We have recently had the pleasure of working with the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance (MSGA) as they design a Great Neighborhoods Network. The Alliance’s Great Neighborhoods initiative seeks to build a movement to transform the built environment, creating great places around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Significant work has been done to create partnerships and goals in five diverse communities in Greater Boston, connecting them with MSGA resources, other partners, and each other. Now they are working to catalyze a broader Great Neighborhoods Network, enabling local leaders to share their experiences and tools, find information and resources, collaborate, and support each other. There are also opportunities to connect on-the-ground leaders with policy advocates to strengthen their respective work.

Funders inherently have significant power in a system. The way that they use their funding and positional authority can have huge impact on whether a network works effectively. At the Northern New England Networks community of practice gathering I attended this week, a group of network leaders, funders, and consultants reflected on the question: In your work with networks, where have you seen the power that funders have used skillfully and where have you seen it not used skillfully?

Years ago, I was in the audience at a conference of investors and environmentalists listening to a panel of presenters talk about what actions they were pursuing on climate. A speaker from NRDC, who worked in their D.C. office and was all too familiar with the political realities, was talking about their strategy of advocating for incremental reasonable energy reduction targets. In the Q&A, I asked “If the science tells us that we need an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the scope and approach we would adopt to reach 80% is vastly different than the strategies we adopt to achieve a 10-20% target. I realize the political difficulty, but where does this really get us?”

The conundrum is that all the effort and activity to reach shorter-term GHG reduction targets will not necessarily position us to achieve the much greater reductions that the science tells us we need.

This week, the State of Massachusetts just launched a new dashboard to track the progress of greenhouse gas emission reductions and related indicators. The Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Project (GWSP) Network has been working with the state to develop a meaningful set of metrics to enable progress to be evaluated.

In a complex world of interconnected social and environmental challenges, it is increasingly clear that no one organization can solve these alone. A new focus on “collective leadership” is emerging where people collaborate and align their work across organizations and traditional boundaries for greater impact. In this context, we need skills to engage the diversity of a system, tap the collective wisdom of a group, and prioritize strategic actions and learn and adapt as things change.

Strategic questions are a core collective leadership skill. The April gathering of the Leadership Learning Community’s Boston Learning Circle explored the art of asking strategic questions in the context of participants’ current network leadership challenges. This format provided a rich opportunity for dialogue about the nature of how we, as leaders, can use questions to engage and inspire people, to expand our perspective, and tap the collective wisdom of a group.