Audacious Maximus — Recommended Reading

Waddell, Steve. Change for the Audacious: A Doer’s Guide. 2016, Boston: NetworkingAction Publishing.  Click here for the Introduction and Chapter 1.

Fine-tuning how to work with what we already understand occupies most of our efforts.  What route to our next destination minimizes unwanted traffic and maximizes opportunities to complete errands?  How can we design the agenda and space for our next meeting to get the most out of the creativity and passion everyone brings?  What do I want to put in the garden this year?

How to get our head, heart, and hands around really big issues that we care deeply about and that we don’t understand at all is hard.  Thus, most of us most of the time dedicate little effort to this.  It is too complex and too hard.  It requires too much audacity, especially when the results of our efforts are fruitless.

Along comes Steve Waddell, a friend and colleague working at the forefront of abundance-based approaches to human agreements.  In Change for the Audacious, Steve shares how he makes sense of what is being learned across the globe about engaging vast numbers of people in addressing large systems change.  A pragmatic sociologist, he has traveled the world working with and observing people who take on extraordinarily challenging issues, finding patterns in how these people do what they do.  In earlier books and dozens of articles, he has described the emerging world of Societal Learning and Change and emerging forms of human interaction that deal with these issues, like Global Action Networks.  Now he extends the breadth of practice he embraces to highlight patterns in how people are learning to transform the complexity of human interactions, to “[radically change] the way we perceive our world, create relationships, and organize our societies.”

In this “doer’s guide,” Steve frames complexity and transformation in ways that make it easier to see what is being learned across thousands of efforts globally, towards large systems change.  He then applies these frames in five rich case studies.  Through these stories, you will see how people address “issues such as climate change, food security, health, education, environmental degradation, peace-building, water, equity, corruption, and wealth creation. This book is for people working on these types of issues, with the belief that we can create a future that is not just ‘sustainable,’ but also flourishing.”  A big hairy, audacious goal–audacious maximus.