Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking …
For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying. Nowadays …
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things. Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach …
I was watching this great interview with Roger Penrose this morning speculating on the origins of the Big Bang, and sharing some of his most recent thinking on how the universe might be in an eternal cycle of recreation in which, at certain points in the cycle, size and time don’t matter. My early morning mind connects a lot of things together, and today that video led to a reflection on smoothness and lumpiness. And the universe, mushrooms, and jazz. One of the fundamental patterns in the universe is that there are clumps of matter. This always amazed me. The …
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma. Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work …