It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia. Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site. The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and …
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Tunstall Bay, Bowen Island An old quote, freshly rediscovered: If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it. The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action. But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen. Back in the fall, my business …
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Merlin Mann points to a nice piece on the fragmentation of attention: A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. Recently I facilitated a meeting in which there were so many BlackBerries, I felt like making a pie. Some people had BlackBerries AND cell phones, and both were on. What struck me was actually how the fragmentation of the room’s …
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Ottawa, Ont. A spring day in the nation’s capital, sunny and warm, everyone in short sleeves and the latest sunglasses, drinking beer on patios in the Byward Market and just showing off. I’m sitting in an old haunt called “Memories” on Clarence Street, in the shadow of the American Embassy that wasn’t here 12 years ago when I last lived in Ottawa. Beside me on the floor is a bag of Quebec cheese, some of which I am going to eat with my mother and father and sister on my mum’s birthday tomorrow. Like every place I’ve lived in in …