Chris Corrigan

A collection of life’s lessons

I find my life becoming more and more becoming like one big teaching. From very early on, I have used my weblog as a place to do “open source learning” in the world. As a result, I have collected a number of these teachings on this weblog over the years, and here are some of the highlights.

Lessons about working with groups

• The difference between facilitating and hosting
• Making public meetings work
• What Navajo people have to teach the world about collaboration
• The mother map
• Using maps to help ground hosting practice
• Using nothing but stories to experience emergence
• Values, tools and authentic facilitation
• Working with the centre
• Living in Open Space
• Harvesting nutrients
• The simplest way to host conversations
• Designing conversations to change the world.
• Presence, circles and granola: more on living in Open Space
• Facilitate as the sky does
• Keynote facilitation and changing the way conferences are designed.

Facilitation stories

• Co-creating safety in a group
• Presencing in a small strategic planning workshop
• Using World Cafe in a conference setting

Lessons about working in organizations

• Appreciative worldviews and living systems
• What we can learn from mushrooms
• Rapid prototyping at Boeing
• The gift of bureaucracy
• Strategy and improvisation

Lesson about working in communities

• Hosting for conscious community to emerge
• Lessons from working with the Nuxalk Nation: A community opens space for itself, and Teaching and learning about leadership in a First Nations community
• Working with community action systems

Lessons about learning

• At play in the fields of flow: music, writing and participation.
• Remaining a learner while committing to action
• Emergent learning: watching my son teach himself to read
• How networks change learning

Lessons from indigenous North America and beyond

• The Navajo concept of k’e
• Ojibway genesis and the deep pattern of creation stories
• On dreaming and visioning
• Stories of transformation and decolonization in Open Space
• Quantum physics and indigenous worldviews
• Nuu-Chah-Nulth ha-wilh and co-sensing
• Principles of indigenous science
• A Nuu-Chah-Nulth teaching about holding space
• Sonny Diabo and a Mohawk teaching about the path of life
• Herb Joe and a Sto:lo teaching on the perfect gift of humans
• Martin Brokenleg and the Circle of Courage
• The power of tribal structures in building peace in Somalialand
• Working with ancient patterns in the contemporary world at Sliammon

Lessons about life, the universe and everything.

• An invitation to work together
• Four good life practices for serving the world
• The responsibility of love
• Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss
• Holding our enemies
• What I learned from John Muir
• What I learned from David Newhouse
• Remembering the birth of my son
• Trust and control
• What my ancestors created together
• Productive waiting
• Life on a pale blue dot
• Following eternal coyote trails
• Compassion and mutuality
• How to get home by air in the heart of a Canadian winter

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