A bench at Killarney Lake near my home on Bowen Island
Recent cool stuff
- Pulse: a book on the coming age of machines inspired by living systems. The whole book is being published by RSS.
- The Evolutionary LIfe Newsletter. March edition.
- Life with Thomas: a two part video about sustainable living at the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage.
- World cafe image bank.
- Good quote from Viv: ““Knowledge is knowing you’re on a one-way street; wisdom is looking both ways anyway.”
- Why I let my 9 year old ride the subway alone. On fostering independence in children and bucking the American climate of fear…
- …and nicely paired with Bill McKibben’s exhortation towards dependence.
- Josh Waitzkin on chess, taichi and learning.
- A real cool series of videos about The World Cafe, prepared from the European World Cafe gathering in 2007.
If you would like a flavour of what happens at workshops on the Art of Hosting, here are some links to give you a sense of things.
- Audio from the Art of Hosting workshop in southern Indiana last fall. These files were made by Jeneal King, one of the participants who took an active role in harvesting the event. Lots to listen to here. Best I think to download and listen off line. Update: No longer up as of August 12, 2008.
- Ravi Tangri in Nova Scotia has been making a number of videos about Art of Hosting teachings on the chaordic stepping stones, harvesting, world cafe and the art of calling. Browse ArtOfHostingTV.net for more.
- A video from my mate Thomas Ufer of the meta harvest from a recent Art of Hosting workshop in Brazil. This path that he is walking on has notable quotes from the whole three days. Participants walked the path, reflecting on ther experience and then contributed a further thought on the meaning of the experience. THis is a really creative way of find higher and higher levels of collective meaning making.
- Andy Himes made a short video of a number of us playing with candles and music at last week’s gathering on Whidbey Island. In the evenings there is often creative play and chilling out that we get into. When the weather is nice we often build a fire outside and sit around telling stories of hosting. On Whidbey we did it inside.
This just gives you a sense of the diversity of the experience. If you are interested in attending an Art of Hosting workshop contact me, or check in at the website to see if there is one coming up near where you live.
The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act.
There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.
Courtenay, BC
I’m coming to the end of a Moleskine notebook I’ve had since March, and it’s almost filled up. I’m going through it harvesting a few things, and thought I might post a series of notes here. The journal began with a few notes that I made about the preliminary design of an Art of Hosting we ran for VIATT on Quadra Island. This particular Art of Hosting was called to train with 40 or so people who are helping us to build an Aboriginal child and familiy services system on Vancouver Island. It’s big work, undoing 120 of colonization and history and taking advantage of an historic opportunity to build a community-owned system that puts children at the centre of our work. Here’s what the notes say:
- Be the healing organization
- Establish everybody’s authority
- Healing patterns connecting heart to heart
- Host for community to become conscious
- Our work: healing the relationships between people that have arisen from the history of being tied to stakeholders
- This circle seems to recommit us to the work
- Putting our purpose at the centre, build a process to do this.
It’s fitting that I’m reflecting on this harvest tonight. Tonight we ran our third regional assembly here on Vancouver Island, inviting people from this area to share what is exciting them about this work. The purpose of the assemblies is to create champions for the process and to enlist people into a more intensive experience of community-based dialogue and deliberation by creating community circles. These circles will do the work of incorporating the community voice into the decisions and policy making of this new Authority we are creating to take over Aboriginal child and family services from the provincial government. We can’t do this without the community being involved and we’ve been quite taken by the response of Elders, youth and parents to our invitation to join us in creating this new system.
These notes remind me that much of the work I do has a healing component to it, that the work of opening hearts and supporting movement in Aboriginal organizations and communities is about healing – making whole – and sustaining connection and belonging. That makes the work I am doing complex and many-aspected, but when we get it right, like tonight for example when we ran a cafe that tapped open heartedness, it does so much more than move the organization forward in strategic ways. It makes things stronger.
Strengthening is a powerful and needed quality in development work, whether it is in organizations or communities. Strengthening commitment, heart, leadership, quality, results…it is a pattern of “better” that is embedded in the nature of powerful conversations and participatory leadership.
Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web:
- Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better.
- Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal communities that has long formed the basis of my practice: “he understanding is that childhood traumas cause our souls to fragment. The work of healing is to enable the reclaiming of these parts of our souls – like wisdom, love, and courage – that are ours to reclaim.”
- It still amazes me how intimate people can be in person after engaging with each other over time on weblogs. Since my lunch with new friends in London last weekend, Richard and Kevin have both posted interesting thoughts about this particular lunch on their blogs. If you still haven’t had the experience of meeting someone physically whom you have known only through a blog, I recommend it. It will blow your mind.
- One of the processes we used in Belgium for looking at ourselves was a systemic constellation. I’m quite interested in this methodology (here is a website for the community of practice) and would welcome anythoughts from those who have used it in organizations and communities about resources that are useful for understanding it in those contexts.
- Finally this week, a note on a great looking training offered by my friend Christine Whitney Sanchez in Colorado this summer combining Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Polarity Management. It’s just one more offering on the kinds of things we teach at an art of hosting. You can also explore these ideas through a workshop with Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock, which they call “Wise Action that Lasts.” (July 9-11 near Vancouver, BC) and of course you could also come to an Art of Hosting training, several of which are going on in Europe and North America this summer and fall.