Peter Block creates a brilliant case for brain-based-community-building through conversations that transform.
Conversations that create community transformation for Block, include invitation, possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment and gifts. Do you agree?
Interestingly, each of Block’s entry points to transformation, also offer segues into brain based communication.
Invitational conversation welcomes diversity with an emphasis on leaving no brain behind.
Possibility – for Block is an act of imagination of what we can create collaboratively in future. It replaces problem solving which seeks to improve the past.
Ownership ensures that the community is ours to create, and is built on the fact that people best create that which they own.
Dissent creat
es space for diversity to get valued in Block’s world and in ours when tone skills create civil discourse.
Commitment as Block lays it out in personal promises to support the community, calls for a highly developed intrapersonal intelligence.
Gifts represent people’s core capability and that contribution which is freely offered and openly received in community.
For Peter Block, ideal communities offer empowerment, stewardship and accountability for all. For MITA Brain Based Approaches community is the opposite of toxic workplaces that often fragment and overwhelm our world. For both – leaders and followers exchange places back and forth on a regular basis and for mutual dividends.
Striking similarities between Block’s work and MITA brain based work fill the pages of this amazing book. Delightful differences invite questions that stir curiosity.
Questions such as – How can we rejuvenate learning communities as entry points for ongoing transformation at work? What’s your take?
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Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset
Mary Jo, thanks for your kind words! Your comment represents what I hear from all those who know Peter Block and what makes his work so much more attractive to me.
We’ve all learned the words and heard so many of the core components for a great community – and then we see it lived! How refreshing!
I am willing to best you live this also — because I’ve seen it ribboned throughout your work!
Hi Ellen,
Peter Block’s book about Community is definitely a favorite of mine! I had the distinct pleasure to spend a few 1:1 minutes with him a couple of years ago, and found him to represent his work well. He “walks the talk” of community. Thanks for the great post.
Thanks Robyn, Yes, I agree. Interestingly in this fine work of Peter Block – I see the same kind of amazing communities that impressed me so many years ago with Dr. Jean Vanier’s global work that drew in the disenfranchised.
Certainly Paolo Freire notion of the oppressor and the oppressed comes into play here.
MITA community building follows along these lines to a strong degree and yet differ in their emphasis on brain research as part of the freedom to live freely in transformational communities.
During the World Business Forum there was a new emphasis on transparency, trust and collaboration. These are major factors in building the kind of community Block envisions.
I also see how this dovetails with “working with your brain” and not against it. We need “A Whole New Mind” for the Conceptual Age as Daniel H. Pink reveals.