From a recent Art of Hosting in Sweden comes a learning from some young leaders thinking about how to lead in networks: 1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible. 2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action? 3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess) 4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts 5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, …
For about a year now I have been cross posting twitter updates and blog posts from here (Parking Lot) to my facebook page. I have started noticing that people comment much more on facebook than here, with almost every post receiving a comment or a “like.” What concerns me a little, is that the great conversations that happen on facebook don’t happen here on Parking Lot, and that if you want to read them and take part on facebook, you need to be friended by me in the big blue walled compound. So I am wondering how to import the …
One of the cool cultural Olympiad things happening around here for the 2010 Winter Games is an interactive light exhibit which makes patterns in the sky with 20 spotlights along False Creek. We can see these from our house on Bowen Island. They are part of an interactive art installation called Vectoral Elevations. Very cool, and you can play too! Make your own pattern online and submit it. There’s a good chance we’ll see it as we have been completely entranced by these lights the last few nights.
I’m back in Johannesburg after three days on the veld west of the city running an Art of Participatory Leadership workshop with my friend from REOS Social Innovation. The weather here has been crazy – constant rain showers and thunderstorms for the whole time we were away, and there is flooding locally here. Driving back into the city we went fender deep through many intersections; major thoroughfares were rendered into fords, water coloured with deep red soil flowing everywhere. Usually its easy for me to write about these kinds of workshops, but I have to say that South Africa is …
I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things. Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works. One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species. An …