My friend (and one time guest blogger here) Alex Kjerulf is ploughing ahead with his Happy At Work Project and he now has a website up and an international conference in the offing for next month. In his inaugural English newsletter, he quotes from this article about Southwest Airlines and reiterates the following story: [One] time, a senior executive spent a day working at the ticket counter and with the ground crew to have a better understanding of their roles. While she was helping direct a plane to the gate using those long orange directional devises, one of the seasoned …
This is from “Synchronicity” by Joseph Jaworski. It is from a conversation he had with Francisco Varela in which Varela tells him about the power of being open: When we are in touch with our ‘open nature,’ our emptiness, we exert an enormous attraction to other human beings. There is great magnetism in that state of being which has been called by Trungpa ‘authentic presence.” Varela leaned back and smiled. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? And if others are in that same space or entering it, they resonate with us and immediately doors are open to us. It is not strange or …
I learned something at OSonOS which applies to unconferencing. Blogging DURING a conference is not good unconferencing behaviour. Unconferencing dialogue requires attention and you can’t do that while you are writing. And so, my thoughts about OSonOS will trickle out here in the next little while. I start with this one, from Masud Sheik. Masud said something in the closing circle that sent me thinking…he began his comments by saying “most of us are dead” by which I think he meant most of the people who have been alive in human history. This immediately made a picture of a tree …
Halifax, Nova Scotia What a hairy day of travel that was. I’m here in Halifax for the 13th annual Open Space on Open Space conference. In an hour or so, 100 of us from all over the world will gather in in a church hall on Barrington Street, for our annual gathering, wherein we take stock of practices and the state of things Open Space. And of course we do it in Open Space. Yesterday it took me a long time to get here. My 7:00am flight was cancelled by the Air France crash in Toronto which backed up traffic …
Now this might seem a tad trite, but I heard an interview on CBC this morning with the David and Nanelle Barash, the authors of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature, a book that uses evolution as a lens for reading literature. On preview, I thought this was a silly idea, but it seems that what they have done is to review the western literary canon and note how prevalent Darwinian ideas have been over time. This, the authors claims is simply evidence that the best and most enduring pieces of literature come from very accurate observations …