Isn’t that beautiful image? Here on the west coast of Canada the Douglas-firs and cedars and hemlocks that cover the mountains and islands rake the sky for moisture. As the rains return in the fall, the trees help the forest drink. Rain showers pass through and for hours afterwards, the trees drip water onto the forest floor, feeding all the understory and the mushrooms that keep them alive. That image was one given to me by Chris Weaver, a fellow Open Space Technology facilitator and a poet and a friend who spent years on this coast, south of me, in …
Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together in a traditional conference of panels, workshops and tours to learn and develop their own practices of social entrepreneurship, community development, planning and research. The conference organizers, led by the courageous Barb Davies of Momentum Consulting were resolved to make at least part of the conference a participatory plenary. The idea was to put the intelligence of the network to use and to ground and apply the learning and experiences of …
One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones. Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work. Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool. The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for …
John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius. The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I …
One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all. This paragraph sums up his premise: “We are beyond the hegemony of …