I think it was 1986-87 academic year that I truly fell in love with the idea of culture. That was the year I began my BA in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and it was during a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada were going through a generational resurgence after recovering from 100 years of state-sponsored cultural, physical and intellectual extinction. I was able to be a witness to communities and organizations recovering by growing deep into traditional practices, and younger generations receiving the teaching of Elders and using them to create new political movements, organizations, economies, governments, and health …
Mindfulness, awareness and the move from confusion to aporia to resourcefulness in the Cynefin framework.
Thomas Homer-Dixon writing in the Globe and Mail this weekend: Constitutive moments are a special kind of historical inflection point. Powerful actors like U.S. presidents always operate within a constellation of macro-trends, cultures, institutions, and social and political alliances. But during constitutive moments, they have a rare opportunity to radically reconfigure that constellation because the usual constraints on selecting from, combining, and adjusting its elements are greatly weakened. The systems they’re operating within are abnormally susceptible to massive change. Leaders who effectively exploit these opportunities can create not just profoundly new ways of doing things, but also new ways of …
The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage. We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own …
Here’s where our Working in Complexity course comes from. For more than 30 years, Caitlin Frost and I have been collaborating on raising a family, running a business, and building community. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to work with ourselves and others in a participatory, relational and resourceful way, especially as we face emergence and uncertainty. A few years ago we sat down and mapped out how we work with complexity. Because my work was mostly with groups, organizations and communities and hers mostly with individuals we looked for characteristics of complexity that crossed that boundary between …