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Monthly Archives "November 2006"

I am a Jedi loser

November 13, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Being, Learning 5 Comments

Yesterday we celebrated my son’s sixth birthday with a small gathering of five of his friends based on Star Wars. We did nothing but open a space in the middle of our small house and let them bang away at each other for two hours with light sabers. For a six year old boy, this constitutes a great gift (as it does I am sure for the parents of the other boys who came!).

Of course, being the Jedi master, I was obliged to fight them all at some point, and sometimes even two at a time. It was all going so well until I turned and got stabbed right in the eye by a boy less than half my size. My vision went blurry and my eye started to weep. I was fine in the end, but I had to retire, knowing the humlity of what it must feel like to be slain by Yoda.

[tags]yoda, star wars[/tags]

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Harvest

November 10, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, CoHo, Collaboration, Emergence 7 Comments

This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond the forms of minutes, notes or summaries. In the Art of Hosting community we are currently looking at how to broaden this activity.

George and Peggy and I looked at what this starting pattern said about the processes of harvesting, including teasing apart the word itself. We started by teasing apart the basic pattern of harvest and noticed that it lives in three modes: time, media and speech acts. We immediately asked the question what would harvesting looked like if we fully harvested from these modes, to wit:

  • Time modes of the past present and future. We are practiced at harvesting from what has happened, but what does it mean to harvest in the moment, and to harvest from the future? The World Cafe process lights up the practice of harvesting in the present, as we capture and map nuggets of insight. The work of the Presencing community might have some insight into how we might harvest from the future, through a process of sensing and presencing.
  • Media modes include the typical text modes that we use to harvest (reports and web sites, for example) but increasingly I am personally using audio and visual representations in my own harvesting work and this week I worked with Thomas Arthur who, as a performing artist and in relationship with Ashley Cooper, is harvesting from our gathering using video to capture the patterns of how we were together. Graphic facilitation is a method that combines hosting and harvest in the present, and the commission of music, dance and other movement is a mode of harvest that, although it is strange to Western cultures, is very alive in traditional cultures. Here on the west coast of North America events are harvested through song and dance and the song and dance live to “tell the story” of an event. In the Ojibway territories of Canada, they used birch bark scrolls and petroglyphs, “abstract” wampum belts and rock paintings of images and shapes to harvest. Traditional cultures know that the full story of something cannot be told simply with language and so the harvest often lives in what western cultures might call abstract art. It is precisely this abstraction that allows for the richness of the harvest to live.
  • Speech act modes are all about the way the harvest is communicated. Typically harvest takes the shape of “telling the story” and so remains in the monological mode. Harvesting can also take the form of inquiry where the harvest is a question and invitation to engage. In both modes support is needed for understanding to arise, so in a telling mode, one must have a good communications infrastructure to get the story out and understood, In an inquiry mode, one also needs a way to support the harvest of an event. Harvesting through inquiry sets up a reflective learning process with the world at large and so it demands an open, inviting and deep listening infrastructure to further the work of the gathering that produced the harvest.
  • Levels of what is happening which implies that there is more going on in any given gathering than simply what can be captured in a set of notes. Levels might include, the level of work, the level of process, the level of underlying patterns.

I got really excited about these, for when you combine these modes together (in the moment video making, having children in a gathering tell the story of the future, producing a series of audio recordings that ask questions) the art of harvesting becomes liberating and alive. A menu pattern emerges in which you might select harvesting strategies to both serve the purpose of the gathering and stretch it to harvest the underlying patterns of the gathering which make for learning conversations about HOW we meet as well as what is done in any given meeting.

There are many other dynamics that might emerge from this thinking on harvesting, including how we might harvest both individually and collectively or in combination, and harvesting from an inner perspective along with an objective perspective, which leads us to an integral model of harvest.

We also spoke of how technology, taxonomy and folksonomy might conspire to extract patterns of meaning from our artifacts of conversation through “knowledge gardening“, which is work that has been alive in George’s life for many decades.

As we spoke I found that our conversation became inspiring and emergent. We initially began informally in three chairs at the end of a long day of meeting, and we moved to have dinner together in the room in which we had held a World Cafe earlier in the day. The markers and paper were still on this table, like a huge “back of a napkin” which just begged scrawl. I started mind mapping our conversation which led us to explore many branches of what was possible and still keep the emerging whole in front of us. I was so excited by what we were learning together that I found myself “sparking” for many hours afterwards. There was a breathless feeling to our talk which became so strong that we actually felt it must be in the field of the after dinner conversation among others too. We called for a late night circle with others to harvest from the conversations that happened at the end of the day. What we discovered was that the pattern of inspiration was alive in the natural cafe of dinnertime and much of what was harvested by all and then understood collectively provided the fodder we needed to integrate our experiences of two days and lead us towards a place where day three could be convergent and about the implications of our work in the world together.

And so in the spirit of inquiry about harvesting, what do you think? What is alive in you about this story? Where does it lead you?

[tags]George Por, Peggy Holman[/tags]

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Why I wear a poppy

November 3, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 3 Comments

“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.”

–Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301

I wish I could find a more coherent way to talk about this, about the complex set of emotions I feel in wearing a poppy and believing in peace.   Joseph Boyden’s quote reminds me about the humanity that is at war.   Whenever humans are involved in something, it’s never simple, so bear with me.   I am trying to write about something that lives strongly in my heart, and heart language and word language are different beasts…

Rememberance Day is coming and I choose to remember the men and women that I am paying to fight in Afghanistan. I am not a friend of war, and especially not a friend of this one, and I desperately wish for these men and women that if they have to confront these two fronts that it be rather in the service of a better story than the one we are being told about terror.

Every year at this time I have a deep remembering of the First World War, the Great War, in which Canadian boys – officially children – signed up to fight for honour and die insanely on the fields of France and Belgium. The 20th century produced a brief period where war went from professional skirmishes, to massive conflicts between amateurs and willing volunteers to its current shape – the slaughter of civilians by professional armies. Soldiers die in these conflicts but not in anything like the proportion of civilians that die. It is innocents who are mostly killed now in Iraq and Sudan and Colombia and Afgahnistan.
And why?

The sooner we can bring our young men and women home from central Asia, the better. I have no doubt that they feel like their mission is noble and important. My wish for them is that we as a country find a better use for that willingness to do the dirty work of doing good. They are willing to kill and die for us. They are willing to suffer the inflictions of fighting on these deeply personal fronts to be of service.   It is a screwy way to be in the world, but what higher calling can there be than be prepared to offer your life to an ideal?

What else could we ask them to do? What do we wish for them when they come home to their families full of the residue of those killing fields? Even those of us who oppose this war must remember them.

My call for us to leave Afghanistan is not a call to run scared from a foe. It is rather a call for a reasoned use of our troops. There is no exit strategy for this war (and I doubt whether we even have a foe there that we wouldn’t have if we weren’t there).   Our political   leadership has refused to ever contemnplate negotiating with the enemy. Even at the end of World War ii we negotiated with the enemy. If you refuse to talk to the enemy, you are committing yourself to fight until either of you are dead. We will never kill every Taliban soldier. For thousands of years, Afghans have fought and defended their lands. Are we going to “win?” And what does “win” mean? And anyway, just what are the conditions under which we will leave Afghanistan?

Committing the lives of young people to a mission so vague and hopeless as this, without supporting the troops by telling them what set of conditions they are fighting for borders on criminal in my opinion. And so I wear a poppy today to remember the soldiers that we have sent there to fight a hopeless war with no prospect of victory. They will not return having vanquished a foe, decorated and lauded for using force to defend a true threat to our country and way of life. You will not see scenes like we saw at the end of the last century’s wars when our troops came back having won, having liberated people who were forced beneath the jackboots of facism. We will be bringing home brave and promising Canadians who have fought for a political cause and have suffered life long scars for poll points, opinions and home front glory for those too scared to go themselves.

This is also not to doubt the work that our soldiers are doing. There is no doubt in my mind that it is possible to be in Afghanistan and do good work, and we are also doing that. But we could do it anywhere, and with much more effect. Why are we there?

I wear a poppy today to remember those that are caught in these conflicts – the innocents and those we pay – and to remember that when they come home we owe them wholeness and a responsibility to help them heal themselves from the wars that they fight, on both fronts.

More on the war:

  • Previously argued on Parking Lot
  • Afghanistan: Wrong Mission for Canada
  • Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan

[tags]war, peace, rememberance day, poppy[/tags]

Photo by   striatic

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