We are excited to be facilitating a gathering on Strategic Questioning and the Art of Network Leadership as part of the Leadership Learning Community's Boston Learning Circle series. It will be held on April 5th from 9:30am - 12:30pm in Boston at The Boston Foundation. Here are the details on the program:

To celebrate the publication of Leadership & Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World, the Leadership Learning Community is convening Boston area funders, practitioners and evaluators to explore what it means to lead with a network mindset.

Leading with a network mindset requires skills in creating spaces and conditions that enable diverse groups to find common purpose and come together in ways where diversity enables new possibilities to emerge. We often view leaders as having the answers, yet in networks, effective leadership requires the ability to frame the right questions – questions that inspire, focus, and catalyze the power of a group and the individuals within it.

At this gathering of the Boston Leadership Learning Circle, we will explore Strategic Questioning, a technique of framing open questions that inspire movement, reflection, and enable people to discover new options and alternatives. Beth Tener, Principal of New Directions Collaborative, will provide a brief primer on strategic questioning and how it can be used in facilitating and convening networks. Then participants will practice using strategic questions in the context of their real-life challenges in leading networks, in a live case-study process and in small groups. Maya Townsend of Partnering Resources will help facilitate this gathering.

You will come away with many new strategic questions to inform your work with networks and new tools for leading with a network mindset. Attendees will receive a copy of the Leadership & Networks report. Click here to register.

New Directions blog has provided a valuable way to share case studies and explore the emergineg issues and best practices we see in our work. We have added new functionality to our blog to make it more interactive and searchable. Some key new features include:

• Articles are now tagged by topic and indexed in a Tag Cloud on the left so you can search by many more topics.
• A comments feature has been added. We look forward to your thoughts, additions, and questions on these blog posts. 
• Social media buttons now enable you to click "Like" for Facebook or Tweet if you would like to forward a blog link to your networks.
• Related articles on our site and on other sites can now be linked to a blog post.

We welcome your feedback on these improvements and look forward to future "conversations" via the blog comments.

The Leadership Learning Community has just published a new report entitled Leadership and Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World. New Directions Collaborative was one of several co-authors of the report. The report explores how traditional models of leadership and skills needed are changing as network strategies for social change are increasing. Many examples are shared of how leaders are using network strategies to increase impact, including the Barr Fellowship Network and MomsRising.org. Key questions addressed include:

Why do network strategies deserve our attention?

Why do we need a new leadership mindset?

What are the core principles of leading with a network mindset?

What leadership development strategies support a network mindset and skills?

Beth Tener of New Directions Collaborative is honored to be part of the faculty for a Certificate in Corporate Sustainability, a 3-day program for professionals interested in deepening their understanding of sustainability issues, the benefits to their organization, while acquiring tools and resources to drive change and developing a network of peers to support their efforts. The Certificate is offered by the Institute for Corporate Sustainability, a joint project of NH Business for Social Responsibility and University of New Hampshire. The Institute is followed by a self-defined, mentor-guided capstone project. This year's program will be held November 7-9, 2012 at the University of New Hampshire, Durham.

For further information on the program and to register, click this link.