I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day: Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s …
For those of you curious about exploring the Art of Hosting, our emerging pattern language on leadership and facilitation in living systems, you are invited to join me, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman Sharon Joy Klietsch and Francis Baldwin in Tampa Bay, Florida from May 7-10. We’ll spend three plus days learning about chaos and order, living systems, the role of group work with Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and many other aspects of working with human relations to do good things in challenging and complex times. This will be our first Art of Hosting in the …
Last week, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons passed away. When I was a kid, in the early eighties, you either played D&D and or you didn’t, and I did. I went through a few years of playing a little, not as intensely as some, but a fair amount nonetheless. In D&D I found an outlet for my imagination, and in an era when computer games got no more interesting than Pac-Man, it was a blessing to be engaged in play like that. My seven year old son is a gamer. I taught …
So I’m a map maker. I am a cartographer of my own learning, and I love making maps to help me understand where I am, where I have been, and where I might go. Since being an active participant in the community of learners working with what we call the Art of Hosting, I have been fascinated with the maps we use that represent our ways of making sense of the world. I have been trying various ways to draw a grand map of all of these things, and here is my latest effort, a sketch I did today based …