“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.” –Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301 Three Day Road is about two Oji-Cree soldiers who fight for Canada in the first world war. They survive the fight with the enemy on the battlefield, but they lose the war to the other enemy, the one that lurks on the inner front. It is only *I* that holds others as “enemies.” No one is born into this world as my enemy. I create that story. My …
Ted Ernst pionts to an article on leadership in participatory culture. The artile contains the following list of capacities: trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences) demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of …
Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web: Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better. Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal …
I’m back from Bella Coola, and reflecting on the remarkable three days of learning and Open Space we did there. Saturday, we held a small community Open Space gathering around the issue of what the community needs to do to prepare for assuming full responsibility over child and family services. This is a provocative question in the Nuxalk Nation. The Nation is a strong and independent community and putting children and families in the centre of any conversation brings heart, passion and commitment. We had a small group of people present for our Open Space. 20 people began the day …
Yesterday, in preparing for two days of teaching and training I spent the morning over breakfast reading some of th stories of Clayton Mack, the grandfather of my friend and client Liz Hall. I was reading about the way in which Nuxalk people gathered food from the land, whether it was the fish, game or plants and berries. He talked about the way the amlh – the spring salmon – were harvested using fishtraps. At one time there were 22 traps on the river. These traps would form barriers that the salmon would need to jump. When they jumped they …