I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn. I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of …
An incident in Red Deer this week has made visible some of the deep seated xenophobia that exists just under the surface in Canada. While we are known as a country of tolerance and peace, and we largely are, there is a longstanding thread that runs through our history and right into our present that claims a kind of Eurocentric supremacy, and it has its impact against immigrants, indigenous people and people of colour who were born here. In the Red Deer story a group of high school kids are punished for fighting, in an incident that involved Syrian refugee …
This month I am in the middle of delivering another very cool online offering with Beehive Productions on the art of invitation. It’s a three session program focusing on the practice of invitation as it relates to participatory meetings, longer term participatory strategic initiatives and even organizational design. Michael Herman will be joining us next week for the “Inviting Organization” module. He’s really the guy that got me thinking about invitation way back in 2000 when I first came across his work as an Open Space colleague. While Rowan and Amy and I were thinking about content we discussed some …
I’ve been for a beautiful walk this morning in the warm mist of a spring day in the highlands near Victoria. It was quiet but for the cacophony of bird song, and everything was wet with mist and dew. This is the greenest time of year on the west coast, and the mossy outcroppings and forest floor were verdant. There is a beauty in what is, in any given moment. I’ve been thinking about this as I have been struggling with watching people be evaluated in their work recently. My daughter is a jazz musician, training her art in a …
A couple of years ago I wrote a post that was critical of the way in which the Representative for Children in Youth in British Columbia drove practice changes among social workers. In short the reason had to do with apply too much order (rules and checklists) in a complex space (social work practice). At a certain point, when you are trying to prevent deaths that have occurred in the past, you end up outlawing all but the deaths that will surprise you in the future. We look at reviews of child deaths as if they were expected and predictable …