Menu

Travelling on Christmas Day

December 26, 2014 By Bowen, Travel

Every Christmas Day, our nuclear family heads off Bowen Island to travel into Vancouver and celebrate with cousins and grandparents, feasting, gift giving, hanging out and catching up.  The weather is always different.  Some years the ferry ploughs through a fierce Squamish wind blowing down Howe Sound from the north and freezing salt spray covers the cars on the ferry deck.  Other years it is rainy and blowing from the southeast, as it was much of this month.  Once – only once in thirteen Christmases of doing this – did we have snow, and that was back in 2008 when the whole country experienced it’s first completely white Christmas in 37 years.  Alas, our little pocket of green on the west coast of BC is usually the reason why the whole country isn’t covered in snow.

This year, the weather was sunny and calm, about 8 degrees and the Queen Charlotte Channel between Bowen Island and Horseshoe Bay was like glass.  I stood at the front of the car deck on the soon to be overhauled Queen of Capilano and shot this little time lapse of the voyage, which normally takes under 20 minutes.  This is the first leg of every trip I do to anywhere in the world: across this gorgeous fjord.

Empathy

December 20, 2014 By Being, Flow, Music One Comment

http://youtu.be/2MeaOZKY80o

Spellbound this morning watching Sean de hOra, a famous old Irish singer, performing his version of the Irish air Bean Dubh an Ghleanna (The Dark Woman of the Glen).  He is a gorgeous interpreter of the “sean nos” or old style of Irish singing, which is deeply emotional and moving evoking in the performer something of the duende that Lorca wrote about in flamenco.  In both flamenco and sean nos, there is a sense that supernatural creatures are near by, and there is tradition that links the singing of these songs to the kidnapping of the singer by fairies, so powerful is the song.

For these reasons – the weight of emotion being communicated and the fear of being lost – a tradition in sean nos singing is to have someone engage in “hand winding” with the singer and you can see this in this video.  It is a gesture of amazing empathy, and it brings the singer into the fullness of the expression of the song without him fearing being lost or taken away.

Here is Ciaran Carson:

In the ‘hand-winding’ system of the Irish sean-nós, a sympathetic listener grasps the singer’s hand; or, indeed, the singer may initiate first contact and reach out for a listener. The singer then might close his eyes, if they are open (sometimes he might grope for someone, like a blind man) and appear to go into a trance; or his eyes, if open, might focus on some remote corner of the room, as if his gaze could penetrate the fabric, and take him to some antique, far-off happening among the stars. The two clasped hands remind one another of each other, following each other; loops and spirals accompany the melody, singer and listener are rooted static to the spot, and yet the winding unwinds like a line of music with its ups and downs, its glens and plateaux and its little melismatic avalanches.

What do you notice here?

Losing Dr. Brenda Zimmerman

December 19, 2014 By Evaluation

As I have been diving into the worlds of complexity and especially the question of evaluation in the complex domain, one of the people on my list to meet was Dr. Brenda Zimmerman, who taught at York University.  News finally came through today that she died in a car accident on December 16.  Her work is summed up in this notice from the Plexus Institute:

Dr. Zimmerman is co-author of several books, including Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed, which she wrote with Frances Westley and Michael Quinn Patton, and Edgeware: Insights from complexity Science for HealthCare Leaders, which she wrote with Paul Plsek and Curt Lindberg. She wrote the report “Complicated and Complex Systems: What would Successful Reform Medicare Look Like?” with Sholom Glouberman, published in 2002 by the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada. She also wrote numerous book chapters, including “Generative Relationships: STAR,” with Bryan Hayday, in Glenda Eoyang’s book Voices from the Field, and she authored two chapters in the book On the Edge: Nursing in the Age of Complexity, by Curt Lindberg, Sue Nash and Claire Lindberg.

Curt Lindberg, a founder and former president of Plexus Institute and another of Dr. Zimmerman’s co-authors, called her death a tragic loss. Henri Lipmanowicz, a founder of Plexus and its Board Chairman Emeritus, said, “We were lucky to have known her. She was one of a kind. A beautiful and caring person.”

Michael Quinn Patton is an organizational development and evaluation consultant, and complexity scholar. “Without Brenda there would have been no Getting to Maybe book and no subsequent Developmental Evaluation book,” Patton said of the book he co-authored with Dr. Zimmerman and the pioneering book on evaluation he later wrote. He noted that Chapter 4 in Developmental Evaluation tells something of Dr. Zimmerman’s influence on his own work and on the evaluation field generally.

via Brenda Zimmerman: Complexity Scholar and Mentor to Many – Plexus Institute.

A huge loss to her family and friends of course, and to the field in general.

The bench that awaits the return of the light

December 18, 2014 By Bowen 2 Comments

 

The bench at Killarney Lake on Bowen Island that looks out across a rock and the calm surface of this afternoon’s gloaming.  I love the word “gloaming.” It refers to the dusky twilight that is practically what passes for daytime now, so close to the solstice, when the grey clouds that envelop us dim the already weak northern daylight even further.  I love the cool air and the damp and wet, I love the contrast of walking into a friend’s house full of the smells of spiced ginger tea and welcomed with warmth.  I love that we can huddle together against the chill to sing, as we did tonight with our local men’s and women’s Threshold Choirs, wrapped in blankets in a yurt, singing chants we practice for singing to the dying, accompanied by the random percussion of the rain.

I am built for gloaming of Advent, a northern soul, a winter lover, one who can wait and wait and wait for the returning of the light, for the summer’s long in breath that begins a 2:03 on Sunday afternoon.

Until then, enjoy some other amazing gloaming.

How the Harvard MBA model fails the world

December 16, 2014 By Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy

Henry Mintzberg revisits some of his research and conclusions about the methods used to teach MBAs at Harvard, and his conclusions point to the near complete saturation of analysis and control that now drowns the business, government and non-profit world:

When I studied management across the river in the 1960s, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Harvard Business School was just as renowned as it is today. But it was weak in research—in fact some of its prominent faculty derided research. The turnaround since then has been quite remarkable. In the areas I know, Harvard’s faculty is fantastic, especially in the ability of many to relate concrete issues to conceptual understanding. Too bad that they have to devote so much of their teaching efforts to a method—and its view of management, like that of other business schools so concentrated on analysis–that is doing such great harm to our organizations and the societies in which they function (see mintzberg.org/enterprise).

We are mired in a heroic view of management (now called leadership)–centralized, numeric, individualistic and often narcissistic–that is too often detached from what is supposed to be managed. People who believe they can manage everything often prove themselves capable of managing nothing. We don’t need generic managers; we need engaged ones. The problem has been bad enough in the private sector; its infiltration into other sectors of society is far worse. Do NGOs need “CEOs”, business models, strategic plans, measures galore, and all the rest? Harvard and most other business schools have to be doing better than that.

via The Harvard 19 | Henry Mintzberg.

What happens at places like Harvard matters, because it sets the standard for what passes as responsible management in organizations.  And there are many fatal flaws with the way Harvard teaches business, and those are magnified and distorted in the hands of the amateur quant jockeys that reduce everything to numeric analysis.  This is the finest and most concise articulation of this problem I have read in a while and it matters that it is Henry Mintzberg who is saying it.