Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners. At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space. One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training. I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system. I had …
Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation. That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I …
Diamond graphic by Darrell Freeman at Colour Within the constellation of design tools I find especially helpful in creating spaces for conversation, Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation has been very influential. About three years ago my friend Myriam Laberge pointed out to me the possibility that all learning conversations take place along this flow of thinking and since then the model has been an important part of my life and work. The diamond is a map that points to three phases that groups pass through as they move from questions to insights. Groups begin with divergent thinking, sit for a …
Johnnie Moore and I have been trading links about podcasts…today I’ll point you to one he did with Annette Clancy and Matt Moore on shadows in organizations. It’s really, really good, and what got my attention is when Annette asked “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” I first met Annette in 2005 when she responded to an invitation I issued about looking for help designing an Aboriginal youth conference on suicide. She has a great knack for asking these questions and has terrific ideas floating around in her blog. …
Courtenay, BC I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big …