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Sense-making in real time

March 18, 2020 By Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured 4 Comments

I put a call out on twitter yesterday, inviting topics for blog posts that could be helpful. I’m happy to take requests! Today my friend Trilby Smith, the brilliant Director of Evaluation at the Vancouver Foundation, replied with this: Sense making in real time. Like what are the practices we can use to make sense of what is happening to us as it happens? And how can those of us who work in orgs support our colleagues to do this work?— Trilby Smith (@TrilbySmith) March 17, 2020 The last few days have been full of information. It comes streaming through …

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Complexity in the time of COVID-19

March 16, 2020 By Complexity, Featured 10 Comments

So it’s on. Our lives have been instantly upended and five days after cancelling everything, I find myself at home mostly, with days spent in the forest walking and, as of today, avoiding visiting even the cafes and local gathering spots on our island. We live in a small place with many older people. We are connecting and looking out for each other on facebook and just waiting now. Waiting for what? To get sick? For it to be over? For something to happen? As a person who spends nearly every waking hour thinking about how to act in times …

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The troublesome word “container”

February 9, 2020 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Complexity, Conversation, Culture, Design, Emergence, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Leadership, Organization, Power 26 Comments

I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice. I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He …

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Happy New Year!

January 24, 2020 By Being, Bowen

You might think it a little bit late, but here on the in Howe Sound where I live, New Year traditionally begins. In the local language, Sk?wx?wu?7mesh sni?chim, this time of year is known as “tem welhxs” which refers to the time of the last snows and the frogs starting to sing. Ten days ago here on Bowen Island, we had a massive snow and windstorm, but at lower levels, all that snow has melted, flooding the creeks and wetlands and making the forest bright green in today’s after-rain sunshine. It’s warm – 9 degrees celsius – and it does …

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Harrison Owen and getting out of the way

January 22, 2020 By Complexity, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space 4 Comments

One of my favourite photos of Harrison Owen, courtesy of Peggy Holman This morning I got to play the role of host/interviewer to my mentor Harrison Owen, the guy that accidentally invented Open Space Technology and unknowingly changed my life. It was when I participated in my first Open Space conference in 1995 that I knew I had found the core of my path in work. Truth be told, interviewing Harrison is the easiest job you could ever want. You basically do what you do when running an Open Space meeting: ask the question and get out of the way. …

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