After a long hiatus, we're excited to return and bring you the voices of those tackling tough problems! In this episode, Kumu Founder and CEO Jeff Mohr sits down with Cassandra Gould van Praag, Senior Community Manager at The Alan Turing Institute. Cassandra plays a key role in fostering and growing a dynamic community of researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts. She recently launched a captivating Kumu project that visualizes her community and is now sharing with us what she learned from the process. Let's dive in!

Read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog

This podcast was recorded on June 11th, 2024. Opinions expressed by Dr Gould van Praag are solely her own and do not express the views or opinions of The Alan Turing Institute. For more information, please visit The Alan Turing Institute website for updates on their organization.

This week we’re joined by Chris Block, who is currently the Chronic Homelessness Initiative Director at Tipping Point Foundation. Previously he was the CEO of American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley, as well as a number of other roles all really in the thick of it, as a systems leader working on systems change. I think you’ll find he has a fascinating background, with lots of insights to share, so let’s dive in.

Read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog.
*Audio is not optimal for this episode, but the message is powerful nonetheless!

This week we are joined by Gene Bellinger. Gene is one of the most prolific systems thinkers, an early founder of Systems Thinking World, and one of the earliest and most influential evangelists of Kumu (there are a number of features that you should be thanking Gene for). In this episode we explore Gene's path to systems thinking, what it takes to do it well, and why he so rarely uses that term anymore.

Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.

This week we’re joined with Odin Mühlenbein who is a partner at Ashoka Germany and also a lead of the systems unit at Ashoka Globalizer. He’s also the co-author of a recent report, From Small to Systemic which looks at the multi-billion euro potential in social innovation.

Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.

This week we're joined by June Holley, who is a longtime network weaver and author of The Network Weaving Handbook. She's spent much of her career working with communities, often times low-income communities, on complex issues, taking both a systems and a network lens informed by complexity principles.

In this conversation we touch on lots of different topics from the basics of how do you collect really good, compelling information about the people in your network and see how that network changes over time, to the importance of experimentation and aligning funding to support that experimentation, and also to thinking about the really important role of things like diversity in a network, and how much that can be an unlock and truly an early leverage point for so much of the change that we're trying to create in the world.

Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.

This week we have longtime community member Aldo de Moor joining us. Some of you may remember him from one of our original podcasts. Since we last spoke with Aldo, he's been busy refining his CommunitySensor participatory methodology with communities across the globe.

In this episode we catch up with Aldo to learn about how his approach has evolved, what he's learning about how to engage communities in shared sensemaking, what it takes to make maps that are meaningful to communities, and how processes like his are essential to increasing collective impact.

Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.

We’re joined today by Sam Rye. Sam is a self-described unapologetic generalist who has left his mark on a number of different organizations. Enspiral, Social Labs, Lifehack to name a few. In today’s conversation we’ll touch on a variety of topics. Anything from the role of nature in encouraging greater presence and leading to strategic insight. How to have a more experimental focus and combine systems analysis, strategy, and prototyping. And the need to focus way more than we do on relationships. Let’s dive in.

Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.

Luke Craven is a research fellow at the University of New South Wales and the developer of the System Effects methodology. Today we'll explore a number of different topics: why Luke decided to create this approach, what some of the challenges were with traditional systems mapping approaches, and find out about some of the secrets that Luke has come across for how to bring the user understanding of complex systems and recenter that lived experience in social science and policy making practice.

Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcription.

Josh Goldstein is a Director of the Bridge Collaborative at The Nature Conservancy, where he works to bring about fundamental changes about how we think, plan and fund work across the environment, health and development communities. Josh's work pushes against the dominant paradigm that we can either support economic development OR protect the environment, and instead looks at how The Nature Conservancy's work can benefit both nature and people.

Jolyon Swinburn is a Policy Analyst at the Ministry of Environment in New Zealand. In this role, he brings a multi-domain approach that recognizes how interconnected our various natural assets are and how we can use that mindset to create more effective policies.