This amazing video is significant on a couple of fronts.  First it shows how much other stuff we share our solar system with.  Second it is a lovely visualization of seeing, learning and becoming aware.  It is the sum total of what humans know about asteroids in our solar system, and like all good learning it gets better over time as we perfect patterns and then ways of seeing and understanding.  And like all good learning, it takes and becomes memory, knowledge and then part of our everyday experience.

Over 30 years of constant and repeated practice with constant improvement and inquiry, this is the kind of discovery tat can be wrought.  The purest form of discovery: finding things that have always been there.

And here is a more technical explanation of what you are seeing here:

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You’ll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990′s we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you’ll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that’s tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we’re running out of undiscovered objects.

via YouTube – Asteroid Discovery From 1980 – 2010.

We send our kids to school. I call it the “brain laundry.” They teach them everything you don’t want them to know. It’s done in the name of education and fairness and righteousness, and the things of common sense and how things are done, are never explored. You get a piece of paper with your name on it, if you follow the instructions. I got a Doctorate not because I wanted the piece of paper; I got the Doctorate because my professor said to me, “You know more about this than I do and I’m the professor.” I wanted to know why things occurred. I always say that creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

That indeed is art in so many ways…it is the act of playing with space…the space between the notes that Miles Davisr talked about or the willingness to master and then let go of technique that Thelonius Monk talk about or the.  In the moment, art is about knowing which mistakes to keep and how to surround them with silence and emptiness so that they can grow and come alive.  Everything we do, if we call ourselves artists comes from that source.

1. Be in a learning journey with others.  While you are working with people, see your work as a learning journey and share questions and inquiries with your team.

2. Take time to reflect on successes and failures together. We are having a lovely conversation on the OSLIST, the Open Space facilitator’s listserv about failures right now and it’s refreshing to hear stories about where things went sideways.  What we learn from those experiences is deep, both about ourselves and our work.

3. Be helpful. When a colleague takes a risk and fail, be prepared to setp up to help them sort it out.  My best boss ever gave us three rules to operate under: be loyal to your team, make mistakes and make sure he was the first to know when you made one.  There was almost nothing we could do that he couldn’t take care of, and we always had him at our backs, as long as he was the first to hear about it.  Providing that support to team members is fantastic.

4. Apologize together.  Show a united front, and help make amends when things go wrong.  This is a take on one of the improv principles of making your partner look good.  It is also about taking responsibility and having many minds and hearts to put to work to correct what needs correcting.  This one matters when your mistake costs lives.  Would be nice to see this more in the corporate world.

5. Build on the offer. Another improv principle, this one invites us to see what we just went through as an offer to move on to the next thing.

6. Don’t be hard on yourself.  You can’t get out of a pickle if you are berating yourself up for being there.  I find The Work of Byron Katie to be very very helpful in helping become clear about what to do next and to loosen up on the story that just because I failed, therefore I am a failure.

Now these little lessons work in complex environments, like human organizations, not mechanical systems so before you jump on me for having unrealistic expectation for airplanes and oil rigs, just know that.  Having said that, dealing with the human costs of airplane crashes and oil rig explosions requires clarity, and being wrapped in blame and self-loathing is not the same as being empathetic and clear.

Here are three resources which have recently crossed my path that involve using fun and games for social change.  Some of these work with groups and some work across social spaces – demographics, communities or organizations.  What I like about these games is that they provide a built in set of measureables that can be used to gauge progress and evaluate behaviour change.  Sesms like combining fun, visible change and simple yet powerful standards for noticing shift is the holy grail in this kind of work.

Games for Change: Games for Change (G4C) is a non-profit which seeks to harness the extraordinary power of video games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, education, human rights, global conflict and climate change. G4C acts as a voice for the transformative power of games, bringing together organizations and individuals from the nonprofit sector, government, journalism, academia, industry and the arts, to grow the sector and provide a platform for the exchange of ideas and resources.

The Fun Theory:  I’ve blogged this before, but The Fun Theory is “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”

The FreeChild Project: Lots of games and resources at this website dedictaed to youth engagement around social change.  FreeChild has been working for almost eight years to promote the idea that when engaged in meaningful ways throughout society, the knowledge, action and wisdom of children and youth can make the world more democratic, more non-violent and engaging for everyone. By working with adults as allies young people learn, teach and lead democracy throughout society! ]]> http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?feed=rss2&p=2719 7 http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=2707 http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=2707#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:02:00 +0000 Chris Corrigan http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=2707 Hosting an Open Space gathering in Kamloops today with about 40 people who work hard around issues of child and youth health.  We are exploring ways to connect differently and do our work at the next level.  The conversations have started and the topics are rich.  I thought I would put the list here and see if any of you readers in blog land have resources to offer that we can forward to the folks meeting here today.  And if you are in Kamloops and do this work, come on up to Thompson Rivers University and join the conversation.

Session 1

11:00 – 12:15

• How to develop intergenerational programming (ie seniors and youth)
• How do we engage children who come from families dealing with addictions?
• How can we drastically improve reading instruction in your child’s school?  These top 5 items from research can be supported in a half-hour daily routine in the classroom.
• How do we start the process to develop a children’s charter in Kamloops?
• What opportunities are out there to use youth wilderness programs to engage youth in meaningful community development?
• How do we better connect youth/schools to the local food system?  For example: engaging shcools to start gardnes or increasing local food sold in schools?
• How to create a culture to encourage families at perinatal stage to have access to services and supports which are integrated with traditional service providers?

Session 2

12:15-1:45

• Wow! Statistics!
• I would like to better understand our needs and gaps so that I can better support the community.
• How do we develop and sustain our networks?  What are the possibilities of our networks?
• How to create service for parents with disabilities?
• How can we reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases in sexually active youth?

Session 3

1:45-3:00

• How to develop fitness/physical literacy program for 2.5 to 5 year olds?
• How to keep children and youth engagement authentic, original and fresh so they have the agenda and don’t get bored?
• How do we better connect school and community centres and programs for collaborative work?
• How do we reduce stigma attached to social programs to include more children youth and family?
• Teachers and youth workers as gardners, hiking guides and community development professionals.
• How do we collectively support and empower parents in our communities to recognize that they have such a crucial role?

Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others’ experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure.

How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are now obsolete? How will we keep abreast of changes in context that warrant new measures? Who will look for the unintended consequences that accompany any process and feed that information back to us?

Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? Are they open enough? Do they invite in newness and surprise? Do they encourage people to look in new places, or to see with new eyes?

Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization? Will this particular information help individuals, teams, and the entire organization grow in the right direction? Will this information help us to deepen and expand the meaning of our work?

What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation? How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process? Do these measures honor and support the relationships and meaning-rich environments that give rise to these behaviors?

via Margaret J. Wheatley: What Do We Measure and Why?.

These are great questions to consider at the Show Me The Change conference in Melbourne as we dive into questions on the implications for complexity on the measurements used to evaluate change in living and complex systems.

1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.

2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?

3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)

4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts

5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.

6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.

7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.

via How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona | Monkey Business.

This is my friend Colleen Stevenson, a lovely graphic recorder that I work with whenever I can.  Here she is talking about permaculture principles, something which she knows a lot about, and talking about this large shart she drew to capture and start conversations on how these principles work in learning.

Last night I drove out here across the spine of Vancouver Island, from Departure Bay on the east side, through Port Alberni and along the shore of Sproat Lake, through the pass and down to the west coast.  It’s a landscape of high mountains, big trees, big clearcuts and huge beaches.   Everything is scaled so big that you can’t help feel small and humbled in this landscape.  And to beat it all, last night I chased the sun across the island and it beat me to the open Pacific.  By the time I made the turn for Tofino it was pitch dark and the sky was ablaze with stars and the Geminid meteor showers littered the heavens with fireballs and frequent streaks of light.

The first time I ever cam to BC, in 1989, I came here, or more precisely, I stayed a week in Heshquiaht, on the north edge of Clayoquot Sound, visiting with my friend Sennen Charleson and his family.  Sennen died a few years ago in a road accident in northern BC, and I can feel his presence here in land from which he spent many years in exile, but which always called him strongly.  There is a riotous complexity to the rainforests of the west coast, and a presence unlike anywhere else on earth.  Everything is quiet, knowing that you cannot make more noise than a storm from the ocean or the clatter of rain through the canopy.  Human noises disappear here, like a the ripples from a pebble tossed into surf.

I’m excited to be designing a three day learning experience here with some apprenticing mates, Norinne Messer and Laura Loucks.  We are using the framework of tsawalk for our work together, a concept that is deeply rooted in the Nuu-Cha-Nulth worldview and that influences everything from resource management to spiritual ceremony to the role of community.  It is forming the basis of a unique partnership that will produce a marine use plan for Clayoquot and Barkley Sounds, and over the next few days, we will look at how tsawalk informs our work with communities, influences design choices for community engagement and self-development.

One of the processes we will be using is based on the Nuu-Cha-Nulth spiritual practice of “oosumich” which is a form of prayer and self-knowledge that helps us to access knowledge from the interior worlds of spiritual source, individual persoanlity and community.  It is a form of investigative methodology that is complimentary to science, which examines and makes sense of the external world.  Working together with these methods, we can come to a holistic understanding of the world, a practical expression of tsawalk.  For those of you familiar with Otto Scharmer’s work, this is very much a Nuu-Chah-Nulth version of his Theory U.  The main difference I think is that oosumich is a spiritual practice, intended to connect with the spiritual aspects of the world that we can also understand materially.  Oosumich itself is a secret and a scared practice, but what we know of it can be used to work in leadership learning and process design.

Some of the basic values that are involved in the expression of tsawalk are aphey (kindness), isaak (respect) and he-xwa (balance).  As I sit here designing today, I am thinking very carefully about how these three basic show up in hosting work.  Some of my preliminary thoughts are:

aphey

• being helpful for the common good (“hupee-ee-aulth”)
• paying attention to good relations and increasing more of them (an appreciative approach to growing community)
• ask for what you need, offer what you can (PeerSpirit Circle principles that apply to Nuu-Chah-Nulth life from the way in which people help each other with work, food gathering and preparation and ceremony)

isaak

• every voice has it’s place. When we hear a voice of dissent or confusion, it is not out place to judge it, but rather to figure out how it is related to the whole.  If tsawalk is the principles, there can be nothing outside of that, and so all voices have a place.
• all creation has common origin and we pay respect to that common origin by acknowledging the relationships that are present in the world.

he-xwa

• balance comes from having a core, which can be a purpose or a solid centre or a ground
• the world is a constant balance between energies that create and those that destroy.  Balance is not a static point in time, but a dynamic practice.  We have to learn to be sensitive to imbalances both in the external world and in the internal world.  Where there is too much red tide, people notice, and they know it means something is out of balance with the marine environment.  When there is too much chaos in a meeting, it means that people are confused and more order and clarity has to be found.

All of these ideas form the basis for some teaching, for some play and learning.  I’m thrilled to be here.

So we had our little learning village today with the kids at Aine’s learning centre which my partner, daughter and I designed.  We explored these questions of what kind of inner climate is needed to engage around questions of climate change and the kids followed the energy.  They got really interested in what kinds of things they could say to the global leadership meeting in Copenhagen.  They wanted to convey a sense that, yes this is a serious issue, but how you choose to meet together matters.  They were dismayed and discouraged by the prospect of a lot of angry and worried people sitting around for a few days trying to reach a creative agreement.  One kid said that she doesn’t work very well if she thinks there is a tiger behind her about to eat her.

So we had a little circle and talked about what we know about principles of meeting together.  The kids generated this list:

• Be serious but not bitter
• Optimistic
• Not grim
• Respectfully, without insulting each other
• talk with civility
• peacefully
• consider the whole planet
• Be calm
• happily and confidently
• include everyone and make sure everyone has a voice
• be positive and useful
• get different opinions
• have fun
• break into groups to get more ideas
• make sure groups get mixed up.
• no shouting
• come with an open mind
• talk nicely and treat everyone as if they were a relative
• make sure to move.  maybe dance together.
• feast
• have music and entertainers, and hire a jester to make fun of yourself.

We even took this advice, and broke into groups to see what kinds of things we could brainstorm around climate change solutions.  The kids worked for 40 minutes in a world cafe, and then we shared some ideas (“Someone needs to develop shoes that massage your feet while you walk.”  ”Busses should be free”).  We discovered that if we practice some of the principles, they really do result in creative thinking, and a more civil tone.

So the kids were pretty clear that they didn’t have answers about climate change, but they did have recommendations about HOWthe leaders should meet in order to find creative and sustaining solutions.  We made four videos (the kids chose to do sketches) which we are editing and will get quick parental approval before sending off to Copenhagen through various channels.

My takeaway on this is that there is a lot of science and highly technical information that is required before you can make useful contributions to the global warming debate.  Very few of us have access to that level of understanding and while we might have some good ideas, we don’t really have the ability to engage at the level of understanding that results in concrete solutions.

We do however all have experience of conversations that work.  Youth are very clear about ways in which learning takes place.  I was delighted when they began naming principles of participatory process and conversational leadership, which are just fancy terms for what we already know about how to collaborate.  Twelve year olds CAN make a contribution, and can learn and reflect on process as they share their own experience about what works.