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The Practice & Power of Authentic Community Engagement

February 11, 2010 By Design

Jack Ricchiuto publishes a new little paper on  The Practice & Power of Authentic Community Engagement :

When a community is authentically engaged in conversations that matter, the conversation engages their assets in the realization of their dreams. In authentic engagement, the community becomes author of its own future.

The opposite of authentic engagement is lip service to engagement. It is an invitation to conversation that simply engages the community’s voices of victimhood and entitlement. Lip service engagement loudly proclaims commitments to change, but has no power to bring it about and is ironically the shortest distance to sustaining the status quo.

Lights in the sky!

February 10, 2010 By Collaboration

One of the cool cultural Olympiad things happening around here for the 2010 Winter Games is an interactive light exhibit which makes patterns in the sky with 20 spotlights along False Creek. We can see these from our house on Bowen Island. They are part of an interactive art installation called Vectoral Elevations. Very cool, and you can play too! Make your own pattern online and submit it. There’s a good chance we’ll see it as we have been completely entranced by these lights the last few nights.

Learning improv

February 10, 2010 By Improv 2 Comments

Sunday afternoon a small group of my neighbours here on Bowen Island gathered to inaugurate an improv group.  All I had was a bunch of exercises culled from the web, some eager players and a space.  And that was all we needed.

After a few warm ups, we got into some evxercises and then played a few scenes.  At least half of the group of eight were experienced actors, several of whom were comfortable with the openness of the structure and others who struggled a little.  It was cool to see us hit some real high points (especially during on exercise called ABC where you play a scene with the dialogue rotating through each actor, and each line starting with a subsequent letter of the alphabet.  What I noticed was how comfortable we were in general with a little bit of order and then space inside that to play.

For me, in addition to playing, this is really an exercise in discovering chaordic structure in practice.  What is the happy balance between a little form and a little space?  What constraints give us freedom and how does too much openness oppress?  It’s interesting to be in this space, listening carefully, struggling to find a way to advance the line, make an offer, build on what has gone before.  This is fun, but HARD, and that is the delightful challenge of it.

We’re going to keep going Monday nights at Collins Hall on Bowen Island.  If you are on island, some and play!  Bring a game to offer, and come prepared to learn.

Humility in midtown Manhattan

February 3, 2010 By BC, Being, Leadership

The view from the Rockefeller Foundation meeting room, looking south towards the Empire State Building.  Today I worked in this location with friends Willie Toliver and Kelly McGowan supporting the work of a group of executive leaders in the New York City municapl administration.  I was struck by how, despite the responsibility and magnitude of influence these people have, that they are nonetheless human beings – vulnerable, falliable and authentic as the rest of us.

Here is the poem that was created from the checkout.

We are just poor weak human beings,

Resisting the call

Because we cease and desist

our belief in all we can offer

Somehow we have created

single places upon which everything hinges

and when we are put in those spaces

we confront our smallness, see it in

perspective because none of us are

big enough to be the change others expect

and we have long stopped fooling ourselves.

To confront our own smallness is terrifying

especially when people project bigness on us –

the scale of challenge, the scope of our capability.

The I we are through other people’s eyes

is never the me we see through our own.

Know this – you have been chosen only to live.

It is never over until you leave.

the only line you ever cross

is the one you choose to draw..

The passing of Brian Bainbridge

February 2, 2010 By Being, Open Space 3 Comments

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Father Brian, Photo by Peggy Holman

The Open Space community has lost one of it’s stalwart elders, Father Brian Bainbridge, a Catholic priest and corporate consultant from Melbourne, Australia.  Brian was a dear friend and colleague and offered much to the shape and form of Open Space although his contributions were quiet and behind the scenes.  He trained and taught many, many Australian Open Space facilitators, wrote an informally published ebook about his experiences creating and Open Space organization in his parish and was a stalwart for the integrity of the process, curious in the multiple ways self-organization and complex adaptive systems could work.  Today on the OSLIST I shared my own recollections of Brian:

Ah.

What a blessing it was to know and be loved by Brian…a man absolutely generous in his equanimity, achingly funny and self-deprecating and absolutely committed to the integrity and effectiveness of Open Space.   I have several audio recordings of conversations I spent with him over the years.   If I can find them and clean them up, perhaps I’ll get them uploaded somewhere.

As far as I know one of Brian’s enduring legacies to the Open Space community was the coinage of the unofficial fifth principle: Be Prepared to Be Surprised.   Perhaps others can concur, but I always associated him strongly with that principle.   And in his death he surprised us all!   All I can think of is his mischievous smile and quiet bubbling chuckle.

The other phrase that entered my vocabulary from Brian was “It’s all good.”   And indeed I notice that today his death has given me a chance to revisit my feelings of tenderness and admiration and love for him, to connect with people in the OS world I haven’t head from for a while and generally spend some time in my virtual home.

My favourite Brian story, a story he told me:   Once when working with a group of Australian IBM managers he listened patiently while they told him of their struggles working so far away from headquarters in an extremely hierarchical structure with an almost dogmatic approach to things.   Brian listened sympathetically for a while and then made the incisive observation: “You call yourselves Big Blue.   Well, Catholic priests have suffered this same management challenge for 1500 years and ore.   Call us Big Black.”

My family is finally travelling to Melbourne in May to do some work with Viv McWaters and Anne Patillo and Geoff Brown and Johnnie Moore and we were really looking forward to seeing Brian in his own place. Alas, we won’t have that chance now, but you can bet when we open space together Brian will be invoked and I will relish the chance to raise a glass and tell some stories about our patron Father, our mentor, teacher and friend.