You know how it is when you are so busy that you don’t have time to even think about your blog much less compose an erudite post about everything you are learning?
That’s me right now. But here’s a bit of what I have been doing and some things I’m thinking about:
- Deepening our work with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team including a board strategic planning retreat this weekend where we have asked board members to bring one or two people that support them in their work to contribute to the wisdom in the room. How cool a design is that?
- Working with 60 leaders from across the spectrum in Columbus Ohio where we witnessed the emergence of the “fifth organizational paradigm,” which is a fancy way of saying that we put hierarchy, circle, bureaucracy and network to work to begin a process of making Columbus a leader as a learning city. I have much more to write about that, with a paper in the works, actually.
- Cracking open the question of the “art of governance” within this new model and creating some inquires with CEOs around how to do that.
- Teaching, training and practising the art of hosting in many guises. My work this month is almost entirely in a teaching context.
- Changing my practice of “consultation” with community based on what I am learning with VIATT and other work.
- Working deeply with the art of harvesting, including collaborating with Monica Nissen and Silas Lusias on a new workbook with our thinking in it, soon to be available.
All of this is rich and fresh and finding the time to sit and reflect is hard. But if these inquiries interest you, drop a comment in the box and let’s get started on the conversations. What questions are alive for you with respect to the above?
I wasn’t at the Nexus for Change conference although I was there in spirit. I had a few lovely long design talks with Peggy Holman, Gabriel Shirley and Tracy Robinson who were hosting various parts of it. I also followed it online a little and even from a distance it was possible to pick up a thread and extend it a little into my own learning. What stood out for me was this emerging identity as a process artist.
John Abbe brought this to my attention with an update to his weblog in which he announced a Nexus project involving creating a wiki around process arts. It’s a great thought and a lovely enterprise, and it has given me some inspiration for talking about my work and what I try to bring to groups, organizations and communities.
I am certainly an artist in the traditional sense of the world, especially in the modality of music where I have practiced consciously since 1979. I am a martial artist, and I do rock balancing more as a meditation than as an art, but still. I have also spent times in my life working artistically with words, writing novels, poetry and other pieces from a place of deep artistic practice. I still practice that somewhat, although I wouldn’t count weblogging necessarily in that field. Blogging for me falls into another category, which I can now name as ProcessArts.
My practice as a process artist includes the following:
- open source learning here at the Parking Lot
- surfing with eyes, ears and fingers for ideas, inspiration and beauty
- parenting and living in a creative set of family relationships (which have their expression in the world in various ways!)
- the art of hosting, designing and convening conversations that matter.
- the art of harvesting learning from questions and learning journeys that I am on.
- Inspiring, creating and supporting change in a way that feeds evolution, life and peace at the many levels of social organization on this planet, from friendships to public service, in response to deep and heartfelt invitations to co-create and collaborate.
I’m going to give this some more thought, but I’d like to ask you two questions, dear reader(s):
- Where do you practice ProcessArts in your life?
- What experience of my ProcessArt practice have you seen that I’m missing in this broad list?
Curious…thanks to John, a little learning journey has begun.
[tags]processarts, john abbe, nexusforchange[/tags]
I was out and about today with three Danish friends of mine – my deep mate Toke and new friends Maja and Rowan from the Kaospilots. We spent the day wandering around Bowen Island taking some deeper teachings and lessons from the land. One of our conversations today was about energy in the Cirle, and how that is sustained. Toke picked a path through the woods alongside the Bridal Veil Falls on Kilarney Creek and we watched the water flowing in a pattern over the rocks. I took this photograph to show that a good process holds energy like the pattern of this waterfall. The water churns and billows in a constant pattern, but it is not the same water molecules travelling through the patern. Different water flowing in the container seeks the same stable pattern.
Good process is like this too. A Circle that is well held contains the flow of energy and allows that flow to pass through it.
Ottawa, Ont.
I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.
This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.
The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.
We began the day asking this question:
What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?
With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.
During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.
mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation
Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.
Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.
Back in the fall I published The Tao of Holding Space (.pdf), a small ebook I had been working on for a number of years. It seemed to get the attention of Lyn Hartley from Fieldnotes, the online journal of the Shambhala Institute. She ran a little interview with me, and this month it appeared in the most recent issue. The interview covers the origins of the book and then we get into some detail about my facilitation practice and the underlying foundation for the way I work.
Thanks to Lyn for the interest in my work.