I love working with engineers. They are curious and always looking for ways to make things better. They sometimes suffer a little from bringing a mechanistic problem solving mindset to complex living systems, but more often than not what they contribute to processes is a sense of adventurous experiment. This video shows why. A few months ago at an Art of Hosting workshop in Springfield Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and I had a great conversation about failure. We were curious about how the mechanistic view of failure has worked its way into human consciousness in this culture. There are very few …
Yesterday I spent a day with 14 students in the Certificate in Dialogue Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, teaching World Cafe and Open Space Technology. Whenever I am asked to teach methodologies I always spend a significant amount of time actually talking about invitation and harvest, because it is these practices that actually contribute to a productive and meaningful conversation, rather than just using the methodology. Invitation has always been a big part of my facilitation practice. From the time I discovered the work Michael Herman had done on invitation both as a practice and as a metaphor …
Phil Cubeta hits a home run with a lament for what lies at our collective centre: As you can tell, this post is not about venture philanthropists per se but about language. What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another. To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination. We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets …
So happy that Tom has started using a posterous site to share his thoughts with the world. He’s been writing great stuff lately: We are geniuses at impacting the world while preventing impact on ourselves. As we solve our lives into greater and greater separation from the built-in learning mechanisms of evolution, nature has to stretch further and further to heal itself, to get us to pay attention, to stop treating feedback as a problem and see it as an increasingly urgent invitation — indeed a demand — to change. Yet still we go further and further out on the …