A colleague passed last week. Laurel Doersam was my co-host for the Open Space on Open Space in 2001 in Vancouver. We met originally when she sent me an email asking about Open Space and after connecting, she decided to go to Berlin in 2000 to OSonoS where she made the offer on behaf of the both of us to come to Vancouver in 2001.
Laurel ran the business end of the operation, which was not something either of us really had passion for, but she took it on and made sure we didn’t lose any money or any people that wanted to come. During the event itself I opened and closed space on the first and last days and she held space for the evening and morning news sessions, lending us a casual but intentional presence which supported the processing of the day’s work. After the conference was over, she hosted many friends including Lisa Heft, Nuran Yurgit and John Engle among others, showing them a little bit of BC and a lot of her heart and hospitality.
Shortly after OSonOS, Laurel was diagnosed with the cancer that took life last week. I heard from her a couple of times after OSonOS and tried to hook up with her and Rick the few times I was in Victoria, to no avail. I think the last time I saw her was actually at OSonOS, when I handed her a small gift of a medicine bundle to show my appreciation for her partnership in co-hosting the conference.
I have lost loved ones to cancer, and I know what Rick and Chelsea and the others are going through. I wish them peace and solace over the next weeks, months and years as Laurel’s spirit flies.
Here is a link to my opening comments at OSonOS IX in Vancouver. Laurel was there in the room with us all, as she is now.
[tags]Laurel Doersam[/tags]
“The secret of life is to have a question or task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day of your whole life and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
— Henry Moore
With thanks to my friend Patti DeSante, and also Michael Jones, who uses this quote in “Artful Leadership” (.pdf).
[tags]Henry Moore, Michael Jones, secret of life[/tags]
Photo of Henry Moore sculpture at Hakone Open Air Museum by Nemo’s Great Uncle
From my friend Roq Garreau:
“Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people would never admit to their visions for fear of being thought impractical or unrealistic. They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience of the world that they can only stand to explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine, they are needed too. Vision does need to be balanced with skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe that it is possible for the world to envision its way to a sustainable future. Vision without action is useless, but action without vision does not know where to go or how to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate action. More than that, vision when widely shared and firmly kept in sight brings into being new systems. We mean that literally. Within the physical limits of space, time, material and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new behaviour, new knowledge and new technology, but eventually new social institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings. A sustainable world can never come into being if it cannot be envisioned. The vision must be built up from the contribution of many people before it is complete and compelling.”
— Meadows, Donnella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jørgen Randers
I’ve had great occaision to think about this quote this week. Roq actually sent this to me and the mayor of the island we live on. Our mayor, Bob Turner, is a guy who is pretty committed to vision, to sustainability and to participation. Yesterday Bob and I were discussing the possibility of a group of us on Bowen Island co-hosting an ongoing “vision collaboratory” which would simply be a place in which Bowen Islanders would be allowed to dream and share good ideas free from the constraints of action plans, resources and even possibility. We could harvest from these conversations using a wiki, Google Earth and other tools to create a simple but powerful ideas bank.
Why would this be important? Because many people want to participate in the life and future of their community, but they don’t want to devote large amounts of time to the formal process, or they don’t have the large amounts of money that allow them to buy and develop parts of the island. Also, there is something incredibly valuable about unfettered dreaming. A vision of 100 years has the luxury of not needing to be perfect and can often provide inspiration and solid ideas for those working on shorter timeframes with more constraints.
And so it looks like that is one project about to take shape here on Bowen Island.
But this vision quote struck me on other levels too, arising out of the experience I had last week in Denver, Colorado where I went to open space at the Placematters 06 conference. I was surrounded by visionary planners and practitioners, including people like Lyman Orton, the founder of the Orton Family Foundation, Tim Erickson from e-democracy.org and folks who run all kinds of mapping projects, visualization tools and instant sketchup kinds of things to help others envision a sustainable world.
I’m inspired to put these tools to work here in my local community, and maybe we’ll learn something about that that can be shared with other people in other communities.
Practice visioning – be sustainable and creative.
[tags]sustainability, placematters06, vision, mapping[/tags]
I am pleased to announce the release of a small book I have been working on for the last three years. It is called “The Tao of Holding Space” and it is a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space. I started this book three years ago, when I began noting parallels between Lao Tzu’s words and my experience of leadership, facilitation and living in Open Space, something many of us have done. In some ways this book chronicles the essence of my own emergent practice of Open Space. In looking over it one more time, I realized that almost everything I know about Open Space is somehow distilled into these chapters
The book is to be shared, so feel free to pass it along and use it whereever that makes sense
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in English
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in Chinese
I am trying to book a flight from Vancouver to Penticton. The Air Canada website is giving me all kinds of errors tonight and I have been ploughing away for about 45 minutes trying to secure a booking.
In an effort to just cut to the chase, I called the reservations centre. They normally have a $20 fee for booking over the phone, but I assume that they will waive that to get me a booking as the web site is clearly down.
To my faint surprise and astonishment, Kevin, the reservations agent, says he can’t do it. He suggests I call Air Canada tech support and get them to phone him to tell him that the web site is down so that he can waive the fee. That strikes me as not my job.
Here’s a better way to handle it, Air Canada. Trust your customers, especially your frequent fliers. Isn’t Aeroplan a “loyalty program?” Is loyalty one way? When we tell you there is a problem, believe us, make the booking and sort it out at your end. If I’m lying, you’re out $20 (but you have my fare), and you can put a note on my Aeroplan file saying I’m a scam artist. It would save you having a blog post written about you at 1:41 in the morning by a tired and irate customer. Also, trust your staff to make the call to waive the fee without someone in tech support okaying it.
If WestJet flew to Penticton, this would not even be an issue. They would have had my $472 in a flash and they don;t charge a fee for phone bookings. For want of a $20 fee, Air Canada sends me packing. When I told Kevin I would call Westjet (just out of sheer frustration) he said “Sorry we can’t help you.”
Yeah, well. I’m still stuck needing to take your airline to Penticton. Cold comfort.
[tags]air canada, customer service[/tags]
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