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Monthly Archives "March 2011"

The true bottom line in business is life.

March 30, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Emergence, Organization

My friend Michelle Holliday has been devoting her life the past few years to understanding living systems and bringing her learning to organizational settings.  She’s been with us at two Art of Hostings and has brought a wonderful group to both events.  Here is her slideshare on her recent thinking and above is a TEDxTalk she gave in Montreal.  I love the way she sees hosting practices as pathways for action as organizations move to living systems approaches.

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Art Kleiner on the organization as living body

March 29, 2011 By Chris Corrigan BC, Organization

The new issue of Fieldnotes is out from ALIA and within it, Art Kleiner muses about the metaphor of the body’s systems as a way of understanding information flow in organizations:

 

–     The hierarchy is a circulatory system for messages of authority; specifically, for anything that can be expressed as a number. It is the means by which the organization seeks scale. It flows from and to the top: the CEO and then the shareholders or owners. It might be analogous to muscle coordination.

–     The network conveys knowledge – in the form of gossip, guidance, information about opportunities, and anything else that people talk about easily. It is the means by which the organization develops its capabilities. It flows from and to a broad base of people throughout (and outside) the company. It might be analogous to neural networks.

–     The market is the exchange of goods, services, and money within an organization and its value chain. It is the means by which the organization manages its workflow. It transmits anything that can be bought, sold, or traded, flowing ultimately to the customer. It might be analogous to the cardiovascular system.

–     The clan is the family or community-like circulatory system, operating below the surface of every organization (and often subconsciously). It is the means by which a company’s culture is maintained, with a “core group” of its most important people at the center. The organization establishes its view of legitimacy through the clan. It might be analogous to the endocrine system.

via The Organization is Alive | ALIA Institute.

Art will be among the faculty at the ALIA Summer Institute this year, where I’m also teaching again.

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The week’s tweets

March 27, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Notes

  • Glad folks took time to appreciate the moon last night. Take a little time to do that everyday and u discover much about your world #nokomis #
  • Fan Culture a Winner on Opening Day in Vancouver | Prost Amerika Soccer <– love it. #
  • http://t.co/qx3psIX. Great improv workshop openings. #
  • Brilliant timeline of the Middle East revolutions: http://t.co/G6vQt7g #
  • Blue sky, green forest, bright sun and the towhees squealing their primal calls. Spring! #
  • Arbutus loving and dying http://flic.kr/p/9sPhNL #
  • Beautiful spring morning. Birds greeting the sun with crazy orchestration. #
  • We live in an amazing universe. Bits of the lunar surface actually levitate every morning! http://t.co/joZoSw3 #moon #GoodMorningSunshine #
  • My 10 yo son watching a doc on 1930s fascist politics: "I'm convinced that 70% of the words spoken on earth are pure bullshit," #ProudFather #
  • http://yfrog.com/h01rwmzj just tasted this hand made sausage at #artisaneats Incredible! #
  • Nice spot for a coffee break and a bit of an RSS read this afternoon. #artisaneats http://yfrog.com/h32s4xqj #

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One introduction to harvesting

March 24, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Design, Emergence, Learning

From an email sent to a friend of mine (a Mohawk, for context!) about the art of harvesting.  It includes an uncited hat tip to the Cynefin framework, and focuses on his particular field of education:

Harvesting, as you know being from a tribe of long standing agrarian practice, (!) is constituted of all kinds of things.  Mostly though, you need an artifact and a feedback loop.  What is the tangible piece I can hold in my hand and point to, and how does it fold back into the system to create learning.  many systems do well at harvesting the artifacts (evaluations, studies, reports) but do very little in creating an architecture for implementing the results.  Think Royal commission.  It’s the equivalent of harvesting the corn and then storing it on a shelf and inviting people over to come and look at it.  Anyone in their right mind would call you crazy, but that is what passes for harvesting in the organizations and institutions of our day.

Within schools there is a special kind of problem with harvesting.  When I work in organizations and communities I take great care to make sure that we harvest both the intentional results (evaluations against objectives and so on) AND the emergent results.  If we are trying to do new things we need to work with the complex dynamics of emergence.  Schools get stuck when they just look at how well the year went with respect to the goals they set out in the first place.  It is a set of blinders that turns them away from emergent practice and limits innovation.  You will not get much information about the new practices, instead you get a sense of best practices, which is fine but which, by definition, gets us stuck in the past.

The problem is that this analytical, reductionist view is driven in education by accountabilities which are more and more tight every year.  Under the guise of spending tax dollars well, there is a real shackle being put on innovation and learning about new ways to do education.  Much of the innovations is happening therefore in the private sphere, but the results aren’t being brought to public education.  This is BAD harvesting.  If someone has figured out a better way to grow corn (what if we planted beans and squash along side the corn?) but didn’t share it or have any way for that information to get to those that need it, well, that’s not working.  People go hungry when they don’t have to, and that is happening in education.  I’ll bet when you go to conferences mostly you hear about how well people are meeting their targets and you get presentations on best practices.  But you are probably not hearing about the trials and  tribulations  of  experiments  that fail.

Evaluating emergence and creating the conditions for SAFEFAIL  experiments  (as opposed to the fail safe plans that every school authority wants) requires a very different mindset.  Instead of “merit and worth evaluation” people are starting to use methodologies like developmental evaluation which works with emergence and complexity.  I think you need both, and not to  privilege  one over the other.

At any rate, this is a long conversation obviously, but it comes down to a couple of things:

1. Start with understand what aspects of your work are simple, complicated or complex.
2. Choose in advance a harvesting methodology for each of these three domains.
3. Choose in advance a strategy for using the harvest from these domains.
4. Build a harvesting strategy into the work up front, as a key piece of design.

And as a special treat, here is an hour of me teaching harvesting at a recent Art of Hosting in Calgary.

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Spring arrives

March 23, 2011 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 4 Comments

This afternoon sitting in the forest above my house in the warm sun. Insects are everywhere, flies landing on me to say hello, the moss and rocks on the cliff warm and dry.

I am sitting with a mug of tea made from the first tender leaves of the season’s lemon balm. Listening to silence punctuated by a squirrel chattering in a rhythmic patterns of sevens “cheap a cheap cheap, cheap a cheap”. He is consistent enough that I can drum softly on the moss beside me in time with his voice and sing a little song about belonging. Making music with the context.

There are many seeds I have planted this winter and I feel a sense of anticipation that some will come up. I also wonder what will never come up and what will grow that I never planted.

I wonder dear few readers, if there is something between you and I that we have spoken of that wants to be born? Are you reading this and thinking about work and play we could do together? Is there a call, however faint, that wants to be voiced?

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