Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs. It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional …
I was going through some old emails today and found one from 2020 from my friend Susan Phillips in Minneapolis who shared a really moving message about the closing of an important Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) back then. It relates to how to end a container. If you’ve been with me in real life you know that I like to end a gathering in a crisp and decisive way. I think it’s important to know when you are done, when the work is complete and when the next thing happens. So for years I have used a practice that I …
Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world. Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there. (PS…the headlines are links! Click for more) John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.” I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that …
It occured to me this morning after I posted that piece on affordances last night, I haven’t really blogged about the two loops model of change in living systems. That’s kind of a surprise to me because for the past 15 years or so this is one of the models that has formed a deep part of my practice in working with organizations. Like the Chaordic Path, it is a simple way to grasp deep and complex topics and a good way to introduce groups to concepts that explain more deeply how complex systems work. (You’ll see me refer to …
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers. After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further …