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Evaluation rigour for harvesting

July 10, 2017 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Evaluation, Featured, Learning 3 Comments

It matters how and why you capture things.

We are embarking on a innovative approach to a social problem and we need a framework to guide the evaluation process. As it is a complex challenge, we’re beginning with a developmental evaluation framework. To begin creating that,I was at work for most of the morning putting together a meta-framework, consisting of questions our core team needs to answer.  In Art of Hosting terms, we might call this a harvesting plan. For me, when working in the space of developmental evaluation, Michael Quinn Patton is the guy whose work guides mine.  This morning I used his eight principles to fashion …

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Living in a radically creative universe

July 4, 2017 By Being, Emergence

  More from the Kauffman book: “The wondrous diversity of life out your window evolved in ways that largely could not be foretold. So, too, has the human economy in the past fifty thousand years, as well as human culture and law. They are not only emergent but radically unpredictable. We cannot even prestate the possibilities that may arise, let alone predict the probabilities of their occurrence. This incapacity to foresee has profound implications. In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s definition, a “natural law” is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process. But if we cannot even prestate …

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Countering the despair of uncertainty

June 30, 2017 By Being, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Organization 8 Comments

I’ve begun Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, which will be a little heavy summer reading, and he states his purpose very clearly in the preface: “If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of …

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Principles for living reconciliation meaningfully

June 19, 2017 By Bowen, Conversation, Featured, First Nations 9 Comments

Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25”  Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities. We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations.  The ability to own …

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Seven by seven

June 14, 2017 By Being 7 Comments

Yesterday I passed through the start line again. Forty nine times I have rode this incredible planet around the sun, corkscrewing together through space. Last night I sat by a small fire with a small glass of whiskey in my hand, friends and family around me and we just hung out, enjoying each other’s company, listening to a little Stephen Fearing and John Wort Hannam and eating fresh strawberries. The last half dozen years of more have been really illuminating in terms of my own professional life. I have moved from the place of a pure practitioner to a professional …

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