This week I was in a gathering with 16 friends about the nature of hosting new organizational structures that arise from the hosting practices that seek to move groups to new levels of consciousness and collaboration. The gathering was essentially four days long, and at the end of second last day I had an interesting conversation with my friends Peggy Holman and George Por about the art of harvesting. “Harvesting” is usually thought of as a way of telling the historical story of a gathering, and as a metaphor it has some value in terms of expanding the idea beyond …
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From whiskey river Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change. Only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power. — Peter Beagle
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Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted: Donella Meadows on being a global citizen and dancing with systems. From Bill Harris at Making Sense with Facilitated Systems. Getting Started with Action Learning, also from Bill. Dave Pollard on indigenous capacities for learning and discovery: The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are …
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In meetings in the Aboriginal community, it’s not uncommon to have prayers end with “all my relations” an utterance that invites attention to everything we are related to, and everyone from whom we are descended. As someone with a mixed ancestry of Irish, Scottish Manx and Ojibway, I sometimes like to think of an Open Space meeting that might have all 128 of my seventh generation genetic ancestors in the room. It would be crazy! Imagine them in a room looking at each other,perplexed, wondering what they could possibly have in common. And then imagine inviting them to create something …
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On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC). I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged …