An incomplete guide to the giants’ shoulders we are standing on.

We figured it might well be a good moment to share from who and what we are learning, and from who and what we are inspired. Our inspirations on cluster development, change, transformation & innovation, collaboration and partnership, sustainable business, system thinking, design thinking and more.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

…and then we felt pressed to contribute something meaningful, too.

The global crisis that emerged from the Coronavirus pandemic certainly is an event — changing everyday life and giving rise to actions of a magnitude one would wish as response for the global climate crisis — that might trigger profound societal transformations. Perhaps we just return to a new normal of less deep changes to our society. Who knows?! These days, the one who is a regular on social media finds an abundance of “Top 10” learnings and predictions from this crisis. We are also asking ourselves “How not waste a crisis”. Yet, we feel reluctant at this point to share our ‘general’ learnings and opinions on the way forward and how to ‘way forward’.

Instead, we figured it might well be a good moment to share from who and what we are learning, and from who and what we are inspired. This will become an incomplete guide to the giants’ shoulders we are standing on. Why? Firstly, we are hoping to extend an invitation to you. Please, share who or what inspires you. We want to hear and know. Secondly, it is perhaps a “thank you” note and a way of giving credit, showing our gratitude. Third, it might be of inspiration to you, too. Just get in touch to start the conversation.

Quercus Group is a consulting company. There is somehow this notion out there of the almighty expert consultant, excelling in performance and developing her own original and unique concepts and methods. Even so, it might be nevertheless healthy to practice humility and be open about on whose shoulders, on whose originality and excellence of practice and work, we build our own. It is sometimes challenging to explain exactly what we are doing. When we come to realize the ever-evolving nature of our company and team, much of our approach owes to those from who we learn and get inspired. We offer a tailored approach to the challenges and the realities of our clients. This act of tailoring can be described in a way as craftmanship, wherein we knit together and operationalize knowledge, concepts, approaches and methods so they fit. This applies more less irrespective of the topics (sustainable urban development, sustainable agribusiness, sustainable trade and green economy, circular economy, and others) or geographies (East Africa, the Nordics, South Asia Pacific, every else) we are working on.

Here is a certainly incomplete list to our “toolbox” and who/what we think of or draw from when we think about these “tools”. It does not follow any particular structure, framework or hierarchy, and some of it would fit in several categories.

Cluster Development

Cluster development is home turf for us as Quercus Group’s story began with it.

• The story of clusters might also start from reading Michael Porter (@MichaelEPorter), then you give us a call.
• Most recently, we are super impressed by Bianca Dragomir and in awe of Cluster of Change, which she is the driving head of. We strongly identify with the “7-stepping stones for a cluster of change” in reflection of our work.
• We are happy to be part of a thriving cluster community as member of the TCI Network, sharing our office with Merete Nielsen and Kaspar Nielsen from Cluster Excellence Denmark, who happen to be core members (Merete is the chairwoman)of the global TCI network team.

Change, Transformation and Innovation

• We are loyal followers of the Nesta Foundation and the related State of Change.
• Sitra in Finland also leaves us in awe all the time.
• Our work often takes place in a human development context. There are many actors in this space, who are great inspiration. We love the efforts of Partos (and the spindle) and Bond in connecting CSOs and pushing their members addressing human development challenges in new ways.
• Simply impressive and huge source for inspiration and learning are the UNDP Accelerator Labs (60 Lab teams covering 78 countries). Go check it out!
• We are really into urban development and the MaRS Solutions Lab is another super cool lab in this space.

Collaboration

• How do you create a system and conducive conditions in our times inviting citizen to actually participate? We feel Participatory City, Every One. Every Day. (@TessyBriton) are simply beautiful efforts on participation in our today’s society.
• Everything collective intelligence e.g. the Collective Intelligence Design Playbook by Nesta (related Collective Intelligence Projects and Tools. And the contributors of We are liminal.
• The European Network of Living Labs
• Manifesto for a Collaborative Society by Collaborate CIC
• Transdisciplinarity (& Transdiscplinary Science). We are happy followers of Aalto University, Dutch Research Institute For Transitions or the Leuphana University.

Design Thinking

We are not designers. Design thinking matters to us, because it sits well with our ambition on tackling wicked problems. There are plenty of resources. Thus, we keep it short and mention only two.

• Danish Design Center in general and the work of Christian Bason (@christianbason) on government innovation of which much is inspiring for change process beyond government, too.
• Chemistry in Singapore, who we really admire and consider as good friends.

Sustainable Business

• B Corp
• Danish companies such as Ørsted, Chr. Hansen, who really walk new pathways.

Systems Thinking & Systems Transformation

• It is worth signing up for the newsletter of The Complexity Void
• We have been working closely with Climate-KIC on various projects. Climate-KIC reframed its approach recently towards a systems transformation approach. We learn a lot. If you are interested, it might be a good idea to read the series of articles on innovation in complex adaptive systems by Dominic Hofstetter (@dhofstetter_x)
• Metabolic, who made system thinking core to their consultancy work
• Portfolios Approaches in Sustainability and Innovation
• Collaborators in creation — Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control? By Doyne Farmer, Fotini Markopoulou, Eric Beinhocker, Steen Rasmussen

Facilitation

• We love toolboxes. Toolboxtoolbox might be the single only place to look for an abundance of beautiful and really helpful toolboxes from a wide range of organizations and for a wide range of purposes.

Organizational Development

We are an evolving organization. We help our clients to transform. We spent a lot of thought and experiment how we can continue to evolve.

• The difference between Networked Leadership, Systems Leadership and Digital Leadership ? by Cassie Robinson
• Distributed Collaboration Manual has been inspirational just recently. We are a distributed team working from the office and from home, from Denmark, Kenya, Singapore and wherever our projects lead us. This has been helpful also during the Coronavirus times.
• Daresay Teamwork Kit

Storytelling and Communication

Admittingly, we have a long way to go on becoming better communicators and storytellers. It is important, because we know that storytelling can be a powerful tool for change.

• Storythings has a cool newsletter coming every Friday, which happens to be nicely curated and inspirational.
• Our Nordic neighbor Sweden hired what you might call the country’s chief storyteller, Per Grankvist, “exploring storytelling as a tool to get us to sustainable future even quicker”.

Of course, there are many more. We hope that this provides a glimpse of what goes into our work, who inspires it. We would love to connect and have a conversation with you. This is an invitation to reach out to us.

Get in touch to start the conversation.

— Wadim Baslow, Project Manager, Sustainable Cities (@w_baslow)