Dave Snowden has a new post up this week in which he gives us a situational snapshot about a big chunk of his body of work he has been developing for a number of years now. I love these posts because every so often Dave publishes them to consolidate teaching he has done and methods he has been working on in practice. They have the energy of “okay…I think I’ve got something here. Check it out.” I alos love these posts becasue they always offer me something to dive further into and ways to improve my own practice. So first …
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable. It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?” Well, this …
Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity. I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with …
A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere. For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next. Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with …
Image: a word cloud capturing Bowen Island culture from the 2017 Cultural Master Plan About 15 years ago I met Lyman Orton, who is a small town entrepreneur who created a very successful mail order business from his family’s General Store in a small town in Vermont. He tells the story of how he got involved in town planning and ended up creating a community plan that was top-down, based on a template and not engaged with the community. When a developer with an idea for a carnival park and zoo came along, the community got quickly divided and Lyman …