Just a picture of the ordinary full moon I took a few years ago through my binoculars. The moon will rise tonight, about the same time the sun sets, hence tonight is a full moon. This happens every 28 days or so. It will be a “supermoon” because about three or four times a year, the moon’s orbit carries it to a point where it’s closest point to Earth coincides with a full moon – as it will tonight – making this full moon appear a little bigger in the sky than the 9 or 10 other full moons. And …
A detail from a surf board on display at the Nazare Surf Museum, Nazare, Portugal. If you have been working with me over the past five years or so you will have heard me reference and use the work of Cynthia Kurtz in the work we are doing. Among other things Cynthia is the originator of NarraFirma, the software I most often use for narrative work on complex topics. She is the author of one of my favourite papers on Cynefin, The New Dynamics of Strategy which she wrote with Dave Snowden back in 2003. She wrote her own books …
A sign at the government wharf in Tofino, BC reserving parking for Elders from the Indigenous communities of Clayquot Sound. Yesterday I was on a call with one of our Complexity Inside & Out participants who was getting started with Participatory Narrative Inquiry and NarraFirma. Like I do with everyone, I pointed him to Cynthia Kurtz’s websites on these topics and then walked him through an installation of the NarraFirma WordPress plugin. My friend wanted to use PNI to gather stories related to his family. He comes from a big family who have regular reunions at which more than 100 …
The three-domain version of Cynefin, originally published on Dave Snowden’s blog. I’m trying to organize my thoughts on containers, complexity and constraints that span a couple of decades of work and grounded theory. In this post, I want to lay out how I see these phenomena in the context of anthro-complexity, largely articulated by Dave Snowden, with implications for complex facilitation, or what we in the Art of Hosting community call “hosting.” I’ll lay out some theory first that I’m working on, link it to facilitation and then share a case study of a recent meeting I hosted to demonstrate …
This is a picture of me, puzzling something out. I’m about a third of the way through a 20-week Participatory Narrative Inquiry practicum with Cynthia Kurtz. We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about story, and story collection, because that is a really important aspect of generating the magic. As Cynthia said today “magic is amazing but all the folktales will tell you that it is always supposed to be hard.” Today she shared an old blog post on the work being “too hard” and it’s worth quoting in depth: Story work is hard. It is not clean or clear or …