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Author Archives "Chris Corrigan"

The new online home of the Art of Hosting

September 14, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Appreciative Inquiry, Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization, World Cafe

For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.

Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.

And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.

[tags]art of hosting[/tags]

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Linkage

September 14, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Notes 2 Comments

10 cool reads that crossed my path recently:

1. The Plastic Sea: “The simple fact is that when you drop a Styrofoam cup onto the street, you’re causing more damage than you would by dropping a stick of dynamite into the ocean. You set in motion an invasion of thousands of killer plastibots that will cause death and destruction for centuries to come.” See also A Primeval Tide of Toxins.

2. How Bush Makes Enemies: “Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the “war on terror” has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone’s counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.” I was just plain struck by these stats. Fundamentally, I want the killing to stop.

3. The New Organization: “Organisation man did bump into people in corridors, but he was cautious about networking. In his world, knowledge was power, and he needed to be careful about sharing out his particular store of it. He found comfort in hierarchy, which obviated the need to be self-motivating and take risks. He lived in a highly structured world where lines of authority were clearly drawn on charts, decisions were made on high, and knowledge resided in manuals.

Networked person, by contrast, takes decisions all the time, guided by the knowledge base she has access to, the corporate culture she has embraced, and the colleagues with whom she is constantly communicating. She interacts with a far greater number of people than her father did.” via

4. The Ecotone Archives 2003-2006: The archives of a placeblogging project I helped start three years ago.

5. Ten Essential Canadian books of fiction: “Imaginative works, our panel decided after vigorous debate, dive deeper into the national psyche than non-fiction. Here are 10 novels and books of poetry you need to read to understand the inner lives of Canadians, our fears and frictions, our cultural history.” The ten were derived from this list. In BC, The Tyee has a different opinion.

6. Hawaiian Folk Tales Index: “This is an anthology of Hawaiian folklore, including pieces by Thomas Thrum and other writers. This includes many articles which were originally published in difficult to obtain journals and now-rare books. All were written in the late 19th or early 20th century, and are mostly based on first-hand oral traditions. Chapters cover topics such as resemblances to Biblical stories, myths of the gods and goddesses such as Maui and Pele, historical legends, topographical folklore, and the folklore of fishing.”

7. Starry Night in Beirut: An improvisation for bass clarinet (I think) and bombs.

8. Playing the Right Thing – Chris Corrigan: “I think Chris Corrigan is one of the best guitar players in Canada. The integrity and good taste he brings to every note knocks me dead. But I’m almost reluctant to make this disclosure, lest the Wide World catches on, and he gets snatched away from the East Coast.” Nice, but this is NOT about me. For years people have been asking me if I was this Chris Corrigan. We both play Celtic music, we’re both on the radio from time to time, we both live on islands. About time we recorded something together, eh? (I sound like this, by the way).

9. Answers for Young People. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, has a lovely page explaing the web, and his life, for young folks.

10. Kati Sarinnen on unschooling and uniqueness. My new friend, a lovely writer and a reflective thinkiner on gardening and life learning:

“I know from experience what it is like to be the parent of a child that does not fit the mold, cannot meet the expectations at the exact time and in the exact way educators at a certain time and in a certain place require. This is to teach that a child with unique talents and wisdom is a failure. And that is so wrong.

The world is deprived of that child if the parents and child give up and don’t realize that that child has so much to contribute, in a different point of view, in creativity, in skill sets, that a narrow approach shuts off, if we allow it. What the world needs, what industry and business need, (what they say they need but behave in opposition to, far too often in actuality) is a person with a fresh perspective, creative insight, skill in independent problem solving! The child whose spark is not extinguished in most school experiences, will go on to do great things in this world — and maybe not in the way we expect.”

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Knowing deeply about council

September 13, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Organization

One of the decision making tools we teach in the Art of Hosting is called “Council.” In it’s essence it is a way of making a decision collectively which uses dialogue and conversation to get to a point where the decision is fully supported and meets the needs of the group. This kind of process can take a lot of time, but the quality of the decision is incredible. It leads to sustainable action, solid relationships and wisdom.

There are a couple of other things required for making council a good process. First you need mates, people with whom you can work with and deeply trust to contribute to the work, and secondly you need to let go of individual agendas and trust that the wisdom and capacity of the group will produce a more wise, more sustainable and more effective decision. This is not “groupthink” or even “management by committee.” It is rather a much deeper way of making a decision and executing action. You can probably think of the times in your life when you have done this – we all have. Think about times when, with a few others, you seemed to simply know what to do and the result was an amazing and unexpected time.

It turns out that we may be deeply wired to do this. Some recent research by biologist Bonnie Bassler has shown that bacteria converse with one another before collectively taking a decision to act:

“This is how this whole field started,” she says. “You’re looking at this bacterium, which is a marine bacterium.”

It turns out that when one of these bacteria is all alone, it doesn’t glow. After all, that would be a waste of effort because nothing could ever see such a tiny amount of light. But it does send out chemical signals that say, hey I’m here … and it listens back for other bacteria sending the same signal.

When enough bacteria are doing this, they know they have a quorum. All of a sudden, they light up and do all sorts of other things to act in concert, like a super-organism.

It’s always interesting to read of these kinds of things. It turns out that mushrooms may operate in the same way too, as do corals and ant and bee colonies. It seems a deeper pattern of life on earth that we wait until we have mates around us to really hum.

THanks to Johnnie for the link

[tags]bonnie bassler, council, art of hosting, decision making, bacteria[/tags]

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Wikipedia and Britannica and worldviews

September 12, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 4 Comments

I was reading the striking conversation between Jimmy Wales and Dale Hoiberg, from Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica respectively, and I suddenly had the strangest thought.

These two publications represent completely different creations stories.

Britannica is the Garden of Eden, a perfectly designed place that can only get worse as people tamper with it. It is the “order to chaos” model and so it is surrounded with protection to keep it in it’s pristine form.

(I was also surprised to read Mr. Hoiberg’s comment that the Britannica endeavours to represent all of human knowledge. That seems absurd to me.)

Wikipedia is the Ojibway creation story worldview, the one in which the animals help Giizhigokwe make a new world out of some soil and a turtle’s back. In this model we move from chaos to order by inviting as many people as possible to come and contribute, knowing that things can only get better in general.

I hadn’t thought of these two efforts as inhabiting the archetypes of world creation stories before. I probably need to get out more!

[tags]wikipedia, encyclopedia britannica, creation stories, jimmy wales, dale hoiberg[/tags]

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What changed everything?

September 12, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Being, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Five years ago, four planes were hijacked and crashed and three buildings were damaged and destroyed and upwards of 3000 people died. It was a big event. It has been said often this week that “911 changed everything.”
But did that event change everything, or was it our responses to that event that changed everything? If the first is true, then I believe we have already lost the “war on terror”, for if all it takes is for these acts to be committed and everything changes, then the power rests with those who commit the acts.

But if the responsibility for world-changing rests with us individually and collectively, then we are confronted with the thought that we must bear some responsibility for how the world has changed, and know that it is entirely within our capabilities to change it again.

What do you think?

[tags]911[/tags]

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