When Maddie and I did an informal talk on the book back in August (before we were done editing!), one of the participants asked us to elaborate on what it means to be “generative.” Of the four human elements in our trellis, this one was the least familiar, apparently. I did a quick post on what we mean by generative on this blog in August. So I’ll go ahead and quote myself here:

Generative means to be capable of producing or creating. As a species, human beings are generative in that we are biologically wired to reproduce and propagate. But beyond the biology, human beings are generative in that we are called to create things, to develop, to grow. It’s not a one-time thing. Being generative is an ongoing spiral of growth, change, and creation. It’s a part of being human.

As in the other chapters, we break it down in terms of culture, process, and behavior.

Generative cultures are all about inclusion. This is, quite simply, the capacity to include difference in your organization. Easier said than done, yet critical for innovation and becoming more human as an organization. In all of our discussions about culture, part of what we talk about are the underlying assumptions of culture. I really love the assumptions that support an inclusive culture because they are all paradoxical. We suggest your cultures need to have a “proud humility,” an “aggressive sensitivity,” and “dynamic stability.”

Generative organizations will also fine tune their processes to maximize collaboration. And we don’t just mean simple working together to solve problems. That’s a good start, but we want more. We want collaboration that not only solves the problem, but builds capacity in the system to solve other problems (or future problems) at the same time. And instead of exploring it in terms of structure, internal process, and external process (like we do in the other chapters), we take more of a holistic snapshot of what “collaborative brand” would look like, and “collaborative strategy” as well.

The behavior of generativity is relationship building. This includes the basics of building good interpersonal relationships, but it is also about network relationship building. Here we talk a little more directly about social media than in many of the other chapters. It’s a different kind of work building relationships within social media networks.

At the end of the chapter (we do this in most of the chapters, actually), we have a brief “Must Read” section. Each time we list only three books that we think are the best sources out there on the topic of that particular chapter. For Generative, we listed Frans Johannson’s The Medici Effect, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit, and Nilofer Merchant’s The New How.

All the details, of course, are in the book.

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