If you scroll back through this archive of architectural Eyesores of the Month you will find many of them are fronted by flags. The author, in his cynical wisdom, will say things like “Note the large American flag, planted in front of the mall to ward off criticism.”

Goring the sacred cow is a necessary evil if we are to bore down to the truth behind the things that are slowly crushing us. Not just the soul-stealing architecture of suburbia, by the equally draining toil of going to work in places like hospitals, where doctors and nurses are expected to put in shifts sometimes lasting 36 hours. Depriving a person of sleep for this long and placing life and death decisions in their hands would be outrageous except for the culture that has sprung up around medicine, the tough-as-nails, nothing’s-gonna-knock-me-down machismo that infects generation after generation of young interns. It’s impossible to criticize, because the work of saving lives demands this kind of commitment, or so the story goes. Allegorical flags wave over the whole situation. To take a bead on the absurdity of it all is to demonstrate terminal disloyalty.

If we want people to care about their work and their communities, we have to ask them what kind of work they really want to do. It’s no good insisting that they get passionate about what we want them to do. That requires all sorts of traps, like putting flags in front of big box stores, somehow channeling patriotic fervour into shopping at Wal-Mart. No, we have to step back and remove these inane devices and clearly ask two questions:

• What do you really want to do? and
• Why don’t you take care of it?

Passion will magically appear. Responsibility will suddenly blossom. Authenticity arises and everything works better.

With thanks to Harrison Owen, for the questions.

One of the 2% of Bowen Islanders who blog just sent me an email with a really crisp late summer definition of blogging vs. traditional website maintenance:

Thanks to Markus Roemer at Stinky Cat.

Fused glass button

From a collection of glass buttons, this one stood out. Buttons as fastners, connectors, things that draw two other things together and hold them there echoed in the plug and wire, the implied connection, the plugging into power.

Gertrude Stein wrote Tender Buttons, a collection of still life sketches, tiny portraits of objects, food and rooms, which critic Norman Weinstein called “a mirror for our nonsense, a dictionary for our daily distraction�.”

Buttons as connectors, tender buttons as blogs.

From an email from the Plexus Institute, comes this piece, an interview with Birute Regine and Roger Lewin on complexity in organizations:

This is a fantastic article on the application of complexity theory to organization issues, and it jives really nicely with a practice of Open Space Technology. For example Regin says:

The piece contains good advice on working with a relational, complexity-based model both for consultants (facilitate conversations and invite people to establish real connections with each other) and leaders (“give up the illusion of control and concentrate instead on setting a larger vision for their organizations so that the creativity of their people can emerge.”)

I’ll post the entire article at the Deeper Open Space wiki as well for more conversation, should you wish to join me there.

Just perusing my little collection of poems by Jorie Graham…