Organizations, leaders, people – in short, sponsors – who decide to take responsibility for convening an Open Space meeting often wonder what their role can be afterwards. In working recently with a community I asked the question to gather perspectives and one answer stood out: Be good stewards of passionate enterprise That’s a lovely way to talk about holding space for learning, action or development. Technorati Tags: leadership, openspace
On the OSLIST today, a question about success: If maintaining control means avoiding success…then what is the motivation for people maintaining that control? Is there another kind/aspect of success in play? Often people expect big things from organizational development “interventions.” They wouldn’t do so otherwise. Retreats, planning sessions, Open Space forums…all come with the expectation that doing something significant will change things significantly. In working with sponsors I do have conversations about what transformation really means and how willing people are to transform themselves to meet the new world they are wanting to be born. There is a real stretch …
I’ve mentioned Nipun before…an amazing weblogger. Today in my RSS feeder comes this lovely analogy: When I was trying to explain the new paradigm of a movement and the relevance of decentralization in this world, Jayeshbhai promptly summarized it — ‘Just like a banyan tree.’ Indeed. Banyan tree starts with a root but when any of its branches hit the ground, they become roots too. In a short period, it’s impossible to figure out the original root, and it’s also very difficult to remove a banyan tree. Technorati Tags: decentralization, power
The website of the National Centre for First Nations Governance is finally online. This is a huge addition to First Nations communities, and dare I say, many other places as well. The Centre is a kind of open source research and dialogue hub for leading edge thinking and conversation on First Nations governance along the lines of the Delgamuukw site we prepared for the Assembly of First Nations. As I have said all along, the lessons that are being learned as First Nations experiment and implement new forms of governance based on traditional processes that are valid for the 21st …
I’m interested in how blogging, email and Skype connect us and more importantly, what we do with those connections. This has been the subject of conversations I’ve recently had with Rob Paterson and George Nemeth among others. Now I’d like to put this to the test, but reaching out across the blogosphere using these tools to gather ideas on a project I’m working on. I’m beginning a new process with a client to design an appreciative summit for a group of First Nations. I’d like to use this opportunity to practice connecting with people over Skype to bounce ideas around. …