Using a Praxis Log
One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written...
View ArticleCreating rules you are willing to be bound by
Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of...
View ArticleCircular causality: it matters
Warning: Dense thoughts on complexity and emergence here. The other day I was discussing a metaphor that a friend raised about “emergence.” Her idea is that a car exhibits a kind of emergence in that...
View ArticleDifference reveals collective capacity
I was on a call with a colleague of mine and we were discussing a recent workshop she had given. She was teaching systems thinking theory and practice. Instead of offloading a bunch of content to...
View ArticleGroups, brains, and the fallacy of digital thinking
Dave Snowden publishes a post today thick with some interesting brain research and some musing about how we might structure organizations along the lines of what we know about how brains work: What...
View ArticlePause Pairs and the Praxis Lab
I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read...
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Dear mates: a letter to my Art of Hosting community
Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we...
View ArticleDear Dave: A letter on hosting, complexity and practice
A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep. Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and...
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Why the design corner matters
Over the last month I have been working with this diagram that depicts the architecture of held space. You can read much more detail about this at the post I wrote earlier in the month, including some...
View ArticleGoals in complexity
One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled...
View ArticleMoving from healer to revealer
Chris Mowles reflects on the question of whether the consultant/leader is a healer or revealer and offers his thoughts that the second position is better: To take the second position is to work...
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Observing the architecture of the held container
You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others...
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A triad of constraints for hosted containers
This triad has turned out to be surprisingly helpful. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I posted it a few days ago, because it answers some questions that have been bothering me for a long time....
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The three cornered container
I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container....
View ArticleAre the people trustworthy? Is the facilitator? Is the process?
Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and...
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Thinking about powerful questions
Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask...
View ArticleRiding waves that have come up from the deep oceans of theory
The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong...
View ArticleInviting diversity
I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The...
View ArticleStill reaching for that messy definition of container
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make...
View ArticleFour streams that have taken me to the margins of every community of practice...
The Var River below the high village of Touët in France. This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position...
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