What’s in the central garden?
A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us...
View ArticleTrying to make developmental evaluation easier
Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing...
View ArticleComplexity and movements change culture
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological...
View ArticleOne organizing strategy against Trump
I have been spending my Saturday inside watching a bit of soccer and engaging with Donald Trump supporters on twitter. You might consider that a waste of time. I loved the soccer (Tottenham survived a...
View ArticlePrototyping and strategic planning
My friends over at the Social Labs Revolution website have been fielding questions about the prototyping phase of labwork and today published a nice compilation of prototyping resources. It’s worth a...
View ArticleEvery herring is a word
Yesterday I spent most of the day honouring people who have worked for decades to preserve and grow the Skwxu7mesh language. I’m on the advisory board of an organization called Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which...
View ArticleThe VALUE of invitation
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...
View ArticleUnderstanding vision
“Vision” is one of those words that is overused in our work and the reason it is so elusive is that is is so context dependant. You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can...
View ArticleThe creative challenge
Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo. I like the way she puts this: Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A...
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Running a Pro Action Cafe for 300 people
Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together...
View ArticleBetter decision making
At the end of a couple of weeks in Europe and being here in Glasgow during this past week has heightened my sensitivity to how democracy, devoid of deliberation and focused only on numeric results, has...
View ArticleShallow dives into chaos in teaching and leading
In the Cynefin framework, the domains are really shades with some clear boundaires. Strategic work using Cynefin is about making various moves between different domains for different reasons. This is...
View ArticleSome things that work in real reconciliation dialogue
We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was...
View ArticleHow complexity principles can inform participatory process design
Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity. Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications...
View ArticleSafe enough in Open Space
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own...
View ArticleA journey towards mastery
Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s...
View ArticleSelecting weak signals and building in diversity and equity
When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things. These are sometimes called...
View ArticleA beautiful reflection on the Art of Hosting on Bowen Island
Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and...
View ArticleDesigning nesting thresholds
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and...
View ArticleShort time, World Cafe to the rescue
Helping a friend with a design challenge today. He is running a small group process at the end of a day of presentations about energy futures in a small community. He initially thought that it would be...
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