Lawrence Lessig has noticed a very important practice that is emerging from the #occupy movement. It is the principle and the practice of non-contradiction: In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform. This is a a very useful contribution to the tools that are emerging from the #occupy movement. It is edgy because in traditional social activism …
Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past. Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear. For me, lots of good insights …
I’m off to Estonia on Saturday to run an Art of Hosting workshop with Toke Moeller and Piret Jeedas. To say I’m excited is an understatement. First, this is only the second trip to Europe I have made since I left the UK in 1981 after living there for three years. It’s interesting to see how things have changed in Europe over 30 years. On this trip I am intending to connect in London, during a brief stopover at Heathrow, with one of my school buddies from those days, who I last saw when I was just 13 years old. …
I love working with engineers. They are curious and always looking for ways to make things better. They sometimes suffer a little from bringing a mechanistic problem solving mindset to complex living systems, but more often than not what they contribute to processes is a sense of adventurous experiment. This video shows why. A few months ago at an Art of Hosting workshop in Springfield Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and I had a great conversation about failure. We were curious about how the mechanistic view of failure has worked its way into human consciousness in this culture. There are very few …