My friend Michelle Holliday has been devoting her life the past few years to understanding living systems and bringing her learning to organizational settings. She’s been with us at two Art of Hostings and has brought a wonderful group to both events. Here is her slideshare on her recent thinking and above is a TEDxTalk she gave in Montreal. I love the way she sees hosting practices as pathways for action as organizations move to living systems approaches.
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The new issue of Fieldnotes is out from ALIA and within it, Art Kleiner muses about the metaphor of the body’s systems as a way of understanding information flow in organizations: – The hierarchy is a circulatory system for messages of authority; specifically, for anything that can be expressed as a number. It is the means by which the organization seeks scale. It flows from and to the top: the CEO and then the shareholders or owners. It might be analogous to muscle coordination. – The network conveys knowledge – in the form of gossip, …
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Glad folks took time to appreciate the moon last night. Take a little time to do that everyday and u discover much about your world #nokomis # Fan Culture a Winner on Opening Day in Vancouver | Prost Amerika Soccer <– love it. # http://t.co/qx3psIX. Great improv workshop openings. # Brilliant timeline of the Middle East revolutions: http://t.co/G6vQt7g # Blue sky, green forest, bright sun and the towhees squealing their primal calls. Spring! # Arbutus loving and dying http://flic.kr/p/9sPhNL # Beautiful spring morning. Birds greeting the sun with crazy orchestration. # We live in an amazing universe. Bits of the …
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From an email sent to a friend of mine (a Mohawk, for context!) about the art of harvesting. It includes an uncited hat tip to the Cynefin framework, and focuses on his particular field of education: Harvesting, as you know being from a tribe of long standing agrarian practice, (!) is constituted of all kinds of things. Mostly though, you need an artifact and a feedback loop. What is the tangible piece I can hold in my hand and point to, and how does it fold back into the system to create learning. many systems do well at harvesting the …
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This afternoon sitting in the forest above my house in the warm sun. Insects are everywhere, flies landing on me to say hello, the moss and rocks on the cliff warm and dry. I am sitting with a mug of tea made from the first tender leaves of the season’s lemon balm. Listening to silence punctuated by a squirrel chattering in a rhythmic patterns of sevens “cheap a cheap cheap, cheap a cheap”. He is consistent enough that I can drum softly on the moss beside me in time with his voice and sing a little song about belonging. Making …