Ottawa, Ont.
I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.
This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.
The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.
We began the day asking this question:
What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?
With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.
During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.
mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation
Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.
Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.
A nice post at Anecdote outling some simple rules for knowledge management which could make for a nice way to think about organizing harvesting efforts in large scale processes:
A simple tip last night from the actKM discussion list contributed by Ivan Webb who provides a ‘strategic job description’”
”that will change the culture of most organisations and leads naturally to knowledge management being embedded in the organisation’s activity. It is everyone’s job to:
- know what is happening
- work with others to improve what is happening
- make it easier for the next person to do their work well
I like the simplicity of these statements and the guidance for behaviour they provide. In some situations they might contribute to improved knowledge sharing behavours. They are also interesting because we know that little things can make a big difference.
I can use this right away.
Back in the fall I published The Tao of Holding Space (.pdf), a small ebook I had been working on for a number of years. It seemed to get the attention of Lyn Hartley from Fieldnotes, the online journal of the Shambhala Institute. She ran a little interview with me, and this month it appeared in the most recent issue. The interview covers the origins of the book and then we get into some detail about my facilitation practice and the underlying foundation for the way I work.
Thanks to Lyn for the interest in my work.
Back from a two week road trip. Less blogging than I thought I’d do as I was mostly out of range and trying just to turn off and spend time with the kids while we drove through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Nevada.
Highlights included three days working with Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf and Roq Gareau doing an Art of Hosting with the Navajo Nation health promotion folks. Tenneson has some photos of our work and harvest at his flickr site. We have some amazing things cooking as a result of that work, including a community based peer support project outline for diabetes maagement, and some designs for what the next level of the Art of Hosting might be, Much thanks to Orlando Pichoe, Karen Sandoval and Chris Percy at the Navajo Nation for hosting us there and for Teresa, Tenn, Roq and Berkana Institute for inviting me along. Good mates, all.
From that event, in Gallup NM, we drove up to Windowrock, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley and Zion National Park (which gets more wow’s per mile than anywhere I’ve ever been) before returning home through the utter madhouse of Las Vegas on a long weekend with the NBA All Star game in town. Overwhelming impressions of Vegas were mostly line ups, being helped to get lost and flooded hotel rooms and overpriced food punctuated only by the beauty and grace of Cirque de Soleil’s show “O” which brought some of the serenity of the landscape back to mind.
Great trip but nice to be finally home, albeit for a short time.
On board the Victoria Clipper, Strait of Juan de Fuca
I’m out in the middle of a big piece of water that seperates Vancouver Island from the Olympic Penisula. Historically this strait is significant. Many of the Europeans who arrived here in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries had a sense that this might be the Northwest Passage. It is the first big opening in the coast that you reach coming north from San Franciso Bay, and it seems to head roughly the right way. It didn’t take long for Europeans to discover that it is actually the entrance to the Salish Sea, encompassing the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the inland archipelagos of islands that ie between Vancouver Island and the solid and inpenatrable North American continental mainland.
This is the first time I’ve crossed this body of water, and it’s dark and rainy this evening so there isn’t much to see. The ferry itself is a catamaran, so the seating is more like a train than it is on our single hulled ships in BC. Also the food is zipped up in a ton of plastic, but the wild salmon chunk was pretty good. We are right now heading to Seattle where I will spend a few days before travelling south with the family to meet mates Tennesson Woolf, Teresa Posakiny and Roq Gareau for an Art of Hosting with our friends at the Navajo Nation health service. It’s funny to think of this trip from here, in the rainy northwest, to the cold high desert of Navajo country.
[tags]Victoria clipper, juan de fuca strait[/tags]
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