My three year old son is a constant source of amusement and awe. Here are some of the questions he asked me today: How low is the earth? What part of the earth spins? – The outside, Finn – What part of the outside? Just the part we are standing on or the part that goes all the way to space? How did I get here? – a short form of the birds and the bees – Yes, I know that, but how did my aliveness get in? Any answers you might have would be gratefully appreciated.
Open Space Technology works on passion bounded by responsibility. It’s about people finding what they want to do and assembling the resources around them to make that happen. It’s about support those people and their ideas with resources and openness. It really works, not just for meetings, but for organizational structures as well. It’s about redefining measurements of success and letting go of control. Now a new book has come out about the practice of very Open Space-like principles at the Brazillian holding company Semco: It’s our lack of formal structure, our willingness to let workers follow their interests and …
Following up on my rant/question of yesterday. Today I met two doctors who I like alot, one of whom I count as a friend and one who is new to me and I was reminded again that what matters is creating conversations where parts of a system talk to one another. We can’t simply write off the whole system because there is wisdom within it that we need to draw us forward. There is also wisdom outside of it too, wisdom that really maters. In the bigger system, convening conversations, like what we did in Chicago matters a lot. In …
I have been engaging with Lenore Ealy since the Giving Conference in Chicago. She turned me on to Richard Cornuelle’s work which seems prescient in many ways. This paper, De-Nationalizing Community (.pdf) is a short but very interesting read. It weaves together anarchist and libertarian perspectives arguing that the idea of community has been appropriated by government. The paper generated a really interesting spark of mutual interest between Lenore and I. We come from very different political poles and through our conversations I have been losing my grip on political spectrums, compasses and other typologies, which can only be a …
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Through Euan, I found out that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying, herself died on Wednesday. Her work on the grief cycle especially has been very influential in my own life in dealing with people, organizations and communities undergoing deep change. But her legacy, as David Weinberger points out, may be that she gave North American culture a language for talk about death and being with dying people.