I’ve begun Stuart Kauffman’s latest book, which will be a little heavy summer reading, and he states his purpose very clearly in the preface: “If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of …
Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25” Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities. We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations. The ability to own …
Yesterday I passed through the start line again. Forty nine times I have rode this incredible planet around the sun, corkscrewing together through space. Last night I sat by a small fire with a small glass of whiskey in my hand, friends and family around me and we just hung out, enjoying each other’s company, listening to a little Stephen Fearing and John Wort Hannam and eating fresh strawberries. The last half dozen years of more have been really illuminating in terms of my own professional life. I have moved from the place of a pure practitioner to a professional …
“Vision” is one of those words that is overused in our work and the reason it is so elusive is that is is so context dependant. You can have a vision of a full bath tub of steaming hot water. You can have a vision of making your home run on rain water alone. You can have a vision of safe drinking water for all humans. The first is simple, short term and you have all the tools and abilities to make it happen. The second is more complicated and you require a few experts to make it happen, but …
I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn. I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of …