Last night we arrived in Kona, on the dry side of the big island of Hawai’i. We overnighted there and woke early in the morning for a swim in crystal clear waters at Hapuna Beach. About 9am we hit the road, taking the Saddle Road over the island between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the twin 13,000+ volcanoes on this island. As you crest the top of the pass between them, the clouds coming up from Hilo-side start flying overhead, and rain showers start. We drove down to Hilo and then back up the south flank of Mauna Loa to …
I’ve been trolling through Geoff’s harvest of our Open Space conference last month in Melbourne and just enjoying the memory of working with friends. Our friend and conference cartoonist Simon Kneebone drew our hosting team. We call ourselves The Slips. The term is from the cricket world and has two purposes. First it signals that this is an all-Commonwealth team, which is lovely, and second, it’s a large cordon and nothing gets past us. From right to left, our members are Anne Pattillo from New Zealand who is our wicket keeper, Aussie Viv McWaters at first slip, Johnnie Moore from …
Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne. If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written. As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate! PS there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.” This one would win it.
I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will …