At Anecdote,Andrew has teamed up with friend Viv McWaters in an innovative community of practice exercise. They are running a three month long learning group on the uses of open and closed language among facilitators: Our focus is on the language facilitators use to encourage or discourage a group discussion. This reflective practice will run over 3 months and for those participating we will provide reminders, feedback and stories from other participants. We aim to share our learnings and findings at a workshop for some upcoming Australasian facilitation conference… If you would like to join in on this reflective practice, …
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Some upcoming learning opportunities in the British Columbia and Washington state areas… News from my dear friend Peggy Holman that she and Steve Cato are offering their Appreiciative Inquiry facilitation training on February 1-3, and it’s not too late to register. Toke Moeller is hosting a FlowGame at Aldermarsh on Whidbey Island in the middle of March, after which we are penciling in an Art of Hosting primarily with Aboriginal youth, but open to the public as well on Vancouver Island. Michael Herman and I will be offering a retreat to support practices for Open Space faiclitation in April, during …
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A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late. Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with …
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I was in a meeting yesterday, a policy consultation actually, which went quite well. As expectations are sometimes low for these types of meetings, and ours came off as a pretty good time, I spent some time thinking about how we made it work. This was a very typical kind of policy consultation. Government creates a policy, in concert many others, and checks back with the “stakeholderss” (a term I loathe) as to where we should go from here. In this particular consultation, history has made relations between the government and the participants particularly rocky. Consultations are often characterized by …
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Today a post by Peter Buys on the OSLIST caught my eye… I am fully convinced that Open Space is a marvelous tool to stimulate individual creativity; spontaneous collaboration (for the duration of the Open Space event); and an expression of trust in people by the client (in other words the ones who bought / decided for the Open Space event)…Many if not most Open Spaces are only very short blips (events) in typically much longer processes of change. But the Open Space does not really address that issue nor does it really offer (as far as I know) options …