Chris Corrigan Chris Corrigan Menu
  • Blog
  • Chaordic design
  • Resources for Facilitators
    • Facilitation Resources
    • Books, Papers, Interviews, and Videos
    • Books in my library
    • Open Space Resources
      • Planning an Open Space Technology Meeting
  • Courses
  • About Me
    • Services
      • What I do
      • How I work with you
    • CV and Client list
    • Music
    • Who I am
  • Contact me
  • Blog
  • Chaordic design
  • Resources for Facilitators
    • Facilitation Resources
    • Books, Papers, Interviews, and Videos
    • Books in my library
    • Open Space Resources
      • Planning an Open Space Technology Meeting
  • Courses
  • About Me
    • Services
      • What I do
      • How I work with you
    • CV and Client list
    • Music
    • Who I am
  • Contact me

Category Archives "CoHo"

Start anywhere, go somewhere

April 10, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Being, CoHo, Flow, Leadership One Comment

That is one of the principles of wayfinding, which is simply to say that if you don’t know what to do, start anywhere and follow it somewhere.   Each step will reveal the next thing to do.

For a beautiful, beautiful exercise in doing this, go here and play for a while with the ToneMatrix.

Share:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram

Like this:

Like Loading...

Knowledge work, collective intellegence and the new

September 17, 2008 By Chris Corrigan CoHo, Collaboration, Organization

Jon Husband has been threatening to write his book on Wirearchy for as long as I’ve known him, and I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, he is posting what could well be a chapter from it in two parts over at his blog in a post he calls Perspectives on Designing and Managing Knowledge Work.

(This is me nudging him to get it done so I can add it to my list of books by friends…:-)   )

In a synchronous moment, also today George Por, a mutual friend of Jon and I published a nice set of thoughts about collective intellegence and spaces in organizations for the new to emerge.

It’s so interesting to be relationship with people thinking so deeply about organization.

Share:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram

Like this:

Like Loading...

Wirearchy · In Networks, Our Agreements With Each Other Will Be Our Structures

August 13, 2008 By Chris Corrigan CoHo, Collaboration, Organization 2 Comments

Jon Husband:

I’ve suggested that in networks we come together around a purpose and objectives, and then begin to discover appropriate skills sets and motivations amongst members of a given network .. after which we begin to negotiate what we are going to do and why, who’s going to do what,how and by when, and then make this strategic information available, in full view, to all who are participating in the conversations, exchanges of information and the actual work (which often consists of pointing each other to pertinent just-in-time information that will make achieving the negotiated objectives easier or more efficient).

The more I am working with relationships as the essential element with organizational sturctures that work, the more I am coming to realize that the glue that binds structures together is intimacy, friendship and respect. Maturana and Bunnell in their paper on love in organizations note:

There is something peculiar about human beings: We are loving animals. I know that we kill each other and do all those horrible things, but if you lookat any story of corporate transformation where everything begins to go well, innovations appear, and people are happy to be there, you will see that it is a story of love. Most problems in companies are not solved through competition, not through fighting, not through authority. They are solved through the only emotion that expands intelligent behavior. They are solved through the only emotion that expands creativity, as in this emotion there is freedom for creativity. This emotion is love. Love expands intelligence and enables creativity. Love returns autonomy and, as it returns autonomy, it returns responsibility and the experience of freedom.

When we treat each other well, we are capable of being intellegent, creative and free together. When we don;t treat each other well, intellegence, creativity and freedom eludes us. How much traditional organizational development includes love on the menu?

Certainly Jon has been noticing all of this for a long time as an OD practitioner working with the architecture of organizations and communities. His own charting of the shift from hierarchy to wirearchy might be summed up by the watching autonomous individuals be finally recognized as the real part of any organization. As technology advances our ability to work closer together, we find more and more ways to simply operate as companies of friends, making agreements based on the accountability of the heart.

This is not soft stuff I am talking about here. Working this way is what makes major transformations possible in all kinds of fields and sectors. As long as we have energy tied up in defending our small territories and personal fifedoms, we don;t have a full suite of assets to apply to meeting the challenges facing our organizations, communities and world. Being at peace with friends, working side by side with shared purpose, openness and autonomy is what will enable us to become more intellegent than we have ever been, and will provide us with the tools to meet challenges that seem insurmountable any other way.

Share:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram

Like this:

Like Loading...

Shambhala Day Four: reviving an optimistic worldview.

June 28, 2008 By Chris Corrigan Being, CoHo, Flow, Invitation, Leadership, Learning 5 Comments

The blog posts dried up because my evenings were taken in celebration, but here’s day four.

There is a deliberate pattern that unfolds over the week of the Shambhala Institute. Monday is a day of arrival and orientation to one’s personal intention and the building of a collective field of learning. Tuesday and Wednesday, we enter the learning journey that brings us all to challenge and to the very edges of the internal questions we are living with. Thursday and Friday are about celebration and re-entry into the world.

Thursday saw a plenary session that was startling for its content and its process. Adam Kahane, Meg Wheatley and Jim Gimmian presented a keynote plenary about strategy at the edge, and the edge they tried to cultivate was one where everything we believed in might not be true. We began in small groups discussing the question of what we believed at our deep core. A sample of these beliefs were harvested from the the audience and these beliefs were taken to be representative of the general sense of the community. Such values as inclusion and the power of relationships to transform systems and the beliefs around presence and intention were the sorts of things that were harvested.

When these beliefs were harvested, Meg then asked the question “What if these were all false?” There then began a kind of heady conversation on stage between these three rather large presences about hope and hopelessness and the clarity of living without beliefs at all. Adam invited the audience to pull their chairs around the stage in a tight mob, a claustrophobic crowd all facing the three. It was deliberately provocative and controversial and it seemed to have the effect of leaving people either shocked and confused nd in grief, or elated and detached. I was certainly in the latter group.

I was elated, because I guess I just am. My first reaction to Meg’s question was similar to my friend David Stevenson’s reaction: we were surprised that Meg had adopted the assumption that we believe these things are even true at all. We both know that they are simply beliefs. They could just as easily be true as not, and the question “What if these beliefs were false?” was simply pointing at another belief as well. It felt as if we were playing an odd shell game, shifting around emotional centre from one thing to another until people were finally felt either manipulated or above it all. There was a huge mix of reactions to the plenary along a wide spectrum of emotions.
I think the point of the exercise was to help us find freedom from our beliefs and not be addicted to communities and situations that feed unhelpful views of the world. I’ve seen Byron Katie doing similar work and imagine her hosting that plenary, inviting people not only to question their beliefs but also introduce a practice for how we could continue to question them and in so doing find more and more clarity as we design strategies from the edge where our selves meet reality.

At any rate, I had a shimmering moment of clarity about my own sort of permanent state of optimism. It’s obvious that we cannot know the future, even though many of us are certain that some things will surely come to pass or never change. But in the context of doom versus hope it seems clear to me that optimism may actually be the only useful stance. If things are not doomed, but merely hard, then it would seem that optimism would be a useful place from which to work. But if things are truly doomed and we are all about to face imminent death, then we have a choice: optimism or pessimism will have an equally useless effect. So why not learn from those we have seen die beautifully among us, and choose an optimistic and peaceful death. Making peace with our death, indeed, is really the last act that we will ever get a chance to perform, and it may be that this is what our lives are all about.

It seems clear to me now that pessimism (including the “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist” stance) is simply a statement of fear that one is not yet friends with. And if one is not friends with fear, then one may actually not be resourceful enough to be of much use in a crisis, or in a moment of chaos and uncertainty.

In my own life I faced one such moment in in 1995 in a mountaineering accident. A group of us were traversing an avalanche slide on the slopes of Mount Seymour in North Vancouver when one of our party slipped and fell 300 feet off a cliff. In the moment that she disappeared, I found myself extraordinarily calm. Three of our party were rather more panicky and were unable to be of much help until we got them to safety, The two of us who remained calm were really living in a state of extreme optimism . The only thing to do was be peaceful and resourceful and get help as quickly as we could. It turned out that our friend survived and in fact the rescue effort was a text book example. I was struck during and afterwards that my adrenal state was actually calm. Of course there have been plenty of times when I have been frightened and useless, but in that deep crisis, my body somehow adopted calm presence as a response. I was fearless and unworried. My friend had gone over a cliff and six of us remained with an overwhelming need to find safety before we could do anything about her. But without that calm, we were in extreme danger.

It seems to me that a pessimistic stance is more about the individual’s fear of inadequacy. If you feel overwhelmed, you give up. But two people in exactly the same situation may react in totally different ways, meaning that there are no givens about any situation or any result.

I sometimes use a juggling metaphor to describe what I think of as my stance that “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.” When you juggle you are working with the reality of gravity. Gravity ensures that every ball that drops will hit the ground. That is reality. But juggling is not so much cheating gravity as it is entering a partnership with it – the reliability of balls dropping at constant rate is actually what makes juggling possible.

When I teach people to juggle they generally come in one of two attitudes. A pessimist might generally watch me juggle and say “I could never do that.” Even as they gradually learn to work with one ball and then two and then three, they will deny the possibility that they could ever juggle. Usually what they are speaking is their fear of inadequacy or embarrassment at failing. Perfectionists are often pessimists because the reality never lives up to their ideal. Pessimists often give up on themselves and me, and they never learn the deceptively simple act of juggling three balls.

Optimists on the other hand approach the situation with curiosity and are usually interested in the aesthetic experience of juggling as well. Optimists learn fast because they recognize immediately that the balls always drop, so there is no problem, and their challenge is to gain more and more mastery, producing more and more beauty and living into more and more amazement at what they can do. Once they learn one trick, they hunger for more, they take satisfaction in what they can do and seek to improve and do it better. They are fearless about their learning and this resourcefulness produces results that continue to surprise them. I have taught people with very little perceived natural ability to juggle within three minutes. I have also taught people who don’t believe in them selves as much, but who take so much longer because we have to break through the belief that dropping the ball is wrong.

The truth is that the balls always fall to to the ground. The beauty of juggling is simply the ongoing possibility that the balls might not drop.

When we partner with reality it doesn’t matter what beliefs we carry. They are all false. And so, taking the advice of my mentor and hero and partner Caitlin Frost who is a deep practitioner of Byron Katie’s work, we need only question the beliefs that cause us suffering and not worry about the ones that don’t. If we can think of a peaceful reason for keeping a thought, we should do so. If not, work to shed the thought and make friends with reality. I can see this work now as terrifying optimism, a fierce sharpening of our own edges where we meet the world with resourcefulness, power and care.

This week I was reaffirmed in my belief that my work is to continue to be in the world living and working at every turn with the possibility that today the whole thing just might not fall apart.

Share:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram

Like this:

Like Loading...

Good work is collaboration with friends

April 21, 2008 By Chris Corrigan CoHo, Collaboration, Flow, Leadership, Poetry 6 Comments

Farewells

Two good friends of mine, Roq Gareau who works for the Canadian Border Services Agency and Orlando Pioche who works for the Indian Health Service in Shiprock, NM. Men doing serious work who work together as deep friends.

From Wendel Berry:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health.
It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Sent out to all my friends, especially Steven, Kathryn, Tenneson and Beverley, with whom I did some good work this week. And to those good friends I will be working with this coming week in Phoenix at the Good Food Gathering – Toke, Monica, Tim, Phil and Tuesday.
Working with friends is perhaps the wisest thing one can do in pursuing larcge scale change. Only with the ears and hearts of friends tuned to one another’s needs can we hear more of the wholeness of the music that only comes to us in fragments.

I’m in some big work these days, whether it is in the child and family services system here in British Columbia, or hosting a 500 person World Cafe and Open Space at the Good Food Gathering to help the good food movement find it’s way with renewed leadership and vigour. None of this is remotley possible alone.   I am working with close friends.

While it may be true that one person can make a difference in the world, I believe that the difference one person makes is choosing to work with others. We have long since exited the age of heros, and I wonder if we were ever in that age.

I once sat with Tenneson Woolf on a beach on my home island and we gazed across the Strait of Georgia. We talked about how huge everything is, how small we are in relation to the vast world. And we asked this question: if we are born of this world, knowing deeply the scale in which we live in relation to everything else, why do we feel like we can make an impact? What put that impulse there? We are the only creatures that entertain the delusion that we can shift things, and yet, we persist. AND, it’s true, to the extent that we can even shift the climate of our home world. There is almost a drive to do it.

There is nothing around you right now that is not the result of a group of people working together. No structure, no machine, no community, no idea exists because one person thought of it. Everything is born in relationship, and to the extent that our relationships are filled with quality, the work we do will be filled with quality. I choose first of all to work with friends, and from there to find the work that we can do together. When we attend to this quality of relationship, everything else becomes possible. Nothing around you has ever emerged otherwise.

So thank you to my friends who make it possible for me to satisfy my personal version of the human drive to make an impact. Together, as we tune to one another and reach into possibility, we can find the holy chords of that fragmented music, and sing.

Share:

  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram

Like this:

Like Loading...

1 2 3 4 5 6 … 9

Find Interesting Things
Events
  • Art of Hosting November 12-14, 2025, with Caitlin Frost, Kelly Poirier and Kris Archie Vancouver, Canada
  • The Art of Hosting and Reimagining Education, October 16-19, Elgin Ontario Canada, with Jenn Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle
Resources
  • A list of books in my library
  • Facilitation Resources
  • Open Space Resources
  • Planning an Open Space Technology meeting
SIGN UP

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
  

Find Interesting Things

© 2015 Chris Corrigan. All rights reserved. | Site by Square Wave Studio

%d