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Victoria on a winter’s night

January 22, 2007 By Travel

Victoria, BC

It’s dry here tonight, on the south end of Vancouver Island, and I sat on the balcony of my hotel room looking out over the Inner Harbour, watching a mixed flock of cormorants and common mergansers fish for shiners around the houseboats of Fisherman’s Wharf.

I really like this city.   Tonight I took a walk around James Bay, an old Victorian neighbourhood consisting of tree lined streets and houses of every imaginable shape and size and age huddled up against apartment blocks and the hotels along the harbour walkway.   It has been raining, a steady rain in an ever brightening sky, but tonight it is just calm and warm and quiet.

Ate lunch today at the Heron Rock Bistro.   Unremarkable crab salad sandwich, made all the more so by the fact that I had ordered a wild salmon sandwhich.   And a weak shot of espresso.   The best espresso in this town is at Cafe Macchiato on Broad Street.   That is the definitive shot of espresso around here.   Prove me otherwise.

Conscious darkness

January 22, 2007 By Being

From whiskey river:

“One does not become enlightened

by imagining light,

but by making the darkness conscious.”

– C.G. Jung

Photo by flyzipper

Three systems for communicating

January 22, 2007 By Conversation, Notes, Uncategorized

Found in some email conversations lately, three systemic methods for communicating well:

Photo by Susan NYC

It’s not where you think

January 22, 2007 By Leadership One Comment

The truth, from a site that excels in getting it right: indexed.   Props to Dave Snowdon for the link

The Change Handbook

January 21, 2007 By Uncategorized 4 Comments

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

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