We are in the midst of a federal election here in Canada and it’s getting nasty. In an effort to counteract some of the negative spin, our public broadcaster CBC has been running a number of interesting documentaries. Today a producer followed three candidates in Toronto who were struggling with how to work with diversity rather than falling into the political trap of polarizing people.

One of the candidates was Borys Wrzesnewskyj who is a Liberal running in the west end of Toronto. He is the owner of the Future Bakery in Toronto, a thriving local chain that was founded by his grandfather. His grandfather came to Canada as a master baker, having earned that designation from the court of czar Nicholas in Russia in 1915. To become a master baker a receive that designation 100 years ago in Russia, one had to study for seven years and learn accounting and morality.

Morality?

Wrzesnewskyj said that bakers needed to learn morality because they feed people. He drew a parallel to politics and suggested that people running for office be similarly trained.

Its obviously a perspective that has sat with Wrzesnewskyj for sometime as this article shows from 1998:

It is nice to see someone connecting work and leadership to a bigger values-based context in the midst of this dirty election.

I’ve been enjoying James Joyce’s Ulysses as posted by Botheration. One page a day, pushed through my RSS feeder. What a great way to read a great book.

So what if it takes two years!

Dave Pollard offers a graduation address for all those of us who had lame ones when we matriculated:

Read the whole thing.

Lilia Efimova notes that Open Space makes you the one in charge and then asks: “‘No way to delegate’ 🙂 Can we found a trigger for self-organised attitude here?”

Yup. And the keys, as Harrison Owen will say repeatedly are that OST works with passion bounded by responsibility. Passion is what gets you out of your seat, responsibility is what causes you to take action.

With these two ingredients, and the tools to support them, you have a trigger for self organizing systems in humans. Open Space embodies a dance from individual intention, to collective storytelling, to self organization to individual action. I see these patterns beginning and ending with agency, as ideas arise out in each mind and heart and work their way through the collective space of story and structure returning again to the realm of the personal for the action to happen.

There IS a way to delegate of course, and in Open Space we call this “invitation.” Instead of foisting an agenda on people, you invite them to help you, work with you, create with you, do heavy lifting with you.

It’s not easy, and you have to create the conditions to support these kinds of things, but once you have the basic structures in place, it is amazing what can happen.

Passion bounded by responsibility lovingly contained within invitation. The ingredients for the inviting organization.

My friend Cody Clark, the first blogger I ever met because of this medium posts an intriguing thought from Kurt Vonnegut:

This is a really good point. Theological merits aside, the difference between the two is stark and represents an interesting insight into the nature of our legal systems here in Judeo-Christian societies.

The Ten Commandments are the big don’ts of the Bible. These are the things you get in huge trouble for. You could probably name most of them, even if you were only marginally associated with Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

The beatitudes are a different beast altogether. These are the blessings that Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount, and they offer an entirely different moral code, one which is inviting rather than prohibitive:

Google News shows people prefer the first set of instructions to the second.