I’ve been using Dave Snowden’s conception of simple, chaotic, complicated and complex systems for a while. This video: How to organise a Children’s Party is a brilliant redux of these helpful distinctions.
This week I had the tremendous privilage to facilitate two days of Open Space for Xyolhemeylh, the Aboriginal child and family services agency in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver. The agency has been going through a lot of turmoil over the past few years, and has come to a point of reinvention. The theme of the gathering was “Reclaiming our Journey” and it marked a significant transition for the organization as it headed into community control from being managed by the provincial government for the past 2.5 years. The point of the Open Space meetings were to invite the …
Fascinating read about the fall of East Germany and how the leaders in West, especially Thatcher, loved freedom, but loved order even more. For her, reunification was too chaotic. For Moscow, used to imposed control, they had no idea what people were thinking. The people finally just acted out of a basic self-organizing impulse, and Gorbachev, confused but bemused, let them go: Moscow probably thought it could have it both ways: earn the gratitude of the East by liberalising the system and the gratitude of the West for promoting democracy and human rights. In fact, it reaped only mistrust and …
Sometimes we describe what we do with practing the Art of Hosting as bringin participatory leadership to life. THis can be a major shift in some people’s way of thinking. To describe it, Toke Moeller sent this around a few days ago – an explanation of participatory leadership in one sentence. How do you explain participatory leadership in one sentence? o Imagine” a meeting of 60 people, where in an hour you would have heard everyone and at the end you would have precisely identified the 5 most important points that people are willing to act on together. o When …
Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity. At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes: Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the …