From Nancy White, a brilliant video of Tom Sparough juggling cigar boxes and talking about courage. And from Jon Husband, with whom I had a lovely conversation today related to my 30 day learning journey, an mp3 from Ben Zander about possibility.
Photo of the rock wall at Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation, where I was visiting and working last month.
Links that I have come across recently:
- A comprehensive list of theories about how we think, feel and behave.
- From Vision in Action, a long piece by Elisabet Sahtouris on a Tentative Model for a Living Universe – parts one and two. Thanks to Dave Pollard.
- Otto Scarmer on The Blind Spot of Leadership.
- Jordon Cooper prints his list of useful (and mostly free) tools for Windows machines.
- Peter Merry’s blog. This is my friend Tim’s brother. Helen Titchen-Beeth is also on Gaia. Plenty of good reading at both.
- More Samurai wisdom: the Hagakure
- Kurt Hahn’s writings, via Michael Herman, who writes more here.
- Dustin Rivers explains Skwxwu7mesh leadership.
- A really good guide to formal consensus decision making. My own method for decision making follows this map, although I rarely have call to use a process this formal. Still, it’s a great redux. Another hit from Pollard.
- Dave Snowdon on archetypes and stereotypes.
Photo by jurvetson
Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.
Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.
Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.
If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.
I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.
So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.
This is refreshing. Michael Bryant, the Ontario Mininster of ABoriginal Affairs was up in Caledonia last week talking to non-native people about what is going on with the dispute there. He sort of live blogged his learning on YouTube, a nice candid set of relfections, although he stammers a fair bit. Would be good too if he spoke to some Haudonasaunee people as well, BUT kudos for him putting his thoughts out there like this. I think that makes for good accountability, especially if some of the folks he talked to weigh in in the comments section if they need to clarify what they told him.
Thanks to Carmen for the link.
Last wekk I was working with some good friends – Kyra Mason, Thomas Ufer, Ruth Lyall, Jennifer Charlesworth and Nanette Taylor. Together we designed and delivered a one day workshop on what we called “Chaordic Leadership in Changing Times.” The focus of the workshop was collaborative leadership practice and we were asking questions about collaborating around a movement in the child and family services sector in British Columbia.
Collaborative leadership practice has a couple of key capacities. First is the ability to be in and hold space for conversations that matter. The second is the practice of developing and holding a centre. Conversation practice is important because the nature of the systems we are a part of is entirely determined by the quality of the relationships between people in those systems. Quality relationships are important and central to those are quality conversations. That is why I put a lot of emphasis on helping people talk together creatively, generatively and with excitement and energy.
But to build a movement, it’s important to share a centre. That centre is both an individual centre as well as a collective one. In our workshop we were playing a lot with the idea of building a centre, especially as it related to children. We began by learning that the Kwa’kwa’la word for child is “Gwaliyu” which means something like “precious one” or “treasure of my heart.” It implies a treasure that you would give your life for. We began our day by asking people to imagine what it must be like to have that definition of a child in mind every time your used the word “child.” In our workshop no one in the room could describe the etymology of the English word “child.” We had devoted our lives to a word and we weren’t even sure what that word meant. So to find our own centre, the place to which we could always return, we began the workshop with an exercise. We asked people to first write on a piece of paper what the treasure about the children in their lives. We next asked them to write, on another piece, what those treasures expect of them. The first piece of paper then became a definition of child that we could really sink into “curious, innocent and playful” and the second sheet of paer contained our mission statement in the child and family services world: “to make safe space for children to grow and flourish.” It’s simple but what it does is to help us find a centre that we can return to especially when things are pushing us around. From this centre it is a simple matter to come to a conversational space in which we invite a similar set of principles to be at our centre.
This is how, over the past year we have settled on “Children at the centre” as a basic organizing principles for the work we are doing with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transistion Team as we build a new system for Aboriginal child and family services. What would a system look like that put children in the centre?
The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba was famously quoted as saying that his advantage in a fight was his ability to return to his centre faster than that of his opponent. In the body, the centre lies just below the navel, in the area the Japanese call the hara, or what Koreans called “tan jun” or “tan tien “ in Chinese. This is both a pivot point for the body’s centre of gravity – a fact well known to martial artists and athletes – as well as the central point from which one’s life force – “ki” or “chi” is projected. Likewise in a group, which is just a body operating at another level, the centre is the pivot point around which we act – our purpose or intention – and the source to which we always return.
Today I am on board a plane heading down to the Navajo Nation to work with a wonderful community of Navajo facilitators involved in health promotion. We are looking at, among other things, these concepts and I have much to consider about the notion of centr ein Navajo thought and practice. I am most curious about how this can be brought to the simplest form of knowing, in the body, heart and mind, to be useful for leadership and hosting practice.