The Principles and Practices in Action

This book asks a rather simple but bold question: “How do organizations create systemic social change?” This question is growing in importance, becoming part of the strategic conversation for all types of organizations, not just those specifically focused on social change. Business leaders, politicians, educators, employees, and parents are grappling with the realization that complex social change can rapidly impact their everyday lives. As frustration at the slow pace of change grows, and the world’s wicked problems—such as inequality, climate change and racial justice—proliferate, people are increasingly recognizing that we need to find ways to tackle the root causes of these issues rather than just addressing the symptoms. In the face of these challenges, it is easy to default to our more traditional views of leadership and problem-solving, which celebrate an us-versus-them mentality, top-down decision-making, and aggressive power stances. Systems work—with its focus on the process of change including our day-to-day actions and relationships—may feel counterintuitive in this rapidly emerging future. Yet, as the authors’ research has shown, the future is demanding a different kind of leadership, one that emphasizes the ways we work as much as the outcomes we pursue.

Do No Harm

This chapter identifies four shifts that must take place to overcome the challenges of climate change and better preserve what remains of the inhabitable natural environment. Globally, climate change must be accepted as fact, not fiction, and each nation must take responsibility and commit to sustainable development. The global energy system must rely on renewable sources, rather than fossil fuels. The focus must shift from economic growth to health and well-being. None of these ideas are new, but the author calls for a global strategic conversation about the shape of our collective future. The chapter concludes with the idea that climate change is an opportunity for global collaboration and the development of relationships to better the future.

Modelling Structures for Situated Discourse

This paper describes a corpus of situated multiparty chats developed for the STAC project (Strategic Conversation, ERC grant n. 269427). and annotated for discourse structure in the style of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher & Lascarides,2003). The STAC corpus is not only a rich source of data on strategic conversation, but also the first corpus that we are aware of that provides discourse structures for multiparty dialogues situated within a virtual environment. The corpus was annotated in two stages: we initially annotated the chat moves only, but later decided to annotate interactions between the chat moves and non-linguistic events from the virtual environment. This two-step procedure has allowed us quantify various ways in which adding information from the nonlinguistic context affects dialogue structure. In this paper, we look at how annotations based only on linguistic information were preserved once the nonlinguistic context was factored in. We explain that while the preservation of relation instances is relatively high when we move from one corpus to the other, there is little preservation of higher order structures that capture "the main point" of a dialogue and distinguish it from peripheral information.