Organizations, leaders, people – in short, sponsors – who decide to take responsibility for convening an Open Space meeting often wonder what their role can be afterwards. In working recently with a community I asked the question to gather perspectives and one answer stood out:

That’s a lovely way to talk about holding space for learning, action or development.

Technorati Tags: leadership, openspace

On the OSLIST today, a question about success:

Often people expect big things from organizational development “interventions.” They wouldn’t do so otherwise. Retreats, planning sessions, Open Space forums…all come with the expectation that doing something significant will change things significantly.

In working with sponsors I do have conversations about what transformation really means and how willing people are to transform themselves to meet the new world they are wanting to be born. There is a real stretch in this work for people, to go into somewhere new while not abandoning what they know – the “safe ground” – even if the safe ground is no longer serving them very well.

Fear, trust, openness, chaordic confidence…all of these are emotions, practices and states we need to grapple with to open ourselves to transformation. We need to be able to embody change in order to be there to welcome it when it arrives.

And so for me success is relative, but what I really invite people to stretch into is that place where they can embody the success they want. If they can’t then we have to get real about what we’re willing to do.

But if they CAN get really big and offer themselves up for change, unbelievable things can happen. I’ve just seen it happen most recently in Prince George.

Technorati Tags: leadership, facilitation, openspace, success

Twenty years ago, in June 1985 I remember listening to the CBC at a friend’s cottage north of Toronto when the news came that Air India flight 182 from Vancouver to Delhi had been bombed out of the sky near Ireland. Three hundred and twenty-nine people, most of them Canadians died that day, including my friend Sanjay Sakhawalkar, his whole family and four other kids from my school. The summer of 1985 was filled with grief and sadness at the loss. I sobbed far more than a 17 year-old boy is supposed to. My dreams were filled with terrible recurring images of falling into the sea. All of us that knew people on that plane felt powerless, robbed of friends and family and determined to see justice brought against the murderers.

It was the worst act of air terrorism until September 11, 2001. An investigation began which soon targetted Sikh seperatists and several men were later arrested. After 19 years, the trial of the two principal suspects began and although the case was not watertight, a guilty verdict was anticipated.

Today the verdicts came and the news is appalling. A BC Supreme Court judge found the two men not guilty. And it’s not because these men are innocent (they are far from nice guys), but because the evidence that the Crown amassed and the witnesses they called were useless. The investigation was a shambles in many ways. At one point our ironically named intelligence agency erased key tapes of phone taps.

The Crown owes a huge apology to the families and friends of the victims of AI 182. Over 80 children died that day, including my friend Sanjay, a brilliant young man who we all knew was destined for great things. That the perpetrators of this crime are walking free makes the vomit rise in my throat.

No one has apologized for these crimes, or taken responsibility for them. I am really quite angry that I may never see the day when anyone does. We have seen the mass slaughter of Canadian children and adults and no one can nail the bastards who did it. It’s an outrage.

My heart goes out to the families.

Technorati Tags: AirIndia, terrorism

I’ve mentioned Nipun before…an amazing weblogger. Today in my RSS feeder comes this lovely analogy:

Technorati Tags: decentralization, power

The website of the National Centre for First Nations Governance is finally online.

This is a huge addition to First Nations communities, and dare I say, many other places as well. The Centre is a kind of open source research and dialogue hub for leading edge thinking and conversation on First Nations governance along the lines of the Delgamuukw site we prepared for the Assembly of First Nations. As I have said all along, the lessons that are being learned as First Nations experiment and implement new forms of governance based on traditional processes that are valid for the 21st century are lessons that can benefit all communities struggling with defining themselves, using their assets and resources and institutionalizing new ways of becoming more free in a global context.

Spend some time watching the video (especially Patrica Montour’s presentation on revolution and empowerment) and browsing some of the research papers and thinking about how they might apply to your own community, state, province or country. This is a big “good news” story for First Nations and it shows that we are leading the way in opening up and testing new ideas about what governance means.

Technorati Tags: firstnations, governance, goodnews