Nelson, New Zealand Blogging on a sunny fall afternoon from Te Tau Ihu, or the Top of the South Island region of New Zealand. The beautiful weather here – including a brisk warm wind off the Tasman Sea coming over the light blue waters of Nelson Bay – kind of nicely reflects my mood at the moment. I was invited here to facilitate a day of Open Space for an Maori economic summit which brought together entrepreneurs, iwi trusts, government folks and Pakehea (or non-Maori) businesses for the tourism, and resource sectors. Our day in Open Space was yesterday and …
I’m heading off to New Zealand for 10 days, so blogging might be light. I’ve collected another ten intereting links for your perusal. So here is the latest edition of Parking Lot linkage: The Open Space of Democracy (not THAT Open Space, but a cool read nonetheless) by Terry Tempest Williams Speaking Differently: Deconstruction/Meditative Thinking as the Heart of “the Faculty of Observing” via wood s lot (and where does he find this stuff! Thanks Mark…) Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web via MeFi. Lose yourself in this for a while. Introduction to Calculus. Just what I need. A …
We’re really humming now. Harrison Owen replied to my stories post on the OSLIST with these comments, among others: This is interesting soup indeed. I think the real positive here is the emphasis on Story Telling. For 40 odd years, ever since the days when I presumed to be an academic delving into the mysteries of myth, ritual and culture in the ancient near east — I have felt that we (all of us humanoids) are essentially story-tellers, it is the way we make meaning and communicate meaning (as in the natural first question of a new person — “What’s …
Yes to this from Carla Verwijs: : The good thing about stories is that it is not ‘just another technology’, it’s something that’s already there in the organisation. You only have to discover them and listen (be open). Everything you wouldn’t read in glossy corporate brochures and promotional videos and that show you the inside of the company, you’ll hear in peoples’ stories. Stories are the heart of the company. Stories are about people, culture, wishes, dreams, new ideas. And that’s what makes them so interesting to me.
Ton is musing about organizational structure: While browsing the Actionable Sense Wiki…I came across this statement of mine, that I scribbled down some weeks ago: Organisations are clusters of relationships between people. | The invididual and the network are the relevant economic units, not the organisation. | Value is in the relationships, organisations are transactions along those relations. The first statement puts people and their relations in the spotlight, thus including informal structures in orgs, not just the formal ones. The second includes all stake holders in any situation from the get-go not just share holders. The third brings into …