Pema Chodron: When we talk about hopelessness and death, we’re talking about facing facts. No escapism. Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, not to run away, to return to the bare bones, no matter whats going on. If we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship that no longer ignores the reality of impermanence and death.
Bob Stilger on “decision happening” rather than “decision making:” I’d add to what John has written by introducing the concept of “decision happening” rather than “decision making.” It is a term I coined a decade ago and am reminded of from time to time. Decision happening uses collective discernment to discover the decision that is happening before our very eyes. It has a very different energy than “decision making.” There is a curiosity. It has an openness and a sense of inquiry rather than a driving quickly towards a given decision. It invites the participation of spirit, non-material beings, the …
The 2010 annual report for the Berkana Institute is out. In it you can get a snapshot of the work that is happening within our network, including the Art of Hosting offerings that we undertake in North America and the learning and illuminating of work happening all over the globe.
I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were …
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains. I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes. Cynefin …