Halfway through our five day residency with leaders from the community sector and the Ministry for Children and Families here in BC. Times like this, at middle of a five day retreat, we turn our thoughts to what comes next and we forget to be present. This is our day of practicing presence however, and later today we will be going out on the land and allow ourselves to be hosted by the forest, the rain and our island. This is the time for a fierce recommitment to the here and now. My colleague and friend Annemarie Travers, who is …
…is the best wisdom for yourself: The advice you’ve been giving your family and friends turns out to be advice for you to live, not us. You become the wise teacher as you become a student of yourself. It stops mattering if anyone else hears you, because you’re listening. You are the wisdom you offer us, breathing and walking and effortlessly moving on, as you make your business deal, buy your groceries, or do the dishes. — Byron Katie Loving being with my partner Caitlin Frost as she teaches this powerful stuff to a group of leaders whose freedom and …
Working with a group of leaders this week all of whom are engaged in bringing their full selves to complex problems largely in the community, family and social services sector. Tonight we are co-initiating our work together and I led them through this exercise which was inspired by my friend and colleague Roq Garreau of Centrespoke Consulting:. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half so that you have a little book with four pages. On the front of the little book write your leadership challenge, something that you are called into doing, something that occupies much of …
Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world. One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence. This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to …
Good spot from Johnnie Moore on the power dynamics of safety in groups. Hint: it comes from attending to rank, not cohesiveness: Nancy Dixon writes about the conditions that favour good quality conversations in organisations. She uses the term psychological safety to describe the conditions that allow people to take risks in conversations. She distinguishes that safety from cohesiveness (for which it could be mistaken). The latter may feel safe but really sets everyone up for groupthink. The safety Nancy talks about allows challenging things to be said. The essential precondition for that kind of safety is largely to do …