Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together. I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.” And it was a learning village. The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering. there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years. We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played …
How many of you live in communities where community meetings are boring affairs punctuated by outrage? How many of you feel like influencing your local government means showing up en masse with a pettion or an organized campaign to get them to make a small change? How many of you are just plain disillusioned with your local government and have given up trying to help them involve citizens in decision making? And how many of you are leaders that are frustrated by citizens who just yell at you all the time? How many of you don’t actually know what you …
Imagine you are stuck in traffic. By the side of a road is a billboard that changes it’s message every five minutes. You glance over at it and read this: “Some claim. One race in Canada should not have to work for a living. That this race should receive millions in funding without accountability. That the elite of this race should be allowed to defraud their regular people. How can anyone support this? How can anyone slam Conservatives for not supporting this like the NDP/Liberals?” How would you feel? Would it make you angry? Would it make you happy? Would …
I have a confession. I advise people never to read the comments on newspaper websites. But I do read them. I can’t take my eyes off them. They are a train wreck of logic and hate and contemptuous entitlement. Lately however, especially the comments on stories about First Nations, they seem entirely predictable. In fact they seem almost too predictable. Every article on the Globe and Mail website for example contains hundreds of comments, a huge majority of which repeat some basic themes: Nothing should change until First Nations are accountable for their money First Nations get a free ride …
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works. In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. …