Many of the circles I travel in instersect in many intimate ways. People I meet here on the west coast of Canada months apart turn out to be co-authors of papers and books. Folks I hear about from others turn out to be partners in crome later on. The Art of Hosting world is a little like that, touching as it does on many many different networks. And through these serendipitous connections, it turns out that I am personally acquainted with two of the three authors of a great little free e-book called Mapping Dialogue. I met Zaid Hassan last …
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Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations. Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are: Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening) Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding) Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding) For me these are important because …
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For those of you that read in newsfeeders you won’t have noticed that I changed the template of the blog again. I think it’s now a little easier to read, but let me know. At any rate, light blogging this month. I have been involved in some incredibly draining work of late, the most recent of which required me to be substantially bigger than I normally have been. I was holding space for a day long circle dialogue on Aboriginal child welfare in British Columbia. It was a full day with many important people from throughout the system who came …
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As Michael and I make some progress on our writing, I find that I have been assembling together bits and pieces of writing I have done over the years and putting some papers up at my site. Today I want to invite you to have a look at a new paper called “Six observations about seeing” which is composed from some blog posts I made 18 months ago or so. As always, comments are welcome.
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Inspired by a project I have been involved in with the Anecdote boys and Viv McWaters, I have written a paper on language and leadership practices in convening a dialogue. Here’s the introduction… William Isaacs book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is continually inspiring reading. It equates very well with the practices that we are teaching fo Open Space facilitation and it is a useful guide for other forms of process facilitation. In the book, Isaacs describes four fields of conversation, essentially politeness, breakdown, inquiry and flow. Within each of these four fields of dialogue, there are a …