KnittheNetwork KnowtheNetwork

• Evaluate network effectiveness and impact

• If transforming: Refine/ redefine network value propositions

• If transitioning: Distribute reusable assets (including knowledge)

• Grow and diversify network participation

• Build enduring trust and connectivity

• Decentralize network functions

• Spread, deepen, diversify network strategies

• Begin to work together; pilot strategies

• If needed, establish shared structures and processes (e.g., norms of engagement)

• Develop systems for ongoing learning and adaptation

We prototyped a new sort of fellowship. In partnership with Creative Santa Fe, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Rhode Island School of Design, and PopTech, we hosted Disruptive Futures, a weeklong immersion into the past, present, and future of nuclear issues as viewed from Santa Fe, New Mexico. The group of 50 participants included career national and global security professionals; public intellectuals; personnel from both Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories; nuclear deterrence advocates; nuclear deterrence critics; financiers, artists, and media producers from multiple disciplines; and others. Over the course of five intense days, the group grappled with the paradoxes, dilemmas, and complexities inherent in the nuclear weapons enterprise, looking for opportunities to approach stuck challenges alongside colleagues embodying very different forms of knowledge and know-how.

Buoyed by the success of Disruptive Futures, which earned N Square and our partners the 2017 Most Significant Futures Works Award from the Association of Professional Futurists, our team returned from Santa Fe ready to develop a full-fledged strategy for recruiting and maintaining an Innovators Network devoted to diversifying the field of actors working toward nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament goals. We now had evidence that a recurring fellowship program, with the diversity and energy of what we had just produced with our partners in Santa Fe, would be a key feeder program for such a network

We partnered with existing networks. Since we had determined to focus on network building, we made the strategic decision that rather than pursuing the costly, time-consuming process of recruiting individual members it would be faster and more effective to partner with existing networks full of the very people we aimed to attract: PopTech, TED, Singularity University, Games for Change, and Hollywood, Health & Society. The success of our network strategy traces back to these partnerships individually and collectively. We owe a debt of gratitude to the extraordinary and highly collaborative leaders of these partner organizations: Leetha Filderman, president of PopTech; Pat Mitchell and the staff of TED; Kate Folb, director of Hollywood, Health & Society; the staff of Singularity University; and Asi Burak and Susanna Pollock, former and current presidents of Games for Change, respectively.