Contact me

Chris Corrigan
RR#1 E3
Bowen Island, BC
Canada V0N 1G0

+1 604 947 9236

chris@chriscorrigan.com


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Peggy Holman on Designing for Community

My friend Peggy Holman is about to write a short series of posts on how to manage the tension between hearing from luminaries and hosting participation in gatherings that aim to:

Make the most of the knowledge and experience of the people in the room; Support participants to make great connections; Bring the wisdom [...]

Working with complexity using Cynefin

A couple of days ago I was invited by Transition US to discuss the Cynefin framework and what it means to work with complexity in a one hour teleconference.  The recording of that call is now available if you’d like to listen in.

Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad

The Groups Works pattern lamnguage deck is now available for the iOS mobile platform.  You can download the app here: Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Or you can also run an Infinite Canvas on your iPad as well.  Learn more here.

The Group Works Deck team has released [...]

Numbers aren’t everything

It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly:

Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture.  Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility.  The problem is when they replace [...]

Simple meeting design

This afternoon, Toke Møller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders.  We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist.  In some ways this is the simplest form of the [...]

Practice Notes: Cafes for taking a conference to action

This week I was hosting at a moderately sized conference in Victoria BC with 100 regional public sector union members.  The purpose of the gathering was to increase the number of active members and to inspire members to engage and improve local communities.  These union members all work in the public service and so [...]

Using Open Space in traditional conference design

I have used Open Space in almost every way conceivable and what Lisa Heft wrote on the OSLIST today about using it with traditional conferences strikes home.  This is good wisdom, friends:

My experience is that – if doing a mix of ‘traditional’ format conference and Open Space – the most ideal situation is [...]

Thoughts on group sizes

One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White.  While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed [...]

Reinventing the wheel

Was in a quick coffee conversation this afternoon with one of our local artisan metal workers on Bowen Island. He has been fascinated by bicycles for a long time and is thinking about how to build one that fits his 6’6″ frame. He has been scouring the net for information about building oversized wheels, [...]

Just about the most fun you can have getting paid

SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver.  We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.

We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering.  The sponsor made [...]