Quotes from Peter Block

The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.

The choice to worry about why we are doing something more than how we do something is risky business.

Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.

We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a "normal" life, and how is it going?

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.

Understand that the task is to shift the demand for the right answer to the search for the right question.

What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.

each technique carries a consistent message more important than any method: that each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with pretense is always self-destructive.

Questions that are designed to change other people are the wrong questions. Wrong, not because they don't matter or are based on ill intent, but because they reinforce the problem-solving model. They are questions that are the cause of the very thing we are trying to shift: the fragmented and retributive nature of our communities.

We want desperately to take uncertainty out of the future. But when we take uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward. Nothing new can come from the desire for a predictable tomorrow. The only way to make tomorrow predictable is to make it just like today. In fact, what distinguishes the future is its unpredictability and mystery.

In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one's being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one's being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.

In his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words That Remade America, Garry Wills (2006) argues that it was Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address who transformed America's individualism-oriented Constitution, with all its checks and balances, into a vision of the common good. Lincoln is the de facto godfather of the common good.

Individual transformation is the more popular conversation, and the choice not to focus on it [in this book] is because we have already learned that the transformation of large numbers of individuals does not result in the transformation of communities. If we continue to invest in individuals as the primary target of change, we will spend our primary energy on this and never fully invest in communities. In this way, individual transformation comes at the cost of community.

Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream.

the search for human freedom—freedom being the choice to be a creator of our own experience and accept the unbearable responsibility that goes with that. Out of this insight grows the idea that perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom. This may be the ultimate act of love that is called for from those who hold power over others.

We recognize the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. The difference between subject and object. Citizens have the capacity to create for themselves whatever they require. Citizens have power, customers have needs.

The things that matter to us are measured by depth. Would you assess your humanity by its pace? When I view myself as a time-sensitive product, valued for what I produce, then I have made depth, extended thought, and the inward journey marginal indulgences.

It is when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others, that things really happen.

Community-as-problems-to-be-solved has some benefits. It values the ability to implement, is big on doing, has a certain honesty about it, and worships tangible results as the ultimate blessing. You might say that this is what has gotten us this far. It is not that this (or any other) context is wrong; it just does not have the power to bring something new into the world.

As an individual free to create the world we live in, I carry the cause for how my boss and others respond to and treat me. Once I understand this and stop trying to control them, I can get on with the business of acting on what matters.

change. Each of us has a free will at our core, so like it or not, others will choose to change more readily from the example set by our own transformation than by any demand we make of them.

We can create structures of belonging even if we are introverted

If you don't believe this, think what would happen if a teacher gave all A's. The teacher would have a problem.

Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for a wide range of beliefs. This begins by allowing people the space to say "no." If we cannot say "no" then "yes" has no meaning