Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax. The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive. Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another. We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field. …
Thank you Euan. Now, there is a time and a place for judgemental skepticism and cynicism (I suppose) but somehow there is a widespread sentiment that associates these two stances with expertise and prudence. Now I don’t want you to think that I am all about squashing opposition or creative tension, but I have to say that when I am working with groups of people to create processes that will help take people out of their comfort zones, there is a particular cynicism that does not help. Euan Semple calls this “pomposity” and that certainly seems to capture the holier …
Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days. On leg five of the epic journey. So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests. First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation. Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna. This was …
Lovely day here in Marin County hanging out with friends and charting some interesting paths forward on a few projects. One highlight of the day was spending time with Amy Lenzo, who I have known for a while but met only one time previously when we were on an diverse and eclectic team of facilitators holding space at the Pegasus systems thinking conference a couple of years ago. Amy is, among other things, the web goddess for The World Cafe community and we spent a lovely lunch at the excellent Buckeye Roadhouse talking over the nature of our …
Over the past few years, I have enjoyed watching Otto Scharmer’s practice develop as he moves between the world of high level systems thinking and grounded facilitation practice. The first book he helped write, Presence, was a lovely distillation of his reasearch and I have been working a lot with his new book, Theory U, with its grounding in practice, to work with networks and communities who are trying to access the source of their collective futures. I have also appreciated his willingness to openly share the tools he and the presencing community have been developing at the Presencing Institute …