A Harvard business professor asks his students to think about elBulli, a fascinating restaurant near Barcelona To eat at elBulli, customers must navigate a mysterious reservations system. If they are lucky enough to be one of the 8,000 who get a booking that year, they are then given a date and time to show up. Reaching elBulli’s coastal perch involves traveling to Barcelona, then negotiating two hours of narrow, twisting mountain roads. But then they enjoy a five-hour meal of thirty-some completely original, whimsical dishes prepared by Adrià and his team of thirty to forty cooks. The meal costs roughly …
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.
I’ve been using Dave Snowden’s conception of simple, chaotic, complicated and complex systems for a while. This video: How to organise a Children’s Party is a brilliant redux of these helpful distinctions.
Why conversation for reconciliation is important: this story about neighbourhood dialogue in a gentrifying Portland, Oregon neighbourhood contains this sheer nugget of wisdom: “The one who strikes the blow doesn’t know the force of the blow,” Mowry says. “Only the one who has received the blow knows its force.” That quote serves to me to point out why reconciliation efforts led by the striker don’t really heal. I think a little about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in Canada which is supposed to look at the residential school experience in a way that hears the story. But it is …
This week I had the tremendous privilage to facilitate two days of Open Space for Xyolhemeylh, the Aboriginal child and family services agency in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver. The agency has been going through a lot of turmoil over the past few years, and has come to a point of reinvention. The theme of the gathering was “Reclaiming our Journey” and it marked a significant transition for the organization as it headed into community control from being managed by the provincial government for the past 2.5 years. The point of the Open Space meetings were to invite the …