My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on! It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together. Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture. But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it …
It’s not at all clear where the social media drip feed is at these days. Here’s where you can find me on the web these days: It’s all coming apart isn’t it? The social media landscape has become fragmented and disjointed. The main sites that still dominate the global system are starting to lose functionality. I have a love/hate relationship with social media, but these days the love is waning quickly. And so, I’m wondering where everyone is and what you’re using these days. Here’s my setup. Facebook I have been on Facebook for a long time. In 2010 I …
The chapel at the Statenberg Manor, when we finished cleaning it out in 2013, and after it has been restored. The global Art of Hosting community is an eclectic group of people from all over the world who share an inquiry about how to bring more participatory processes to a massive variety of challenges they face with their communities and organizations. There is no formal organization, but the community is a network loosely connected through a website, animated through Zoom calls, an active Facebook group and face-to-face gatherings of practitioners who occasionally meet to forge connections and share practices. One …
Funeral urn by Charles LaFond. My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time …
In my early thirties, a small group of us were studying education theory and self-directed learning as we built a supported homeschooling program. We worked with a guy for a while who was an NLP practitioner, and I have mixed memories from our time with him, but one thing that stood out was a novel take on an NLP exercise called “Timeline.” Essentially this exercise has you walk on a large diagram on the floor, laid out in one-foot intervals, with each foot representing a year of your life. In this case, the novelty was that the timeline was laid …