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Beyond Sustainability

June 19, 2010 By Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Facilitation, First Nations 2 Comments

On my way to Hawai’i, the big island to co-host a gathering called Beyond Sustainability: Creating a Community of Leadership based on a Platform of Reverance. This gathering has been several years in the making, and over the last two years I have been deeply involved in the design of the work, finding myself stopping and starting as we find the best way to bring high powered people together to connect existing work, explore indigenous worldviews and creating some coherent results that may positively affect the values that underlie consumer society.

It is a hugely audacious reach that we are trying for with this gathering.  A tipping of time and talent and ways of seeing that is intended to create a series of “start lines” towards new directions.  If we are successful in doing anything, the results will be quietly influential over a period of years.  We need a long view of time and a humble view of reach and we need to also play the balance of love and power that exists in the world to find the openings that will carry the seed of this work.

It has been a long slog getting to this point and the dynamics and energies of raising funds, navigating difference and balancing aspirations have given us some deep insight into what it takes to talk about values shift let alone engage in it.

Tim Merry,Luana Busby-Neff and I will be holding space all week for this, and I’ll try to blog about our experiences as we go, but I suspect my energy won’t be focused in a harvesting direction all the time.  Lots of space to hold at many levels, and in many ways, this is one of the most significant facilitation challenges I have ever undertaken.  Glad to be working it with good friends who can collectively hold all that may come up.

I feel Kiluea in my bones now, 30 minutes from departing from Vancouver to fly there.  Reverance is kicking up in my soul and I am humbled beyond belief to be in the work.

Bless us and wish us luck.

The Slips

June 3, 2010 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

The slips

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 the UK at second slip, Geoff Brown also from Australia at third and me on the end, occasionally moving out to gully or silly point when needed.

At any rate I love this drawing.  It bring back some lovely memories and has me salivating when we join together again in Amsertdam in September for the Applied Improv Network Conference where we will play together mostly and probably end up opening space again.

From failsafe to safefail

June 3, 2010 By BC, Being, Improv, Learning, Organization, Practice 2 Comments

Alex has a great post today on his  Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work.  I’ve been hearing lately from many clients about the need for us to loosen up and accept more failure in our work.  The pressure that comes from perfection and maintaining a failsafe environment is a killer, and while we all demand high levels of accountability and performance, working in a climate where we can fail-safe provides more opportunity to find creative ways forward that are hitherto unknown.  So to compliment Alex’s post, here are a few ways to create a safe-fail environment:

1. Be in a learning journey with others.  While you are working with people, see your work as a learning journey and share questions and inquiries with your team.

2. Take time to reflect on successes and failures together. We are having a lovely conversation on the OSLIST, the Open Space facilitator’s listserv about failures right now and it’s refreshing to hear stories about where things went sideways.  What we learn from those experiences is deep, both about ourselves and our work.

3. Be helpful. When a colleague takes a risk and fail, be prepared to setp up to help them sort it out.  My best boss ever gave us three rules to operate under: be loyal to your team, make mistakes and make sure he was the first to know when you made one.  There was almost nothing we could do that he couldn’t take care of, and we always had him at our backs, as long as he was the first to hear about it.  Providing that support to team members is fantastic.

4. Apologize together.  Show a united front, and help make amends when things go wrong.  This is a take on one of the improv principles of making your partner look good.  It is also about taking responsibility and having many minds and hearts to put to work to correct what needs correcting.  This one matters when your mistake costs lives.  Would be nice to see this more in the corporate world.

5. Build on the offer. Another improv principle, this one invites us to see what we just went through as an offer to move on to the next thing.

6. Don’t be hard on yourself.  You can’t get out of a pickle if you are berating yourself up for being there.  I find The Work of Byron Katie to be very very helpful in helping become clear about what to do next and to loosen up on the story that just because I failed, therefore I am a failure.

Now these little lessons work in complex environments, like human organizations, not mechanical systems so before you jump on me for having unrealistic expectation for airplanes and oil rigs, just know that.  Having said that, dealing with the human costs of airplane crashes and oil rig explosions requires clarity, and being wrapped in blame and self-loathing is not the same as being empathetic and clear.

Time is relative

June 1, 2010 By Uncategorized One Comment

Thanks to Benjamin Aaron Degenhart for pointing this out.

Harvesting learning about design

May 31, 2010 By Uncategorized

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.