? For-profits seek profit. But what about our expectations of not-for-profits? Read more