Photo by jurvetson Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment. Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any …
A design for a recent workshop, based on Theory U. Three years ago, I spent some time reflecting on the principles that underly my work in an effort to describe authentic facilitation practice. Lately I have revisited this question because I have been asked to design and deliver several facilitation training workshops and I have found myself wanting to go deeply into the core of facilitation practice, rather than focusing on tips and tricks. As a result, I have been reflecting a lot on what is at the core of my practice: how to I design and then sit in …
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day: Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s …
For those of you curious about exploring the Art of Hosting, our emerging pattern language on leadership and facilitation in living systems, you are invited to join me, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman Sharon Joy Klietsch and Francis Baldwin in Tampa Bay, Florida from May 7-10. We’ll spend three plus days learning about chaos and order, living systems, the role of group work with Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and many other aspects of working with human relations to do good things in challenging and complex times. This will be our first Art of Hosting in the …
I have succumbed to Twitter.