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Exploring the shadow in facilitation

October 3, 2007 By Facilitation, Organization

Johnnie Moore and I have been trading links about podcasts…today I’ll point you to one he did with Annette Clancy and Matt Moore on shadows in organizations.   It’s really, really good, and what got my attention is when Annette asked “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?”

I first met Annette in 2005 when she responded to an invitation I issued about looking for help designing an Aboriginal youth conference on suicide.   She has a great knack for asking these questions and has terrific ideas floating around in her blog.

Matt I don’t know, but he’s a great sparring partner on this podcast.

Home, in so many ways

October 2, 2007 By Being

I’m back home after a long seven days of travelling to Alert Bay, Courtenay, Victoria, Seattle, Quinault and home again.   I have been doing some fun work with great people, but I’m pretty tired now, and resting here in the warm heart space of home and reflecting on how lucky I am to get to do what I do.   It brought to mind a quote from Aristotle that my mate Tim Merry has put into a recent Art of Hosting journal:

Where the needs of the world meet our passion and gifts, there lies our vocation.

I’m lucky to be home, in so many ways…

Thanks to my mates Kris Archie, David Stevenson, Sono Hashisaki, and the folks at the Quinault Indian Nation for a fascinating week.

A podcast with Dave Pollard

October 2, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Being, Leadership, Learning, Open Space, Podcast, Unschooling 3 Comments

Last week Dave Pollard, author of How to Save the World interviewed me for his first podcast.   We had a lovely conversation about essential human capacities, Open Space, unschooling and leadership.   Head over to Dave’s quite excellent and prolific blog and have a listen.   You can also download the podcast here.
And thanks to Dave for inviting me in.

whiskey river

September 29, 2007 By Appreciative Inquiry

Quinault Indian Nation, Washington

On the first fall storm night, with the wind rain and surf pouring in off the Pacific Ocean, I come across this:

Thomas Merton:

“I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit . . . I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man’s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.”

[tags]Thomas Merton, hope, questions[/tags]

Moleskine harvest 1 – hosting for conscious community

September 26, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, First Nations, Leadership, Moleskine Harvest, Organization, World Cafe 2 Comments

Courtenay, BC

I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up.   I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here.   The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island.   This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island.   It’s big work, undoing 120 of colonization and history and taking advantage of an historic opportunity to build a community-owned system that puts children at the centre of our work.   Here’s what the notes say:

  • Be the healing organization
  • Establish everybody’s authority
  • Healing patterns connecting heart to heart
  • Host for community to become conscious
  • Our work: healing the relationships between people that have arisen from the history of being tied to stakeholders
  • This circle seems to recommit us to the work
  • Putting our purpose at the centre, build a process to do this.

It’s fitting that I’m reflecting on this harvest tonight.   Tonight we ran our third regional assembly here on Vancouver Island, inviting people from this area to share what is exciting them about this work.   The purpose of the assemblies is to create champions for the process and to enlist people into a more intensive experience of community-based dialogue and deliberation by creating community circles.   These circles will do the work of incorporating the community voice into the decisions and policy making of this new Authority we are creating to take over Aboriginal child and family services from the provincial government.   We can’t do this without the community being involved and we’ve been quite taken by the response of Elders, youth and parents to our invitation to join us in creating this new system.

These notes remind me that much of the work I do has a healing component to it, that the work of opening hearts and supporting movement in Aboriginal organizations and communities is about healing – making whole – and sustaining connection and belonging.   That makes the work I am doing complex and many-aspected, but when we get it right, like tonight for example when we ran a cafe that tapped open heartedness, it does so much more than move the organization forward in strategic ways.   It makes things stronger.

Strengthening is a powerful and needed quality in development work, whether it is in organizations or communities.   Strengthening commitment, heart, leadership, quality, results…it is a pattern of “better” that is embedded in the nature of powerful conversations and participatory leadership.