It was a rainy day here on Bowen Island, so I pushed around some pieces of my blog. Readers familiar with the evolution of Parking Lot over the past four years will remember that I once devoted a great deal of time to reading poetry and collecting the work of poets I admire. I have reset those collections, and you can find them on the sidebar in the “Collections of poetry” page. The Denise Levertov collection is still one of the most popular pages on this whole site. Also in the sidebar is a restoration of a page that has …
This past week, the Conservative led Parliament in Canada voted to extend Canada’s military commitment in Afghanistan until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s term in office. In so doing, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the following: Together, diplomats, workers and soldiers from 35 countries are working with the government of Afghanistan to rebuild that country. We are providing knowledge, financial assistance, security; security that allows the Afghan people to build a justice system, develop and grow their economy, construct schools, hospitals and irrigation systems, and yes, ensure that the rights of the Afghan people are protected. [Translation] I am …
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 …
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.
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 …