A lovely paper by Mark McKergow from the UK which defines the art of hosting as a leadership practice: the essence is that the host creates space and is active within it. Download the paper here.
Coming back from a lovely Art of Hosting at Tamagawa near Nanaimo. Lots bubblig out of that one, and so here;s the first little harvest. Our hosting team (the excellent David Stevenson, Colleen stevenson, Paula Beltgens, Diana Smith, Caitlin Frost, Nancy McPhee, Teresa Posakony and Tenneson Woolf) checked in together around this question: What would it take to be ambushed by joy this weekend? This question sprang from a notion of joy as an operating principle; What if noticing joy was a basic agreement about how we will work together? From that came this snippet of a poem that …
A long flight necessitated by a late date travel change, had my flying through Chicago yesterday, getting a quick connection and beating my bags to Minneapolis. MPL is the second nicest airport in North America after Vancouver. Lovely layout, good food options and easy to get around. Also friendly United ground crew who got my bag to me with no problems. I’m staying downtown, reached easily by the LRT from the airport. Downtown cores never give you the pure sense of a place, but I’ll be here a week, moving over to St. Paul tomorrow for a couple of nights …
A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes: Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over …
My friend Kenoli Oleari on the possibility that the conversation can be changed: We are finding that there are lots of opportunities for public meetings, town halls, task forces, etc. as well as a lot of dissatisfaction with the way things are done. People fear new approaches, but we are finding if we don’t buy into those fears, rather working with them to stay focused on outcomes and the best way to achieve what they want, that there is some degree of receptivity. In many cases people do care about good outcomes and let this desire assuage their fears. There …