Back in 2022 Peter Levine – whose thought blog posts are amongst my favourite reads on a regular basis – wrote the following: The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting …
I finally managed to update all the broken links and misplaced resources on my Open Space Technology resources and planning pages. If you now visit the Open Space Planning page and the Open Space Resources page, all the links should be working. Anything you can’t find there is likely to be found at the Open Space World home including a library of books and papers from Harrison Owen. Thanks for everyone who kept poking at me to get this done.
A graph showing cetacean sightings in Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound from 2001-2018 Here in Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the return of cetaceans over the past 20 years has been truly incredible. Having been hunted to extirpation from this part of the world in the early 1900s, a single Humpback Whale made a stunning return to our inlet in 2001. Along with the Humpbacks came hope of a renewed and recovered inlet, washed free of the massive pollution problems caused by a century of logging, wood processing and mining. The explosion happened in earnest in 2010 when Pacific Whitesided Dolphins returned to Howe Sound by …
A little piece I’ve just written about Harrison Owen’s work on High Performance Systems for an Art of Participatory Leadership workbook on the connections between Open Space Technology facilitation and leadership for self-organization. From the moment Open Space was formalized as a meeting method in 1985, its creator, Harrison Owen, saw massive potential for the process to inform organizational design and leadership. Watching groups of 100 or more people self-organize a conference over multiple days was simply a microcosm of what could go on in organizational life. It offered a radical view that perhaps there was a different way to …
A sign at the government wharf in Tofino, BC reserving parking for Elders from the Indigenous communities of Clayquot Sound. Yesterday I was on a call with one of our Complexity Inside & Out participants who was getting started with Participatory Narrative Inquiry and NarraFirma. Like I do with everyone, I pointed him to Cynthia Kurtz’s websites on these topics and then walked him through an installation of the NarraFirma WordPress plugin. My friend wanted to use PNI to gather stories related to his family. He comes from a big family who have regular reunions at which more than 100 …