Adopting change as the point of working together. When so many efforts seemed aimed at preserving the status quo and mitigating the results of things that change and are not the same as before, what would happen if we adopted change as the point of things? Jack Ricchiuto on working with a group using this principle: As usual they are amazed at the pragmatism, efficiency, and wisdom of treating change as a tool of project success rather than a risk, liability, and cost. When change becomes key to how we design future projects, we work with an infinitely greater sense …
“My grandmother was the one that inspired me,” said my friend Liz over lunch at the Valley Inn in Bella Coola. “She said that the world was once all together, and then it came apart and one day it will be all together again. So I just try to bring things together.” Liz is a pretty remarkable woman. She worked for years in family reunification in Vancouver, bringing together First Nations kids with their birth families, reconnecting them to their culture and communities. She is at home now in Bella Coola on council, working for the Ministry as a social …
A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes: Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over …
Check this quote: Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. via Green sandbox: Since 1971. It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us. Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what …
In the US right now, the health care “debate” is raging and town hall meetings being held across the country are being deliberately hijacked by those who don’t want to see reform go ahead. This tactic is discouraging but predictable. “Town Hall” meetings are not usually conducive to democratic deliberation, and they are never about dialogue. Over the past few days an amazing conversation has unfolded on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv about what these events mean for deliberative democracy. Tom Atlee has summarized a lot of the learning from these in a long blog post which …