My dad directing a bridge building crew on the Bruce Trail My dad has a blog. I love this. In his second post, he the various attractions that abound in his villiage of Clarskburg, Ontario and the surrounding area. The thing is that he actually DOES all this stuff too. When he turned 65 last year I asked him what was different for him. He had retired several years before so I wasn’t sure that 65 marked any great life transition. His reply was that the Old Age Security cheques start coming. He was planning to spend his first one …
I pointed to this paper, How stories affect human action in organisations, last week, as it came by way of a regular mailing from the Plexus Institute. I’ve had a chance to read it and it posits a number of interesting points. My reading of the paper follows the development of these key ideas: Organizations are not “things” but rather relational processes. Human beings use story to represent and understand the patterns of experience. Stories only represent partial versions of reality and so narrative interpretation is subject to power dynamics. Powerful storyteller can make people “captives” in the story; this …
David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has just posted six essentials for effective engagement, which is accompanied by a link to a great resource on public participation that he wrote ten years ago. David’s post trigged my own thinking on consultation. Consultation is one of the backbone activities in my business. I simply love designing consultative processes that bring together stakeholders from multiple worlds to help co-create something. Most of my practice of course has centred on Aboriginal issues, but the lessons I have learned extend into any endeavour. A few years ago I was asked to put together …
A new Hubble deep field photo From the Hubble Space Telescope comes this view of the very early cosmos: The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering …
Two new websites of interest to Open Space Technology practitioners and friends. First, my friend Lisa Heft has finally got her consulting practice website up and running. After being in business for 30 years, she really knows what she is talking about and she is one of my all time favourite space openers. She has taught me, more than anything, how to model enthusiasm and cherish participants. Also, my other California friend (and close friend of Lisa) Jeff Aitken, has just launched his own weblog which is going to rock you. Jeff’s blog impresses me with his ability to hold …