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Author Archives "Chris Corrigan"

Safe to fail requires safety, not just failure

November 6, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Improv, Leadership, Learning, Power

I travel around many different kinds of organizations. Many of them preach the mantra that goes something like “it’s okay to fail here. Please take risks and try new things!” Unfortunately, when I look around I can’t see much infrastructure in place that allows the work context to be safe enough to fail. An organization needs to build learning and experimentation into its operations, especially if it is required to respond to changing conditions, improvements in services, or new ideas. And so the idea that “we want people to take risks” is promoted, often alongside an exhortation to do so …

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Deep wells

November 5, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Being 2 Comments

I’ve been enjoying Haruki Murakami’s early novels lately. Here is a paragraph from “Pinball, 1973.” “On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing; a rosebud, a lost cap, a favourite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to all their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.” –Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

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Principles of resilience for designing and facilitating containers for complex work

October 30, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Conversation, Culture, Democracy, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Organization, Power 4 Comments

Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University. In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes: In disciplines as diverse as …

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What I know about “complex facilitation”

October 25, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Complexity, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Organization 9 Comments

In this blog post, I’m going to lift the lid on the core of my facilitation practice. I specialize in complex facilitation for addressing complex issues and this requires a special approach to working with groups. In the Art of Hosting world, we call this approach “hosting” to signify that it has its primary focus on the spaces and processes that we use to host dialogue rather than a more traditional facilitation approach that manages the content, meaning-making, and dynamics. For me, this approach is defined by a focus on the two key dynamics of emergence and self-organization. After 15 …

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Splintered politics in Canada this morning

October 22, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Uncategorized 12 Comments

So we had a very interesting election yesterday in Canada and a couple of progressive American friends of mine were hoping from afar that we would reject the kind of right wing racist populism that has infected much of the western world at the moment. This is the response I sent them. For those of you not in Canada, perhaps it will help you understand what happened in our country, written from an unabashedly progressive standpoint. It’s just my take, but here it is for posterity. We pretty strongly rejected the People’s Party of Canada, the one actual right wing …

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Events
  • Art of Hosting November 12-14, 2025, with Caitlin Frost, Kelly Poirier and Kris Archie Vancouver, Canada
  • The Art of Hosting and Reimagining Education, October 16-19, Elgin Ontario Canada, with Jenn Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle
Resources
  • A list of books in my library
  • Facilitation Resources
  • Open Space Resources
  • Planning an Open Space Technology meeting
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