For years I have been using and extollng the virtue of wikis (and their cousin GoogleDocs) as collaborative tools. For some reason it seems hard for most people to take them up. Thanks to Euan I found this graphic at wikinomics, and it says it all to me. For best results, take it with this video. Now can we use wikis? Please?
Photo of the rock wall at Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation, where I was visiting and working last month.
Links that I have come across recently:
- A comprehensive list of theories about how we think, feel and behave.
- From Vision in Action, a long piece by Elisabet Sahtouris on a Tentative Model for a Living Universe – parts one and two. Thanks to Dave Pollard.
- Otto Scarmer on The Blind Spot of Leadership.
- Jordon Cooper prints his list of useful (and mostly free) tools for Windows machines.
- Peter Merry’s blog. This is my friend Tim’s brother. Helen Titchen-Beeth is also on Gaia. Plenty of good reading at both.
- More Samurai wisdom: the Hagakure
- Kurt Hahn’s writings, via Michael Herman, who writes more here.
- Dustin Rivers explains Skwxwu7mesh leadership.
- A really good guide to formal consensus decision making. My own method for decision making follows this map, although I rarely have call to use a process this formal. Still, it’s a great redux. Another hit from Pollard.
- Dave Snowdon on archetypes and stereotypes.
Navajo people call human beings “five-fingered” people. This refers to the way that Navajos relate their clan connections using the fingers of their hands. The thumb is “shay”, myself. And each one is imprinted with a unique spiral pattern. This spiral pattern is said to emerge when a child has spirit blown into it be the ye’i – the ancestors, who also produce the spiral of hair on the top of each person’s head. The spiral gives life. From there, each person can recite their clan heritage through the remaining four fingers, their father and mother, their father’s mother and mother;s father.
In reciting these clans, Navajo people tell their names and clan and then say “born for the” clans of their ancestors. This recitation is an acknowledgement of k’e – the relationship that binds us together. When you say the word k’e in Navajo country, the first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to your clans.
When we were designing this particular Art of Hosting gathering with our friends from the Healthy Native Communities Fellowship at the Shiprock Medical Centre, Orlando Pioche, Karen Sandoval, Tina Tso and Chris Percy, we dived very deeply into the idea of k’e. In seeking to understand more about this concept, we began to realize that the word refers to a quality of connection that flow between people and indeed between people and all living things including the land. It is this particular connection that we decided to explore in this Art of Hosting. Indeed, it might be said that the essence of the Art of Hosting in general is about how we work with the space between people to produce good in the world. It quickly became clear that we were designing a four day learning laboratory on how to use k’e.
In the context of a facilitation and leadership training, I began to think of k’e as the water that flows in a river. That water flows all the time, and if you want to use it, you have to use appropriate tools. You can build a turbine to produce power, build a sluice gate to channel it into a field, dip into it to drink it. The water does not change but it does different things depending on how to use it. In fact as we talked about this, Orlando, a spiritual man and a man moving beautifully into his Eldership, made the connection between this idea and the iina twho the river of life.
As we explored this further in the design day, lights came on in all of us. We lit up with the idea that the art of working with groups was the artful use of tools and processes that worked with k’e to shape the changes that were needed in the world. We designed a four day process to enter a learning journey on this idea. (see the photo gallery for images).
Our first day was really about wrapping our heads around the concepts we were discovering. The 63 people that joined us I think weren’t expecting us to be working so explicitly with k’e but as we moved through a day of storytelling, appreciative inquiry and world cafe we explored the concept very deeply By the end of the day everyone was excited about what they were discovering about a concept that they had forgotten that they knew about. K’e is everywhere in Navajo families and communities and it was perhaps this close proximity, this fabulous intimacy, that had made the concept so common place that few people remembered that it was the Navajo’s strongest resources for building wellness and sustainable communities.
On day two, after exploring the idea in depth, we began to talk about working with it, spending much of the day in Open Space to see how k’e applied to real word projects. This was followed on day three by grounding these projects in real commitments, a process which deepened on day four when we worked with a smaller community of practice who were actively facilitating community wellness projects and who were looking for ways to bring k’e deeply into the relationships that they need to cultivate with on another.
I learned a huge amount in this Art of Hosting. I learned that in fact k’e,like the Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of heshook ish tsawalk (everything is one) and teechma (the heart path) or the Nisga’a and Tsimshian idea of sayt k’uulum goot (of one heart) is the essential element that produces all things. It is what illuminates the social spaces between us, what allows us to produce quality work together. In fact, if you think of all human endeavour, there is nothing you can think of that was not produced by k’e. We sometimes think it is great people or great teams that produce great results, but more and more I am seeing that it is great k’e that is the source. I’m willing to be that everything – peace, food, shopping malls, aircraft, marketing campaigns, shoes, families, buildings, art – arises from this source. It is love and power combined, to use Adam Kahane’s framing. We can choose how to work with k’e using it to produce acts of beauty or terror. Our Navajo friends warned us that k’e on it’s own is no guarantee of wellness or peace. We must work skilfully with these connections to produce what the call nizhooni – beauty. K’e itself is beautiful, but only with attention can we work with it to produce more beauty. This is wazhonshay the Navajo “beauty way.”
It is simple. When we give attention to the ways in which we work together, connecting as deeply as we can and paying attention to the quality of the relationships between us, we produce good things. If the Art of Hosting is about anything – indeed if working with groups at all is about anything essential – it is that. Beyond methodology, beyond concept, beyond language.
Update: Tenneson has posted some reflections and a photo set as well
K’e.
Last wekk I was working with some good friends – Kyra Mason, Thomas Ufer, Ruth Lyall, Jennifer Charlesworth and Nanette Taylor. Together we designed and delivered a one day workshop on what we called “Chaordic Leadership in Changing Times.” The focus of the workshop was collaborative leadership practice and we were asking questions about collaborating around a movement in the child and family services sector in British Columbia.
Collaborative leadership practice has a couple of key capacities. First is the ability to be in and hold space for conversations that matter. The second is the practice of developing and holding a centre. Conversation practice is important because the nature of the systems we are a part of is entirely determined by the quality of the relationships between people in those systems. Quality relationships are important and central to those are quality conversations. That is why I put a lot of emphasis on helping people talk together creatively, generatively and with excitement and energy.
But to build a movement, it’s important to share a centre. That centre is both an individual centre as well as a collective one. In our workshop we were playing a lot with the idea of building a centre, especially as it related to children. We began by learning that the Kwa’kwa’la word for child is “Gwaliyu” which means something like “precious one” or “treasure of my heart.” It implies a treasure that you would give your life for. We began our day by asking people to imagine what it must be like to have that definition of a child in mind every time your used the word “child.” In our workshop no one in the room could describe the etymology of the English word “child.” We had devoted our lives to a word and we weren’t even sure what that word meant. So to find our own centre, the place to which we could always return, we began the workshop with an exercise. We asked people to first write on a piece of paper what the treasure about the children in their lives. We next asked them to write, on another piece, what those treasures expect of them. The first piece of paper then became a definition of child that we could really sink into “curious, innocent and playful” and the second sheet of paer contained our mission statement in the child and family services world: “to make safe space for children to grow and flourish.” It’s simple but what it does is to help us find a centre that we can return to especially when things are pushing us around. From this centre it is a simple matter to come to a conversational space in which we invite a similar set of principles to be at our centre.
This is how, over the past year we have settled on “Children at the centre” as a basic organizing principles for the work we are doing with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transistion Team as we build a new system for Aboriginal child and family services. What would a system look like that put children in the centre?
The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba was famously quoted as saying that his advantage in a fight was his ability to return to his centre faster than that of his opponent. In the body, the centre lies just below the navel, in the area the Japanese call the hara, or what Koreans called “tan jun” or “tan tien “ in Chinese. This is both a pivot point for the body’s centre of gravity – a fact well known to martial artists and athletes – as well as the central point from which one’s life force – “ki” or “chi” is projected. Likewise in a group, which is just a body operating at another level, the centre is the pivot point around which we act – our purpose or intention – and the source to which we always return.
Today I am on board a plane heading down to the Navajo Nation to work with a wonderful community of Navajo facilitators involved in health promotion. We are looking at, among other things, these concepts and I have much to consider about the notion of centr ein Navajo thought and practice. I am most curious about how this can be brought to the simplest form of knowing, in the body, heart and mind, to be useful for leadership and hosting practice.
- Crystal glass water music
- Indivisible oneness: a gorgeous essay by Evelyn Rodriguez
- Rheingold on the coming age of cooperation
- Go fill your ears with music: The mammoth list of mp3 blogs
- The Grand Plan to get the US onto to solar energy.
- Some fine organizational tools for non-profits and philanthropic endeavours
- An amazing conversation on the collective Buddha