Fit Associates Learning Portfolio

We equip people to create change together

Marc Rettig

10 min readAug 8, 2018

Sections

What we’re trying to do
What we’ve been learning and teaching
What we want to learn
Gallery

Our intention: what we’re trying to do

The short version of our intention is this:

We equip people to create change together.

Whatever you call it, something big is happening. The Great Turning, the rise of social innovation and new power, transition — it has many names and no single name. We see a popular drive toward equity and sustainability, care and inclusion, being expressed in hundreds of thousands of experiments, movements, and organizations.

We’ve met so many of the people involved. They are determined to improve life for their community, or improve the impact of their organization for the people it serves. For years perhaps, they’ve been helping an institution move from its old ways — no longer good for the world — to take its place in a sustainable and equitable society. There’s a vision, a sense of what could come to life.

But this stuff is hard. These efforts are bigger than single projects. These shifts are going to take a long time. The work requires getting people together who don’t see eye-to-eye, who might not like or trust each other. It means facing social complexity, making space for honest conversation and purposeful alignment, and learning to create together over the long haul and through the uncertainty. It means taking care of yourself and each other along the way.

The practices we need are out there. As you’ll see in the list in the next section, the world contains a great deal of knowledge about how social patterns shift, how to work in complexity, the conditions in which groups of people can create together in good relationship despite their differences, and how to cultivate our own personal development so we can stand in those good relationships.

But there is not yet a community of practice for social pattern-shifting. The knowledge we need is out there, but it is spread widely across disciplines and communities. Emergent approaches are still exotic and rare. Solutionism and a heroic view of individual expertise are still the norms.

We are gearing up to give people the fundamentals. Today we are an organization of just two people. What can we do? We believe it will be a good use of our gifts to:

help people and groups get better at collaborating creatively across differences,
introduce them to potent approaches to long-term systemic change,
help them acquire the personal and relationship skills they need to succeed at these things.

What we’ve been learning and teaching

For the last eight years we have been serious students of how to support system- and community-scale change, with the aim of contributing to a societal shift to sustainable and equitable ways of life.

Synthesis at four entangled scales

Social patterns unfold and repeat at all scales: individual, relational, group, and system. Most fields and learning resources focus on one or two of those scales: team focus without personal or organizational attention, systems without acknowledgement of small groups as a “unit of change,” and so on.

We want to understand something about the way these different scales influence each other and unfold together, so we have been learning from a wide range of fields and practices. Here’s a long list of things we’ve tapped in to. It might seem improbably long, but a) it has been eight years so far, and b) we are harvesting and synthesizing the best work we can find, not trying to become experts in all this stuff. Part of the problem we’re seeing is that the knowledge needed for systemic change is fragmented across so many fields.

Social practice theory
Living systems theory
Family systems therapy
Organizational development
Social capital
Dialogue theory and dialogic practices in organizations and communities
Service design
Creativity studies
Applied improv and Theater of the oppressed
Participatory creativity, group co-creation
Models of systemic change
Models of individual change
Conflict resolution
Personal and human development
Art therapy and narrative therapy
Intergenerational trauma
Race, equity, inclusion, and social justice: studies and movements
Complexity studies and practices of managing in complexity
System-scale approaches to intentional change
Reflective and mindfulness practices
Change leadership thinking and literature
Writings on power

… the list goes on. A partial book list can be found in our Goodreads.com page. (It is on our wish-to-do list to curate a good resource list on our site, but other things keep taking priority.)

Learning by teaching

Our learning has been greatly accelerated by the necessity of helping other people learn, as we teach two courses every year:

Fundamentals of Design for Social Innovation in the MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Art in New York.
Principles, Approaches, and Methods for Social Innovation and Transition in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design in Pittsburgh.

We are currently extending these materials into public courses and workshops (see “what we seek to learn,” below).

Learning by practicing

We have been applying these ideas and practices in our work with organizations and communities. These have so far been mostly short-term and group-scale, but we are aiming for longer-term work that embraces all four scales.

Some examples of the kinds of situations we’ve engaged with (or in one case, are in a conversation we expect will lead to engagement):

Capacity-building for a group of non-profits, including a children’s museum and a middle school, who are in the process of developing a “campus for youth learning” in a mostly-minority neighborhood. This stretches their current ability to collaboration, and to include community members in their programs and creative process.
Hosting and facilitating the staff of a library, which is full of internal conflict that retards its progress, murders morale, and affects its services.
Hosting public workshops to help people build skills for difficult conversations, through role-playing, mindfulness, and dialogue.
Equipping teams of grad students, with no prior facilitation experience, as they listen to a community of people, identify a conversation that would greatly matter to that community but which isn’t being had, then invite, plan, and host that conversation among those people.
Gathering program leadership and staff in a non-profit whose efforts to advocate and influence against mistreatment of animals were proving ineffective. Giving them a learn-by-doing experience in harvesting the stories of people who practice the very behaviors they oppose (the first time any of them had met such people in open conversation). Supporting sense-making that led to principles and strategies.
Others — too many to list in detail: hosting diagnostic and healing conversation among the full staff of a sustainability start-up, with a great purpose but a toxic culture; honest conversations in global gatherings of public health specialists in an international development agency; training in group methods for a convener of federal policy influencers; members of an IT organization, creating a new way of collaborating with their estranged internal customers,….

What we want to learn

How to give this to others

We’re always looking at ways to help more people learn this stuff so they can apply it in their own situation.

A university course is good because it gets the same people together for big blocks of time over a long period. But the application — the field assignments — are necessarily brief and artificial.
We have proposed a “capacity building” effort for a group of collaborating organizations and their surrounding community. It includes a learning / social lab for guided practice and application. This is desirable because it engages with people who are in lasting relationship aligned to a common cause, and the applied learning can engage with their real work. But it is rare to find such an opportunity, and takes a long to make it happen. As a small business, that has proven to be quite difficult.
Online courses have global reach, the platforms are getting better, and self-paced learning has lots of appeal. We are attracted to a “community as curriculum” model—groups who share a passion for impact in a similar situation coming together to learn not only from us, but from each other. They create their own learning agenda, they learn what they need as they move into their work, and our offerings provide them with a unique and powerful resource (among everything else they might choose to tap). But this too is a difficult business model, requiring several acts of innovation.

How to embody the change we seek inside our company

It is an uncomfortable fact of our current systems that they are held in place through identity-based oppression. The work we’ve done and are doing at Fit comes quite naturally from who the two of us are as people: middle(ish) class, white, educated, one immigrant, one citizen, one male, one female. Our voice is valuable, but it is not the voice of the society or even a typical slice of society.

We believe that if we want to genuinely shift our world towards an equitable state, we need to become an agency that lives this change: an agency that looks like and gives from the wide pool of wisdom in the world. This means that we need to:
a) continue to educate ourselves so we can unlearn internalized oppression,
b) get more partners that are different than us so we can continue to practice relationships that celebrate difference and model what we know to be possible in this world.

We aren’t always sure how best to proceed, and are seeking input and advice as we go. At this moment Hannah is actively educating herself to undo racism, and writing about some of her experiences in a collection of articles called Fynbos and Fire.

Marc’s current list of things to learn more about

I am gathering notes on a number of topics as I pursue bundles of ideas I would like to internalize and integrate. They’re not tidy, but they’re full of resources, and you can find them at Rettig’s Notes on medium.com.

I’m just at the beginning of my education about race, trauma (including societal and intergenerational trauma), equity and justice. I’ve gathered materials, but so far this learning has been pushed back by more immediate priorities.
A deeper dive and better synthesis with the work being done by the transition design community.
More first-person interviews with people who are managing systemic approaches: positive deviance, social labs, transformational scenario planning, participatory narrative inquiry, organizational relational systems consulting, developmental evaluation, etc. Our work will always benefit from more insight into the realities of people who are committed to such work for the long haul.
More hands-on experience with the tools and processes of “mass ethnography”— systemic pattern-finding through broad collection of anecdotes, employing tools such as SenseMaker or Spryng.io, and managing probes for “How do we get more stories like these, and fewer stories like those?”
I’ve done lots of writing, but only a little video production. Video is such a potent medium, and such a FUN medium, I’m keen to learn and practice more.

Hannah’s current list of things to learn more about

Undoing my internalized racism & forging cross-racial community: I learn best in community, so I am currently taking an 8 month trauma informed anti-oppression yoga teacher training. Working through these tough issues in community really helps me. This is key to my life’s work.
Finding my fit: It is my intention to use my life to shift our world towards a kinder place. In my career as a Designer, I could SEE the change I made. Social change in the way we approach it, is hard to see. I can doubt my path and ask things like “Shouldn’t I just get a job and join an existing movement?” I’m learning what it means to best use my life towards a generative societal shift while also living joyously and wholeheartedly.
Finding my voice: My intention is to inspire creative change. Yet sometimes we need to talk about now, about how we participate in exploitative systems and the inner and outer work required to acknowledge our oppressive past resulting in our unjust present. Learning to speak about this in a way that feels generative to the audience is a learning edge.
Running a sustainable business: I am great at doing my work, but I am still learning how to get work. Running a socially minded business in the US is very different to running my design agency in South Africa! I intend to get better at this and learn from people who do this well.