From my friend Roq Garreau:
“Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people would never admit to their visions for fear of being thought impractical or unrealistic. They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience of the world that they can only stand to explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine, they are needed too. Vision does need to be balanced with skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe that it is possible for the world to envision its way to a sustainable future. Vision without action is useless, but action without vision does not know where to go or how to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate action. More than that, vision when widely shared and firmly kept in sight brings into being new systems. We mean that literally. Within the physical limits of space, time, material and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new behaviour, new knowledge and new technology, but eventually new social institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings. A sustainable world can never come into being if it cannot be envisioned. The vision must be built up from the contribution of many people before it is complete and compelling.”
— Meadows, Donnella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jørgen Randers
I’ve had great occaision to think about this quote this week. Roq actually sent this to me and the mayor of the island we live on. Our mayor, Bob Turner, is a guy who is pretty committed to vision, to sustainability and to participation. Yesterday Bob and I were discussing the possibility of a group of us on Bowen Island co-hosting an ongoing “vision collaboratory” which would simply be a place in which Bowen Islanders would be allowed to dream and share good ideas free from the constraints of action plans, resources and even possibility. We could harvest from these conversations using a wiki, Google Earth and other tools to create a simple but powerful ideas bank.
Why would this be important? Because many people want to participate in the life and future of their community, but they don’t want to devote large amounts of time to the formal process, or they don’t have the large amounts of money that allow them to buy and develop parts of the island. Also, there is something incredibly valuable about unfettered dreaming. A vision of 100 years has the luxury of not needing to be perfect and can often provide inspiration and solid ideas for those working on shorter timeframes with more constraints.
And so it looks like that is one project about to take shape here on Bowen Island.
But this vision quote struck me on other levels too, arising out of the experience I had last week in Denver, Colorado where I went to open space at the Placematters 06 conference. I was surrounded by visionary planners and practitioners, including people like Lyman Orton, the founder of the Orton Family Foundation, Tim Erickson from e-democracy.org and folks who run all kinds of mapping projects, visualization tools and instant sketchup kinds of things to help others envision a sustainable world.
I’m inspired to put these tools to work here in my local community, and maybe we’ll learn something about that that can be shared with other people in other communities.
Practice visioning – be sustainable and creative.
[tags]sustainability, placematters06, vision, mapping[/tags]
I was in a conversation this morning with people who work in a big systemic field: early childhood education. It is one of those fields that is rife with research telling us what all the problems are. We have more information than we could ever use about childhood obesity, drug addiction, abuse, longitudinal studies on literacy and employment, links between diet and capacity, intergenerational issues of dependence and parenting…this list goes on. We know everything about every problem but one.
The one problem we don’t know about is how to solve all of these problems.
My suspicion – and this will not be a huge surprise – is that the answer to that one lies in a couple of key things. First, we need each other. No one person can solve that one. Second, we need to learn how to converse in a way that is generative and not destructive. We need to take the opportunities of our time together in conversation to be deliberate about making things better, and not get too wrapped up in the shadow side of our work even though we can see our heart in the shadow sometimes, and it draws us there very easily.
In truth, I’m not interested in answering the question of how do we solve this biggest problem from the outside. I think the best we can do is to get inside it and start practising, start to find ways to bring to life the integration we sense is needed.
[tags]shadow, problem solving[/tags]
Photo by .serena.
For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.
Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.
And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.
[tags]art of hosting[/tags]
Rare that I completely reproduce a full post from someone else’s blog, but Doug Germann did a masterful job today of capturing the terror of dialogue:
There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might be tossed aside worthless. Our very being might be killed and it is not for sure that someone new will rise from the ashes, or that if such a one does we will want it. We might not recognize ourselves, indeed we might not survive in any form. This is why we hold back, not willing to lose who we are. We are afraid we die. This is why we argue for our position. Yet this is our test of faith: we put forth what reality beyond truth we see, not knowing whether it will bear any fruit. Have we done good or ill we cannot know. Ours is but to offer, trembling to offer. This is a test of faith for despite our past experience that something better arises from the ashes of dialogue, we can never be sure about this time. We risk it all.
So if you do not wish to risk, I will understand. I will not hold it against you. Great courage is not mine, either. I shrink from dialogue. I shrink from revealing myself and from receiving your revealings. I fear that I may have to give up myself and my pet plans and my comfortable ways of living. I may have to learn something new, change my way of working and living, meet new people, become a new person myself.
There is risk here: what else goes with it? A responsibility not just to accept what the others say and go along, but to meet what they say, to throw my offering into the mix, see where the similarities and dissimilarities and correlates are. How are we related, how are our ideas and our dreams related? Perhaps tonight the conversations will turn away from what I think will work into something else: it is my duty to listen; it is also my duty to share my vision; then it is my duty to bend so we can weave a new pattern. There might be a better form. I wrote that like I do not believe those words, but indeed there might be a clue to a fuller measure beyond this half measure, there might be indeed something grandly better. Prepare to be surprised.
It’s a near impossible task to describe to someone what will happen in a skillfully conducted dialogue where the participants agree to stray from their well manicured positions and enter into a world of complexity and difficulty that produces emergent learning. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of your perspective shifting and new insights streaming in. But it is scary, and we do well as facilitators when we remember that the best work is done when people agree to take themselves to that edge. We can meet them there, carefully and with compassion and invite that next step. So can we be that big?
Many of the circles I travel in instersect in many intimate ways. People I meet here on the west coast of Canada months apart turn out to be co-authors of papers and books. Folks I hear about from others turn out to be partners in crome later on.
The Art of Hosting world is a little like that, touching as it does on many many different networks. And through these serendipitous connections, it turns out that I am personally acquainted with two of the three authors of a great little free e-book called Mapping Dialogue. I met Zaid Hassan last year as he was travelling through BC on business with Generon. Marianne Knuth, I haven’t met yet, but she is an amazing woman, a close friend of my friend Toke Moeller and we are hoping to have her join us for the Art of Hosting here in September.
So while I am relishing these connections, I want to put a strong plug in for this book on dialogue. It essentially suammarizes what we know and do with the Art of Hosting and is a great primer to using these processes and approaching this work no matter what context you find yourself in.
[tags]mapping dialogue, Toke Moeller, Zaid Hassan, Marianne Knuth, Art of Hosting[/tags]