It’s been a couple of days since I’ve been home from Prince Rupert and it’s going to take a long time to fully process the youth suicide prevention summit I facilitated on Thursday. The overwhelming result of that gathering was a profound invitation from youth to connect again with their families, communities and traditional laws. The biggest hurdle to overcome in working with suicide as a topic is the fear and overwhelming nature of the problem. In many ways it seems ridiculous to choose an appreciative framework to deal with the topic, but that’s what we did. The result of …
Prince Rupert, BC The results aren’t quite in yet, but it was a good day, as this doodle from one of the participants indicates.
Last week I was part of a remarkable Open Space event sponsored by the United Community Services Cooperative. I was able to bring my new friend Wendy Farmer-O’Neil along to introduce her to Open Space. She performed above and beyond duty helping out with the reports and generally sharing the space holding duties. And then she came home and blogged about it: I think that my heart and soul know that Open Space is the possibility realized�a way we can be together in truth and freedom�that it brings out the best of who we are�when we are willing to give …
Indigo Ocean emailed me an invitation to answer this meme: You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? Hmmm…Am I burning? I can’t remember F451 well enough to remember what I should be here! Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Kerewin, the Maori protagonist of The Bone People by Keri Hulme I read this book at a time in my life when I had violently lost someone I loved. Kerewin was a timely companion to see me through that grief. The last book you bought is: Thoreau’s Method: A Handbook for Nature …
In the Open Space world, we talk about the four pre-conditions that make for great open space events: diversity, complexity, passion and urgency. The more you have of these, the juicier the event becomes. That is counter intuitive to most ways of thinking, because in most cases it seems that problem solving processes aim to homogenize, simplify, rationalize and slow down. If we can just get a handle on the problem, the thinking goes, we can apply the best possible solution. This mechanistic view does not work with so-called “wicked problems.” It can generate solutions or options or ways forward …