Seattle, WA There is a creation story we tell in the art of hosting workshops called “The Chaordic Path” which describes the dance of chaos and order in the service of generative emergence. Today, in Seattle many of us good friends and mates sat in the audience as our friend Thomas Arthur told this story through his production of Luminous Edge. The show is about a wizard who is responsible for juggling into existence the orderly patterns of our human world and then fixing them in place with his spiral of integration. He is assisted by an …
You know how it is when you are so busy that you don’t have time to even think about your blog much less compose an erudite post about everything you are learning? That’s me right now. But here’s a bit of what I have been doing and some things I’m thinking about: Deepening our work with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team including a board strategic planning retreat this weekend where we have asked board members to bring one or two people that support them in their work to contribute to the wisdom in the room. How cool a design …
My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us. He found one today that really rang out for me. It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy. This is not tin-foil hat stuff. It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons. The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents …
Fascinating article in the New York Times about the norther area of Somalia where people have built peace in an incredibly turbulent region by mixing indigenous governance with democratic participation, using elders and tribal leaders to harness attachment to clans AND to transcendent principles such as independence and peace. Some quotes: “You can’t be donated power,” said Dahir Rayale Kahin, the president of the Republic of Somaliland, which has long declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia. “We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the south are still waiting – …
I had never come across the work of Mary Parker Follett before until this week, and I have had some Firefox tabs open with her work in them including The New State written in 1918 when it must have felt like the state itself had become a murderous and inhumane human construction, in which the role of groups in democratic process must have seemed in need of some deep reflection. Follet lays out her thesis in the very first paragraph of the work: Politics must have a technique based on the understanding of the laws of association, that is, based …