I’m just tucking into to David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. (I chose to start reading at the beginning by the way!). In the second chapter, on alphabetization, Weinberger talks about the arbitrariness of classification schemes for organizing knowledge. Everything ordered by human beings is done so arbitrarily, and no one scheme is going to capture exactly the right kind of order that needs to happens. This is why tagging is so important (and I confess to being a lax lately with tags. Perhaps this is a good time to change that practice).
“Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature,” Weinberger writes. In the execution of a chaordic path, where groups and organizations are leaping to and fro between the poles of chaos and order as they find their way, harvesting knowledge must be useful to the endeavour. If the organization is evolving well, it is doing so in a natural way and so the knowledge that is being generated must be useful also in a natural way.
When I worked for government, the classification schemes we were required to use to file documents were so completely aribitrary that in three years I never filed a single thing, for fear that I would never be able to find it again. Instead, I kept files in my office, most often in piles and binders relating to the work I was doing. Things were tagged by post it notes if they could exist in more than one pile. I needed my own scheme. Since 1999 I haven’t used a filing cabinet and in the last year I have gone completely paperless, depending instead on Google Desktop to find what I am looking for in my digital world.
This is nothing new, but it has major ramifications for harvesting. We want to be helpful as facilitators and create clusters for groups of people that seem to reflect patterns we are seeing. The problem of course is that any scheme developed by one person excludes the social reality of the group. And so lately, I have been turning over classification to groups of people and using post-its to tag things so that we can find them again later. As soon as possible getting a harvest into a taggable digital format is essential so that it can be remixed and used in innovative ways, reflecting the chaordic journey a group is on.
This is something to add to the Art of Harvesting materials we are working on.
[tags]David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, tagging, chaordic, filing, knowledge management[/tags]
A summery Friday here at the Lot. Here’s what tickled my eyes this week:
- El Cameron, my favourite flamenco singer. Full of duende this night.
- A brilliantly rendered story of the four quadrants of integral theory. This map is just so helpful in looking at so many sitautions. This particular presentation is a lovely use of web technology as well.
- So you want to speak Danish? Who wouldn’t… The first place to start is by mastering this phrase: rødgrød med fløde. If you can’t get it on the first or second (or 27th) try, have a look at this detailed pronunciation guide which tells how to make the porridge AND the phrase. When you’re done there, watch this incredible documentary about the demise of Danish. This note is required reading for anyone in the Art of Hosting community by the way!
- Boeing launches its new plane, the 787, this weekend: 07/08/07. Check it out now or watch it live on Sunday.
Amy Lenzo at the World Cafe blog tossed out a great link today, to the Global Oneness Project, a collection of videos about what we need to do on this earth. The bonus for me is an interview with my friend Tom Hurley, who I met last week in Belgium. I connected very deeply to Tom for a variety of reasons, but we shared a deep set of conversations on topics as diverse as stewardship, governance and the responsibility of love that helped me ground and understand my experience. The video with Tom is a nice summation of our need to integrate opposites, inner and outer, science and spirit. These are themes that lie deep in my practice of “practical decolonization.” Colonization as a project is about splitting polarities into opposites, decolonization is about making these whole again – healing.
I’m constantly amazed at how close we can come to people we have never met before. I’m wondering what it is we share that creates the invitation to depth so quickly. It’s beyond the fact that we share practices and approaches. What lies at the heart of such a phenomenon, and is this new or did it occur in the past?
Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web:
- Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better.
- Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal communities that has long formed the basis of my practice: “he understanding is that childhood traumas cause our souls to fragment. The work of healing is to enable the reclaiming of these parts of our souls – like wisdom, love, and courage – that are ours to reclaim.”
- It still amazes me how intimate people can be in person after engaging with each other over time on weblogs. Since my lunch with new friends in London last weekend, Richard and Kevin have both posted interesting thoughts about this particular lunch on their blogs. If you still haven’t had the experience of meeting someone physically whom you have known only through a blog, I recommend it. It will blow your mind.
- One of the processes we used in Belgium for looking at ourselves was a systemic constellation. I’m quite interested in this methodology (here is a website for the community of practice) and would welcome anythoughts from those who have used it in organizations and communities about resources that are useful for understanding it in those contexts.
- Finally this week, a note on a great looking training offered by my friend Christine Whitney Sanchez in Colorado this summer combining Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Polarity Management. It’s just one more offering on the kinds of things we teach at an art of hosting. You can also explore these ideas through a workshop with Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock, which they call “Wise Action that Lasts.” (July 9-11 near Vancouver, BC) and of course you could also come to an Art of Hosting training, several of which are going on in Europe and North America this summer and fall.
(I’m posting this a day or two later than when I wrote it)
London, UK
I’m in London now, moving around with with Johnnie Moore and Euan Semple, Richard Oliver,Tanya and Kevin McLean, and Steve Moore seeing some plays, talking about our work and what it all means…
…and I have nearly lost my voice.
I’m quite intrigued actually with the fact that I am suffering from laryngitis. It was caused by an unholy scream I issued on day three of our gathering in Belgium, as I came into some quite strong and profound as a response to the invitation to our group of 26 to face the shadow present in our work. This was a deep exercise and it brought me to a level of presence and clarity about my work that has laid the ground work for my own practice to go to a deeper level.
The day began with an exercise designed I think to work our sensing capacities and our awareness of the very great field of generative support that exists in the mystery of the living system of the world. It’s very hard to write objectively about being at the centre of such experiences, but one thing that stuck out for me was a lingering sense of the power of dignity.
The house we were in at Heerlijckyt is 400 years old and it stands on a domain that is more than 700 years old. The family that owned it for that whole time recently sold it to the current owners and there is only a little of their presence left in the place. One thing that is left though is the dignity of the place and it occurred to me that dignity is a very important part of the work of hosting. I think Lieven and Judith, our hosts at Heerlickyt know this well, and they host each other and the place there with very palpable dignity. THey are good teachers of the lesson of the house.
And so it was with the present sense of dignity that I was prepared to face the shadows that the hosting team for day three put in front of us. And it was an incredibly powerful invitation to step into the shadow. We first chose sat with the strongest thing that our collective invoked in us, a powerful resource that we have to move to the next level. To me it was Sayt’ kuulum goot, the Tsimshian and Nisgaa principle of being of one heart. And then, with this resource in hand, and with our senses alive, Anita Paalvast, a very powerful aikidoka, drew her katana and walked the circle, lowering the blade in front of each of us and challenging us to identify our fear and the shadow that is in our midst. For me the invitation lay very much as an invitation from one warrior in training to another: we must know our opponent, honour the worthiness of that opponent and be prepared to engage with clarity to cut that opponent in one stroke or die to it with dignity.
We moved outside and took our places at the rim of a large circle with our resources spread out around us on the rim and the fears and the shadows collectively held, placed in the middle. We studied the offers, acquainted ourselves with who was at our backs and bowed to the oppoenents in the middle. And then with the intensity she showed in drawing her katana, Anita invited us to collectively come to the centre and engage with these shadows letting loose the most power kihop we could, acting from a deep sense of spirit filled committment. That was the moment I damaged my vocal chords.
My surrender to the task was total. I saw in the midst two of my greatest shadow enemies – greed and failure – and I sense the presence of one that wasn’t in the middle, but instead lurking on the edge: dishonesty. I see these three things as especially dangerous to the territory of the open heart, and in committing to engaging with these opponents I did so from the stance of defending the open heart.
I said in the circle that followed that I feel that if we are serious about this work of addressing our collective shadow, and we are prepared to wield a sword in the service of this work, the sword of clarity and total commitment, then we must be accurate in our engagement and insure that no more than one cut is needed. I thought of the places I work, the communities and people I work with, where the emergence of open heartedness is and has been a dangerous proposition for a long time. In Bella Coola, or on Vancouver Island or in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, opening one’s heart can be an invitation to a painful battle. If we are called to work with open hearts, then the shadows of greed, failure and dishonesty (and many others) will be there to stick us and we must be prepared, as warriors, to fight them or to die to them. They are mortal enemies and casting them in these terms is not a game. It requires a vigilance in practice to defend the open heart in ourselves and in the places where we work so that it may drive the change and healing that is needed.
I was incredibly moved and surprised by my reaction to this exercise, and I sat for a long time after the circle ended. I was joined by my mates Carsten Ohm, Tom Hurley, Nicole Baussart, Maria Skordialou, Sarach Whitely and Toke Moeller. Carsten asked me what was in my heart, and I replied that I thought the call to address our enemies was a serious call and if we were to use the sword for this work, we had to know that there would be pain. Whether we hold our opponents with love or hate, if we are cutting them with precision, we are creating pain. I wondered aloud and asked my mates what they thought of the responsibility of love.
That day I felt a fierce commitment to defending the territory of the open heart and a fierce commitment to training in the practice of wielding love, for communities, people, ideals, possibilities and whatever else. For me, the Art of Hosting on Art of Hosting wrapped up after that circle, even though we still had a half day to go, During the open space I invited people to sit with me and teach me a song from their home place. I’ll post the recordings of these songs when I can get some time. They are beautiful gems, these songs, because they are offered out of a spirit of really open vulnerability, sung in the mother tongue of my mates, and watching them sing these songs opened my heart wide to who these friends really are.
I think this is our call. What do you think of the responsibility of love?