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Necessity is the mother of intention

August 24, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Complexity, Containers, Design, Featured 4 Comments

Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers. After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further …

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Lessons from stewardship

August 23, 2023 By Art of Hosting, Being, Featured, Leadership 4 Comments

The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored. The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One …

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Sarah Jane Scouten and Susie Ungerleider on Bowen Island

July 15, 2023 By Bowen, Featured, Music

Last night we were treated to an incredible concert here on Bowen Island by Susie Ungerleider and Sarah Jane Scouten, two of Canada’s finest singer-songwriters, lyricists who simply and directly reach for the soul, remind you of things you have loved and lost, of times that have rolled on and of places that hold the heart no matter how they change. Sarah Jane is Bowen Island born and raised, brought up in a family and a community that soaked her in folk music, theatre and language. She lives in Scotland now and this is the first time she has been …

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Containers of meaning

July 3, 2023 By Being, Bowen, Containers, Emergence, Featured 2 Comments

Funeral urn by Charles LaFond. My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time …

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The annals of break-out groups

June 28, 2023 By Conversation, Facilitation, Open Space 6 Comments

An interesting rabbit hole was opened for me thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s cheeky claim that the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt created the “unconference” in 1828. Through a link on the OSLIST provided by Rolf Schneidereit I’ve just read Humboldt’s opening address at the “Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians” held over several days and several locations in Berlin during September of 1878. The invitation was to break down barriers between scientists from multiple disciplines to explore diverging opinions and ideas. As Harrison Owen did a century later when reflecting on his development of Open Space Technology, Humboldt drew his …

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