In my move to WordPress, this post went missing…here it is republished. Jack on productive [tag]waiting[/tag]: Waiting is a fact of life. We wait in line, on hold, for people to get back to us, for traffic lights to change, for parking spaces to open up, for solutions to appear, for consensus to be built, for projects to move forward. What is unproductive waiting … and what is productive waiting? Two pieces, for me. First, there is the kind of waiting when our minds are not united with the task at hand, and second there is the kind of waiting …
I’m reissuing this invitation to join Michael Herman and I here on Bowen Island, British Columbia for an Open Space Practice Retreat from April 18-20, 2006. This is an intensive retreat for leaders, managers, facilitators, consultants, community activists, and anyone else who wants to open more space for renewal, visioning, learning and productivity — in business, government, educational and community organizations. This is an opportunity for deep learning about leadership and change, in the context of the practices that support facilitating Open Space. Folks who will find this useful include leaders, managers and facilitators working with very complex issues, requiring …
My buddy Harrison Owen has been writing like crazy a lot lately. He has been almost singlehandedly keeping the conversation going on the OSLIST, where Open Space practitioners gather to play. And the other day he launched a new paper into the mix: Opening Space for The Question. The paper is about the concept of Nichtwissen, a German word that Harrison translates as “Unknowing”. Open Space for the Question means to cultivate a practice that has us sitting in the Unknowing, working to find where the contemplation of the question takes us. In a really good synopsis of the practice …
Merlin Mann found Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s secret to maintaining flow: “The only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding new opportunities to refine one’s skills: do one’s job better or faster, or expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more appropriate to your stage of life. Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realized after the event. To acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction.” This from an article in The Times called “The secrets of happiness.” Worth a read don’t you think? I have experienced intense happiness and flow …
At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks. What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management. Non-hierarchical, emergent …