My daughter Aine is a musician. She is a singer and also a songwriter and she loves collaborating. She has a Soundcloud channel where you can hear some of her stuff accompanied by herself on guitar. And while she is pretty good on guitar, it’s really cool to hear what happens when she works with a collaborator, in this case her friend Zach Brannon, a local shredder from here on Bowen Island. They’ve been working on an album together and have just reeased an acoustic version of a new song called “Not Afraid to Cry.” It’s pretty good.
This afternoon I’m coming home after a morning running a short process for a church in Victoria, BC. The brief was pretty straightforward: help us decide between four possible scenarios about our future. Lucky for me, it gave me an instant application for some of the stuff I was learning in London last week. The scenarios themselves were designed through a series of meetings with people over a number of months and were intended to capture the church’s profile for its future, as a way of advertising themselves for new staff. What was smart about this exercise was the …
Back from London now from a four day deep dive into complexity theory and Cynefin practice with Dave Snowden and Tony Quinlan from Cognitive Edge. It was a packed full four days with many many many bits and pieces of philosophy, natural science, organizational theory and a few exercises thrown in. It was presented in a straight up lecture format, eight hours a day with one or two exercises and some short periods of conversation. The best reflection periods were the three to four hours afterwards with classmates engaged in what my new Welsh friend Sion Charles and I called …
Every year on this day I mark the remembrance of the 14 women that were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. It was one of the most transformational experiences of my life, to be alive and aware on that day. Since then, the long gun registry that was put in place as a result of that murder has been disbanded and we aren’t making much progress on dealing with violence against women in this country And so from now on my December 6 posts will include both the 14 roses and images that capture something …
This afternoon Caitlin and I were in a delightful conversation with new colleagues that ranged across the landscape of the work we are all trying to do in the world, supporting leadership, supporting quality and addressing the ineffable aspects of human experience that pervade our work on leadership. And in the conversation we found our way to the idea of friendship. In our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics offering we are exploring friendship as a key strategic pillar to transforming the nature of engagement, organizational life and community development. And today as we were discussing friendship as the highest form …