Change Matrix (CM) is committed to being a learning organization. CM’s Learning, Being, and Doing (LBD) Community is intended to hold space for team members to engage in new and challenging learning opportunities; encourage innovative application of the learning in our work; and promote thinking around how the learning impacts us as individuals both internally and externally to CM.  

We began hosting the LBD Community with our team in 2018. At that time, the LBDs focused on three key themes in CM’s work: leadership, equity, and evaluation, and sessions were designed to rotate between these themes each month. While these topics remain common threads in our work, recent feedback from CM team members indicated an interest in better aligning sessions with CM’s values, especially those related to relationships and community; diversifying content in a way that is process and/or systems focused, relevant to our work and not redundant; centering monthly sessions on a specific resource; and providing more time and space to explore content in a deeper, more meaningful way. In addition, CM team members expressed an interest in having more involvement in planning and facilitating the LBD Community sessions so they could gain that experience and the work did not entirely lie with CM’s Leadership Team.   

With the above in mind, the CM team is now piloting a redesign of the LBD Community. With this redesign, team members have been divided into learning pods of three to five people each. The goal of the learning pods structure is to engage all CM team members in designing learning that supports the overall growth of the CM team and to encourage connections between team members who may not typically work together. learning pods lead the monthly LBD Community sessions and are responsible for identifying and sharing a resource(s) of interest and facilitating three 80-minute learning sessions with the team during a given month. We are evaluating each monthly session and sharing findings with the team as we go. At the end of the six-month pilot period, we will use the data to inform decisions about what next steps to take with the LBD Community.    

The redesigned LBD Community launched in September 2022 by CM team members, Elizabeth Waetzig, Sandra Silva, and London Losey. We started by identifying an excerpt from adrienne maree brown’s book, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, that focuses on the topic of fractal facilitation and a short video on Emergent Strategies. To center everyone in the shared space, we opened our first session with the poem Radical Gratitude Spell, and reviewed brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy, which guide the fractal facilitation concepts and techniques she describes in her book.  The first LBD focused on Learning – the key learnings from brown’s work and specifically being in relationship with one another. The following week we focused discussions on Being — exploring how we show up as facilitators and as participants in the LBD space. And the final week focused on Doing — identifying actions we might take moving forward based on our LBD experience over the month. Tied into those actions, we wrapped up the September LBD by celebrating how we are evolving and changing as individuals and as a company. 

While we are just at the beginning stages of implementing the redesigned LBD Community, some of our initial learnings from the September session have supported that the design provides for: 

  • Deeper Connections: Team members especially appreciate meeting in small groups that include colleagues with whom they do not normally connect.
  • Diverse Thought: The resources shared did not resonate with all team members and their role(s) with CM, which called on us as facilitators to lift up different perspectives in our learning discussions and not make assumptions that what is shared will feel useful/meaningful to all team members. 
  • Thought-Provoking Discussion: Even though the content didn’t resonate with everyone, team members remained open to learning and felt comfortable enough to express individual thoughts, opinions, and experiences at minimum in the small group space, and, to some extent, in the large group space, as well.

We look forward to sharing over the next few months our continuing journey as an LBD Community and how we are growing together.