Over the years I’ve written nearly 3000 entries on my blog ranging from short notes and links to long essays and collections of writing. Of interest to facilitators and dialogue practitioners, I am publishing some of these as mini-books, in pdf form which you can now download for free. All I ask in return is that you leave me a little note if you find these useful or interesting. I’m curious how they are informing your practices.
Here are the first three:
- A life lived in the four-fold practice: my journey in the Art of Hosting. A set of essays on the Art of Hosting, illustrated with stories from my own life.
- The Two Loops Model: A Living System of Change. A set of essays on the two loops and how to apply it in organizational and community life.
- The Tao of Holding Space. This book explores the practice of holding space by reinterpreting the Tao te Ching. While written for Open Space facilitators, it has wide application across a number of facilitation approaches.
You will find more of my writing, interviews, videos and podcasts on their own page.
I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob’s life and in particular the ways we knew each other, through work, ideas and good friendship. Johnnie’s got a great post up on his blog today about “Facilitation Antlers” in which, as usual, he manages to speak the thing that occupies my mind too: the pitfall of facilitators feeling the need to explain what they are doing, instead of just getting on with it. It’s one we all have to dance around. Johnnie is offering a facilitation training in November in Cambridge, UK. I highly recommend you sign up for it. I would if I was there.
Another friend, Sally Swarthout Wolf, is also birthing an offering into the world. I’ve just had a chance to review and provide a blurb for her new book “Restorative Justice Up Close” which is a broad collection of stories of restorative justice practice, primarily from across the USA. These are the kinds of stories that experienced practitioners crave, becasue it helps to inspire us in our own work. It’s not a how-to manual, but a how-did-I collection. Even if you are aren’t a facilitator of restorative justice, if you work with people in groups, there is a lot in this book to learn from, especially when conflict is afoot. I worked closely with Sally over a number of years when we were running Art of Hosting trainings in Illinois in part with the Illinois Balanced and Restorative Justice Project. I adore her and her colleagues. The book is available for pre-order now.
And while I’m at it, here is a list of the facilitation training offerings I’m involved in the fall. We have spots for both of our Art of Hosting trainings in Vancouver and in Elgin, Ontario, and you can still register for the Stories and System Change workshop I’m doing alongside Donna Brown and my SFU one-day course in the new year.
The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I resonate with their practice principles:
1. Clarify Your North Star
Ask: What is the core purpose that must remain constant, even as the world shifts? How can you stay emergent and responsive to crises while still focusing on building long-term power and transformation?
2. Plan for Multiple Futures
Ask: What are the factors we know or can imagine, and what is beyond? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?
3. Design for Flexibility, Iteration, and Collaboration
Ask: Is our strategy flexible enough to adapt, and do we have strong processes in place to support ongoing experimentation and collaboration?
4. Center Equity and Building Power for Your Organization and Community
Ask: What are we building? Who are we accountable to? Are we building in ways that foster a more equitable future?
5. Strengthen Internal Capacity for Resilience and Well-Being
Ask: What do we need to sustain our people, funding, and infrastructure in the long run?
There is, of course, a time an a place for linear and predictive planning, but many folks are still wedded to the idea that if we just double down on a more ordered line of reasoning, we’ll be able to work ourselves through the massive amounts of uncertainty we are currently facing. If you look online for strategic planning templates, you’ll find a flood of these processes, all offered as if context doesn’t matter.
Something I would add to this list is Develop good situational awareness of the people and issues in context. The ask here is “What is going on? How do different people see the situations we are in? Who has what expertise and experience and how can we bring it to bear on the work?” With large scale initiatives I use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and often NarraFirma as a tool to gather and work with the stories of experience that illuminate the current situation. I have also taken to talking to folks close to the situation for more than I used to as a way of preparing for this kind of work. I am finding that these days many people in decision making positions, on boards or in leadership roles, are operating with an incomplete picture of the situation or an inability to grasp of the issues at stake. That doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to the process. Folks that sit on boards, for example, who are not subject matter experts in the core work of an organization may still have immense wisdom on engagement or process or lived expertise with the consequences of decisions. Taken as a collective, a good board or a leadership has a diversity of experiences and perspectives. But if unquestioned assumptions about power and status are at play, that diversity can be sidelined with the result that organizations make decisions with a narrowed scope of awareness. You are always starting from somewhere.
Strategic planning is one of those terms that means a bunch of different things to folks depending on what they need, what their experience has been and what they have done in the past. I usually begin strategic planning engagements with a client by asking them “tell me what you want to do without using the term ‘strategic planning'” and from there we explore a design for the work that gets them where they need to go. The issue, however, is making sure that the folks participating in the process have a clear view of the need and purpose of the work, which is why we spend time on that part of the design to craft a good invitation process. It helps people show up well and helps to bring clarity to what we are doing, especially if the work is unfamiliar.
Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the lessons they learned:
1. Relationality, not transactionality — Pasifika philosophies emphasize relationships over transactions. In global policymaking, this presents us an opportunity to move toward genuine reciprocity, whether between nations, communities, or sectors. In the Pacific, time is not measured in moments but in seasons and relationships.
2. Nature as kin, not resource — Pacific cultures often see the ocean, land, and skies as family. In the face of climate breakdown, this worldview offers a profound shift: protecting ecosystems is not simply environmental policy, but an act of kinship and responsibility to our Vanua*. It aligns with the principles of deep ecology and the principle of integration, which recognise the intrinsic value of all life and call for a holistic relationship with the natural world, one where human wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the planet, and our consciousness embraces every dimension of life.
3. Progress as continuity, not growth — In many Pasifika contexts, progress is measured not just by growth, but by cycles of regeneration. This stands in stark contrast to the relentless growth-at-all-costs mindset driving much of the global economy. Pasifika philosophies teach us that the beauty of Vakatabu (restraint) is not merely about the end results, but about the self-discovery in the waiting.
4. Consensus and Collective Stewardship — Decision-making in the Pacific often flows from principles such as the Fijian Veivakamareqeti (sustainability), which literally means to treasure or to keep and protect as something beloved. This care is held as a collective responsibility, a shared duty to safeguard what sustains us. Governance rooted in dialogue and consensus may move more slowly than top-down directives, but it works at the speed of trust, anchoring decisions in relationships, nurtures legitimacy, and builds long-term stability — qualities the world urgently needs in this era of polarisation.
5. Leading with Loloma (love) — In Pasifika philosophies, leadership is not a title to be worn as an ornament, but an act of service to the land and its people. True leadership is guided by loloma — a deep, relational love — anchored in connection to land, community, and spirit. Although love is rarely part of mainstream development discourse, overlooking it risks creating interventions without guardianship, autonomy, respect, and intergenerational connection.
6. Honouring Many Truths — Recognising that different perspectives can coexist without cancelling each other out. Pasifika philosophies teach us that mutual contradiction is not a weakness, but a space where diverse truths can live side by side. In this space, respect deepens, creativity flourishes, and collective wisdom grows, reminding us that value lies not in uniformity, but in the richness of many voices.
I resonate strongly with these lessons. These are core practices of dialogue work in human community and especially important values to practice and embed in work done in socially and environmentally threatened communities. The recovery of Indigenous worldviews, philosophies and approaches to land and community is essential in places where communities and land are in vulnerable states. Managerialism and exploitative capitalism sounds the death knell for these communities, both in local work, ecological sustainability and in the ways in which place like small Pacific islands bear the brunt of climate change. The voices that come from the Pacific are voices that plead for the world to change the way it think about life itself.
I live on a Pacific Island myself, within Skwxwu7mesh territory which lies beneath the imposition of Canadian law, regulations and the ways of life that have historically been at odds with the Indigenous worldview of this part of the world and the health of the ecosystems in the land and the seas around here. The recovery of the health of the inlet in which I live, Átl’ka7tsem, parallels the recovery of the strength and jurisdiction of the Squamish Nation, as prophetically documented in the book The Whale In The Door by Pauline Le Bel and Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw, a collection of writing from Squamish Nation members about the history and worldview of the Skwxwu7mesh uxwumixw.
In the UNDP report Upolu Lum? Vaai is quoted and I had a read through some of his work yesterday. For more of his philosophy, here are a couple of recent pieces. In Climate Change in Pasifika Relational Itulagi he writes
“This chapter argues for an ‘unburial’ of this neglected dimension [Pasifika philosophy, ethics and spirituality] which not only holds the key to constructive and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, it also holds the key to a so-called ‘corrective balance’ of the whole human and ecological system, a kind of balance that activates self-healing and regenerative growth.”
In “We Are Therefore We Live” Pacific Eco-Relational Spirituality and Changing the Climate Change Story he explores these ideas more deeply an in the context of Christian theology as well.