Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately. When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest. Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.
I have made all of these notes at my flickr site. When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page. Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along. Click on the photos to view the notes.
Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle:
Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning. This was based on a conversation I had with George:
From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration:
That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance:
Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording. Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest:
I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question: What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?
Why is this important? I think it matters that harvest, good harvest, moves organizations and communities forward, links leadership and action to conversation and makes the best use of the wisdom that is gathered from meetings. If you have ever wondered about meetings that seem not to go anywhere, this inquiry into harvesting, sensemaking and iterative action holds the key to avoiding those kinds of situations. It’s not enough just to have good process and a good facilitator – the results of the work must also be alive in the organization. That’s where we are going with this.
Okay, so for more than 50 years we’ve known that Santa has been tracked by NORAD on Christmas Eve, but this year it seems like he might be having a bit of trouble getting off what’s left of the polar ice cap.
But seriously… the news from the north is not good.
[tags]arctic, global warmng, climate change, santa[/tags]
Please consider joining myself, Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson, Tim Merry, Vanessa Reid and Stephani McCallum and Richard Delaney from the Canadian Institute for Public Engagement as we host an Art of Hosting training in the Gatineau Hills just north of Ottawa, Ont. We will be there March 5-8 exploring design, facilitation and harvesting from conversations that matter.
You can find the full invitation at the Art Of Hosting website.
Eighteen years after the event, I still choose to remember the women killed at the Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal. Many of these women were my age, they were my contemporaries, they were students when I was a student and their murders touched many of us very deeply. So, as I have done every year, i invite you to join me in remembering these fourteen women and all women who have been murdered by men.
- Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
- Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
- Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
- Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department.
- Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
- Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
- Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
- Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.
It is amazing sometimes that the RSS aggregator seems to collect a pattern that is fleeting and yet solidly present in the diverse world of the blogs I read. And so today, I am delighted to find these three posts, all of which seem to be saying something bigger:
- Alex Kjerulf writing on love and leadership
- AKMA in a meditation on the gift of endings and continuings prompted by Lemony Snickett and JK Rowling’s last novels.
- Christy Lee Engle on “the unwanted passion of your sure defeat,” and other thoughts inspired by David Whyte.
There is a tenderness in all three of these posts, finding the soft underbelly of what might otherwise be a hardened and closed experience. Something ineffable like that, and all three touched me quite deeply on this late autumn day, when the snow is melting around me and the rain and fog move through in small moments.