In case you are wonder what John Heron, the author of The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook, is now up to, check out his work at the Centre for Spiritual Inquiry in New Zealand. There are some really remarkable resources there.
I bought a new laptop last Friday – and Acer Aspire 5570 – and I’m finally happy with it, but it took a few days. THere was an annoying problem with poor sound and DVD performance, that seemed as if there was a big elephant hoggin memory somewhere. I tried dozens of solutions and finally found this guy, who tried everything I did too, except he solved the problem:
What I did to fix it was to go to the HARDWARE part under the SYSTEM options (Control Painel). Under the IDE Controllers part I had PRIMARY IDE and the INTEL one. What I did was right click and select UNINSTALL on the IDE one… When I rebooted the whole machine was way faster, specially sound playback. Under the IDE Controllers I still get the same icons (Primary IDE and the Intel one) but I’m 100% sure that this was the cause of the fix.
It worked for me as well, and everything just hums now.
[tags] Acer, Aspire, sound problems[/tags]
Found in some email conversations lately, three systemic methods for communicating well:
Photo by Susan NYC
Peggy Holman just sent me my copy of the Second Edition of The Change Handbook, the definitive reference for large scale systemic change processes. The second edition is much different from the first, covering much more territory than simply methodologies and approaches to change (although it does that amazingly). The book contains 68 chapters written by some 95 contributers (including yours truly as well as fellow blogger and friend Nancy White), and extends the investigation of these methods in to some of the areas that Peggy and I and others have been looking at for the past few years, including new forms of organization and what change means in the 21st century. It’s a monumental effort, a tremendous resource of inspiration, ideas and a definitive “state of the field.”
Between the covers of this book you will find articles on dozens of tools, including the ones I use like The World Cafe, Appreicative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, ICA Technology of Participation, divergent-emergent-convergent design, Cirlce practice, dialogue and many others.
The publication of the second edition will be accompanied by a gathering in March at Bowling Green University in Ohio. Called “Nexus for Change” the conference will bring together most of the contributers in the second edition and anyone else who is interested for a few days of dialogue about where to go from here. There is a small possibility I’ll be there, if my schedule loosens up.
The book will be widely available from the publisher and the usual slew of online book stores
[tags]changehandbook[/tags]
Picture a field in which someone has planted wheat.
We imagine the harvest from that field to look lkike a farmer using equipment to cut down the wheat, thresh it, and seperate the seeds from the stalks.
Now imagine a geologist a biologist and a painter harvesting from the same field. The geologist picks through the rocks and soil gathering data about the land itself. The biologist might collect insects and worms, bits of plants and organic matter. The painter sees the patterns in the landscape and chooses a pallete and a perspective for work of art.
They all harvest differently from the field, and the results of their work go to different places and are put to different uses. But they all have a few things in common; they have a purpose for being in the field and a set of questions about that purpose, they have a pre-determined place to use the results of the harvest, and they have specific tools to use in doing their work.
What’s useful to note is that, despite the field being the same, the tools and results are specific to the purpose and the inquiry.
It is like this when we meet. There is much we can do, but a well thought through inquiry helps us to sift all that we might learn in the meeting to that which serves our purpose. When we can design questions that open up our curiosity, think through how we might use the results of our work and use the tools appropriate to the task, we can go deeper into our tasks and acheive emergent, innovative and better quality results.
So just try this for the next meeting you are a part of. Give some time before hand to create a little inquiry: “What am I curious about in this meeting?” Think in advance how the results of that inquiry will help you work better, and decide on at least one way in which you will use what you have learned. See if that doesn’t create just a little more engagement and createa little more momentum for the results.
Photo by Hector