Al Owski’s Reviews > The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace > Status Update

“Smallness has nothing to do with the size of potential change. What you look for is the quality of what happens if certain sets of people get mixed. The principle of yeast is this: A few strategically connected people have greater potential for creating the social growth of an idea or process than large numbers of people who think alike.”

“It seems to me that the key to changing this thing is getting a small set of the right people involved at the right places. What’s missing is not the critical mass. The missing ingredient is the critical yeast.”

“The number of people in the streets captured the media’s attention but were incapable of generating a sustained process of social change. … However, when I paid careful attention… when… significant change processes actually happened and were sustained… I came to the conclusion that these did not happen with a strategy of focusing on counting the numbers and on whether they amounted to a critical mass.”

“Side-taking…seems to accompany social battlefields and therefore accepts the premise that change is inherently a dualistic struggle. While many of us in the peace movement feel a deep sense of discomfort with politicians who frame our challenges in this manner… as issues that force a choice between the "good guys" and "the evil empires," we have often fallen prey to the trap of replicating that which we abhor.”

“Develop a capacity to see and think strategically about social spaces. These are the actual places of life where unusual relationships cross and interact. This means we must develop a capacity to recognize and build the locus of social change. Markets, hospitals, schools, street corners, cattle dips, transportation service centers, youth soccer clubs… social spaces where people cross in natural ways…”

“Think, feel, and follow relationships. Relationships are at the heart of social change. Relationships require that we understand how and where things connect and how this web of connections occupies the social space where processes of change are birthed and hope to live.”

“Paradoxical by their very nature, relational spaces create social energy that is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. But rather than anarchy, which is like exploding into a million pieces, peacebuilding understands that relationships create and emanate social energy and are places to which energy returns for a sense of purpose and direction.”

“What center holds things together? I have a simple answer in reference to building constructive social change: the invisible web of relationships. When relationships collapse, the center of social change does not hold. And correspondingly, rebuilding what has fallen apart is centrally the process of rebuilding relational spaces that hold things together.”

“Time and again, social change that sticks and makes a difference has behind it the artist’s intuition: the complexity of human experience captured in a simple image and in a way that moves individuals and whole societies. The true genius of the moral imagination is the ability to touch the art and soul of the matter.”

“Professional excellence increasingly has emphasized the technology, the technique and the skills of process management as tools that legitimate and make possible training, replication, and dissemination. … In the process of professionalization we too often have lost a sense of the art, the creative act that underpins the birth and growth of personal and social change.”