Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week. Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them. The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at …
One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence. I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If …
I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online. Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June …
Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention: AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it. A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a …
Yesterday was spent working with my friend and colleague Ciaran Camman yesterday on a design for a workshop on evaluation in complexity. We had the utter joy of being able to be together, having a high bandwidth human experience, which enabled us to really dive into some interesting existential questions after which we were famished and so we retreated to Kulinarya Filipino Eatery for dinner, feasting on Crispy Binagoongan and Batil Patong. The food was great and as usual our conversation wandered all over the place and at some point – possibly when we were standing outside a small rehearsal …