My friend Ginny Belden-Charles told me a great story today. She was working in Detroit on some community development issues with a number of activists and others. Their focus was on empowering community development and social action and creating the kinds of citizen based responses that Detroit needs, and she was invited to come and host a circle. When Ginny arrived in her circle of folks, she was amazed at the presence of the famous revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is an institution in social activist circles and at 96 years old, with 70 years of practice …
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system. Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where …
I am probably never going to write a book. I learn too fast for that, and my learning is so rapid that a blog has become the best possible platform for that learning. For a while thought, I have kept a set of writings apart from this blog, titled “A Collection of Life’s Lessons.” I’ve just spent the morning updating that list, and if you’d like to read the book that I’ll never write, go on over to that page and start reading about everything I’ve learned in 43 years, and all the best stuff I have documented in 10 …
This fall I have been really lucky to study and work alongside Alissa Schwartz in New York and Wendy Morris in Minneapolis. Both of these women are actors and performance artists, and in my working with them I have become cracked wide open to the reality of leadership and ACTION as performance, best trained through understanding the relationship of the inner body to the outer, the presence of the individual in relation to the collective and relational field. Since connecting with the Applied Improvisational Network and working with colleagues Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Geoff Brown, I have been learning …
A great insight from Johnnie Moore on learning facilitation: I’ve done quite a bit of facilitation training this year, loads of it with Viv. We’ve pushed to get the sponsors to accept less emphasis on learning lots of techniques and tips in favour of lots of activities where participants try stuff out. One area where we play around a lot is the “difficult people” situation. We resist offering standard tricks for this. So we don’t offer formulaic models for managing difficult people, however comprehensively researched. Instead, we ask people to recall or imagine their encounters with the inevitable impossible participant …