Jay Wortman, who has been a client of mine, is a medical doctor and also the Regional Director of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch here in BC. He recently had a breakthrough by addressing his diabetes by changing his diet “In evolutionary terms, it’s a blink of an eye. Aboriginal people have been transformed over a hundred years or 200 years, very few numbers of generations, from a completely different way of life to what we experience today, and diet has dramatically changed for that population,” he says. “And that very small period of time, there’s no possible …
My cousin Martha Mills died in a tragic car accident along with her fiancee and his business partner on Monday. Her funeral is today in Canmore, Alberta. If you’re so inclined, spare a prayer for her parents and her brothers, as well as the families of the others. It’s funny how I never really knew Martha. When she was a baby I moved to the UK and when I returned I was in high school and she was beginning kindergarten. By the time I went away to university and then got on with my life, I saw her only very …
My three year old son is a constant source of amusement and awe. Here are some of the questions he asked me today: How low is the earth? What part of the earth spins? – The outside, Finn – What part of the outside? Just the part we are standing on or the part that goes all the way to space? How did I get here? – a short form of the birds and the bees – Yes, I know that, but how did my aliveness get in? Any answers you might have would be gratefully appreciated.
Open Space Technology works on passion bounded by responsibility. It’s about people finding what they want to do and assembling the resources around them to make that happen. It’s about support those people and their ideas with resources and openness. It really works, not just for meetings, but for organizational structures as well. It’s about redefining measurements of success and letting go of control. Now a new book has come out about the practice of very Open Space-like principles at the Brazillian holding company Semco: It’s our lack of formal structure, our willingness to let workers follow their interests and …
Following up on my rant/question of yesterday. Today I met two doctors who I like alot, one of whom I count as a friend and one who is new to me and I was reminded again that what matters is creating conversations where parts of a system talk to one another. We can’t simply write off the whole system because there is wisdom within it that we need to draw us forward. There is also wisdom outside of it too, wisdom that really maters. In the bigger system, convening conversations, like what we did in Chicago matters a lot. In …