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

+1 604 947 9236

chris@chriscorrigan.com


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Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

Richard Straub writes in the Harvard Business Review, on a great piece about what stops managers from adopting complexity views:

Complexity wasnt a convenient reality given managers desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers reluctance to see the world as it is. Where [...]

Bombs and killing and the responsibility or terror.

I hate bombs.

In my 45 years I have had six friends and colleagues killed by bombs both on the Air India bombing in 1985 and in the London bombings in 2005.  As a 10 year old kid living in England during the IRA letter bombing campaigns of Christmas 1978 I remember being completely [...]

Improving community decision making

How many of you live in communities where community meetings are boring affairs punctuated by outrage?  How many of you feel like influencing your local government means showing up en masse with a pettion or an organized campaign to get them to make a small change?  How many of you are just plain disillusioned [...]

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 [...]

Mentoring in the world of hosting

All the best stuff I have learned about mentoring has been in the context of traditional culture, whether with indigenous Elders from Canada or in the traditional Irish music community.  Traditional Irish music is played and kept alive in a structure called a “sessiun.”  There is a repertoire of thousands of tunes, but most [...]

Mutations are the way to make change

Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power.  We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars.  Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world.  We might hate [...]

It’s not easy

Working with groups is not easy.  This is Ian McGeechan, manager of the British and Irish Lions before a dead rubber test.

My friend Kathy Jourdain was quoted yesterday as saying “our power comes from our vulnerability.”  This video reminds me of how that feels some [...]

Three practices Occupy gives and gave us

A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.

When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go.  From whatever place we were in we will move to another.  And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. [...]

Including difference to strengthen a movements

Heard a great story today.

I’m at a conference of union activists who are working to build their activist muscles up and do work in communities.  One of the presenters here is Jason Sidener, who I’ve enjoyed spending a couple of hours with.  Jason is the Member Mobilization Coordinator for the American Federation of [...]

Getting beyond the reaction

My friend Bob Stilger writes today from the radiation fields of Fukushima where he has been joining people for the past year in the work of remaking lives after the tsunami and the meltdown.  It’s worth heading over to his blog to follow his ongoing discoveries there, but here are some good bits from [...]