I’m reissuing this invitation to join Michael Herman and I here on Bowen Island, British Columbia for an Open Space Practice Retreat from April 18-20, 2006. This is an intensive retreat for leaders, managers, facilitators, consultants, community activists, and anyone else who wants to open more space for renewal, visioning, learning and productivity — in business, government, educational and community organizations. This is an opportunity for deep learning about leadership and change, in the context of the practices that support facilitating Open Space. Folks who will find this useful include leaders, managers and facilitators working with very complex issues, requiring …
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My buddy Harrison Owen has been writing like crazy a lot lately. He has been almost singlehandedly keeping the conversation going on the OSLIST, where Open Space practitioners gather to play. And the other day he launched a new paper into the mix: Opening Space for The Question. The paper is about the concept of Nichtwissen, a German word that Harrison translates as “Unknowing”. Open Space for the Question means to cultivate a practice that has us sitting in the Unknowing, working to find where the contemplation of the question takes us. In a really good synopsis of the practice …
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Merlin Mann found Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s secret to maintaining flow: “The only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding new opportunities to refine one’s skills: do one’s job better or faster, or expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more appropriate to your stage of life. Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realized after the event. To acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction.” This from an article in The Times called “The secrets of happiness.” Worth a read don’t you think? I have experienced intense happiness and flow …
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At WorldChanging you will find a link to an amazing site of visualizations of complex networks. What is especially interesting to me about these maps is how many of them are actually hierarchical. Many of these maps show complex relationships, but they do so in a flattened way. For example, this diagram (at right) is a radial representation of an organizational map from 1924. On the face of it it looks radically different, but in fact it is a relatively well formed hierarchy with single reporting relationships and only a cursory acknowledgment of horizontal organizational structure in management. Non-hierarchical, emergent …
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A couple of stories about truth and stories. Yesterday on CBC Radio’s Sounds Like Canada, Shelagh Rogers interviewed Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen is the goaltender for Canada’s Sledge Hockey team, and is getting ready to head over to Turin to compete in the Paralympics. Rosen is an amputee, having lost his leg to a persistent bacterial infection. Very early on in his new life as a one legged man he adopted a very positive outlook. His doctors were suspicious and sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. At that consultation, Rosen took some water and poured it on his …