Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute… Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.” One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide …
Thinking that the facilitator has the answers is one of the biggest problems with the way people are entrained to relate to facilitators. Because you are guiding a process, many people will feel that you are also an authority on what to do. They will often stop and ask questions about how things are going to work. Imagine: you have just done an elegant and energetic Open Space opening and you are ready to hand the process over to the group. You have slowly and clearly explained the instructions. You have showed everyone how the process works. You have restated …
A small elevator speech I shared on the OSLIST yesterday: Self organization works by a combination of attractors and boundaries. Attractors are things that draw components of a system towards themselves (gravity wells, a pile of money left on the ground, an invitation). Boundaries (or constraints) are barriers that constrain the elements in a system (an atmosphere, the edges of an island, the number of syllables in a haiku) Working together, attractors and boundaries define order where otherwise there is chaos. We can be intentional about some of these, but not all of them. Within complex systems, attractors and constraints …