Citizens and political representatives on my home island of Bowen Island, at a meeting this week in which a controversial decision was made to build an artifical turf playing field at our community school. I didn’t run this meeting…it was a regular council meeting, but the one in which the decision was made. The soundtrack is something of a political statement from the videographer, but the images are beautiful. They show my friends and neighbours as they sit pitted against one another in a tense meeting over a deep quality of life issue. Just studying and watching these faces reminds me of how hard this work really is sometimes, to tough through difficult choices and live out your principles and dreams.
On my way to Regina to work with the Urban Aboriginal Strategy steering committee there. We’re running an Open Space for the community on Saturday preceded by a community development/hosting training on Friday. Still designing the training and using the basic structure of covering invitation, hosting and convergence/action/decision making. Can anyone suggest exercises that might be useful in the context of a day long training to explore skills around these three areas? I’m interested in trying new things to teach the importance of these areas of attention.
I’m looking forward to our Open Space. I was in Regina a year ago, when the windchill was -55 and we were talking about how people survived these temperatures on the prairies 400 years ago. If you were not a part of the group, you were dead. So depending on relationship and getting to a fire was a life or death situation. Amazing how easy it is to forget that when so many of our basic needs are covered.
This is my son Finn, one of my teachers, facing huge waves at Ka’anapali on Maui last week. He plays in these waves with no fear at all. Waves that are two or three times taller than he is simply wash over him. He knows what to do, how to dive under the wave, how to swim in and out of currents, how to watch and read the sea, and his fear becomes play. He taught himself to bodysurf.
Fear does funny things to us. It makes us change sizes, for example. When we are confronted with a situation that creates fear, we puff ourselves up to seem bigger than we are, or we shrink away to hide and not be noticed. We do this by boasting, by telling stories that makes us seem more competent, more brave, more experienced than we are, or by engaging in self-deprecating behaviour that lessens our accomplishments, lowers expectations, diminshes our offerings.
It can seem like a challenge sometimes to just be the size that you really are, but I think when we are that size, comfortable in our skin and fearless in the moment, we become completely authentic.
After being registered for a year and using it actively for a few months I now get twitter. Two recent uses have twigged me to twitter’s terrificness.
This month when the roads on Bowen Island were slippery and dangerous a group of us worked over twitter to create a road status tool that uses crowdsourcing to report on road conditions on our island. Road conditions are incredibly variable depending on the altitude of the road (from sea level to 500 feet and more) and so it’s not enough to say “Grafton Road is clear” because it might be snowchoked up the hill from you. So twitter was the way we connected and did real time updates to the tool.
Then today, I read a quick entry on Rob Paterson’s blog about Iceland’s government collapsing and I went to search for more. I checked Google first, but it’s a firehose of content, tried searching for blogs on Google, but that isn’t satisfying. Finally went to twitter, searched for “iceland” and got a slew of great articles and even a timely podcast.
So hooray for twitter.
I’m reading through Otto Schamer‘s Theory U again, this time with an eye to noting how his model and stories can inspire designs in my own work. I came across a story in the book (can’t remember where) in which Otto is working with a group to make some meaning and see patterns, as a way of sensing the bigger field of work. The group was given a transcript of a lot of information – interviews mostly and invited to circle or highlight those quotes that seemed to talk to the bigger patterns out there. then, as an exercise, each person read one out in turn and after a while the group reflected on what they were hearing.
This is an excellent excerise to create co-ownership over the harvest of the reams of material that come from large group processes. It is a great way to collaboratively sift through the material and make sense rather than having one person do all the reading and distill it for everyone else. Co-ownership over meaning, ensures accuracy and sustainability of results..