Apart from the wedding of Michael and Jill last weekend in Chicago, I had a great time hanging out with old friends, new friends and Open Space colleagues from around the States. But of all the things that happened on the weekend around the wedding the best had to be meeting Al Camp.
The wedding took place at Pleasant Home, in Oak Park. The house is situated in a lovely little park and in true Buddhist fashion, Michael had strung up strings of Tibetan prayer flags around the place with the Guru Rinpoche mantra on them. In this little park, during the afternoon I lounged on the grass with Daniel O’Conner, Karen Sella and Ted Ernst in the warm sunshine. Thinking I should practice a little before the wedding, I pulled out my flute and started playing some Irish tunes. After a few minutes, a man rolled up in an electric stroller and expressed astonishment that here was live Irish music, right here in his own park!
He stopped to listen and then engaged us in conversation saying that he had been a pilot of bombers and cargo planes and that many times he had stopped over in the Shannon airport. I asked him when that was and he said it was during the Berlin airlift, after the wall was erected in 1948-49. He flew B-29s and C-47s full of coal from England to West Berlin and crashed twice doing so. Daniel, the economist, immediately set to work calculating the massive efficiency waste of this exercise.
Al later flew B-29s in Korea.
Al continued to tell us the story of his life, interspersed with enthusiastic demands for more sets of tunes, which I happily obliged. He told of skipping school to go to Al Capone’s wake, and the way his taste for bourbon ruined his life and caused his divorce from a woman he still loved. He had tears in his eyes telling us about the love he still held for his former wife.
He told us stories of crashing weddings in all the top hotels for almost three years, during which he was only caught twice and fined $50 each time. He heard the famous L-train derailment of 1977 in which 11 people died, and rounded the corner of Lake Street to witness first hand the damage. It happened after work on February 4, 1977 and Al was on his way to the Merchandise Mart to drink. At that time, the Chicago Transit Authority was in that building, right on the river, and Al ran into a friend of his at the bar who was a high-up executive in the CTA. Al asked him what he was doing at the bar when an L-train had derailed. His friend hadn’t heard about it. He rushed upstairs to confirm the news and then came back down to the bar 15 minutes later. “Say, you’re right Al,” he said before Al encouraged him to catch a cab and maybe go see the wreck for himself.
After Al took his leave from us, we debated the truth of these stories and I think the consensus was that any man who still cried in public over his long lost love had to have more than a little truth in his story telling. And ultimately, what really mattered was the stories themselves. Whether the man was telling the truth or not, I had a marvellous experience of hearing history told as a wonderful personal narrative set against one man’s struggle with his own life. We all left knowing more about these events than we had ever known, and for that, here’s a big thanks for Al Camp.
And in honour of Al, and all my American friends on your Independence Day, here is an mp3 of the Chicago Reel.
mp3: Finnvarra’s Wren – Chicago Reel
[tags]Berlin airlift, al capone, chicago, L-train, Ted Ernst, Karen Sella, Daniel O’Conner. Al Camp[/tags]
Finn Voldtofte and friends are convening an interesting looking gathering in Denmark at the end of October called “Moving the Edge.”
This gathering is intended to support the emergence of a field of collective intelligence, where the practices, insights, principles, etc., of collective intelligence can be evolved.
In addition we intend to create space for engaging the field of collective intelligence for deepening inquiries into core questions within specific areas. We envision that the following areas will attract the interest of many participants:
– The possible roles of business as seen from an evolutionary perspective
– Our planetary home
– Practices for integrated lifeWhat themes will actually be engaged depends on the experiences and insights brought present by the participants.
If you feel called by this invitation, then you are invited.
The gathering will start Sunday, Oct. 22 with an informal reception at 20.00 and ends Thursday, Oct. 26 after lunch. The venue is Fuglsøcentret near Aarhus, Denmark.
In support of this intriguing gathering, Finn has posted some articles about process that are lovely, including one on “inquiring from the middle,” a practice he is especially passionate about.
[tags]moving the edge, finn voldtofte[/tags]
Off to Chicago to celebrate the life partnership of friends Michael Herman and Jill Perkins. I’m looking forward to a weekend of fun and merriment and celebration of these two people. I have had the pride and pleasure to work with Michael for five years now on some amazing projects in Open Space, including an important summit in Alaska in 2002, to co-editing of the Open Space Technology Users NON-Guide, the Giving Conference in 2004 and practice workshops all over the place.
I met Jill at the Gioving Conference in 2004 and have rarely laughed so hard with someone. She is an amazing woman, a retired particle physicist (.pdf) and currently an organizational development consultant and coach.
And, as an added bonus, I get to stay with Ted Ernst in Chicago, who is another gem on this earth.
So light blogging ahead as we celebrate a terrific union.
I spent part of Father’s Day yesterday working with one of the youth PODs at the World Urban Forum along with some friends like sara kendall.. We spent part of the morning in a circle, using a talking piece to discuss what should be in a final statement from the youth to the World Urban Forum leaders. The blog for the Youth leadership POD should have some of the final reflections.
In the room we had 50 youth from every continent, all of them investigating ways of engaging youth on the local, regional, national and global levels. What struck me was how the youth were adamant that parallel structures were useful to include youth, but what really needs to happen in many places in the world is that youth need to simply be a part of the decision making processes that affect them and the world they will inherit. Far more valuable than being stuck into advisory roles, youth a crying out for the ability to be active citizens, practicing care and compassion WITH their elders for a world that they will live with longer than any of us.
In my closing comment I thanked the youth for the Father’s Day present of showing up as good stewards for the world my kids would inhabit. And it led me to think about this question: where are you working with youth to co-create the world together?
The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.
That is such a lovely and concise description of the benefits of bottom up organization combined with the benefits of top down. In some ways you could see this polarity as inside versus outside as well. For example, in chaordic organizational design, you see this manifest with the principles that are developed for action which are the collective expression that comes “top down” in a sense to guide the bottom up action of the individuals. There may be a group of people that cares for these principles and, by agreement of the rest of the group, maintains them in order to creatively constrain action. In that sense the organization is top down that allows for and opens space for bottom up agency.
To see this as inner and outer, it seems clear that from the outside, the rules for action come, but they exist to support and encourage the expression of individual volition, so that individuals, acting on their own drives and passions can connect with others to take responsibility for bringing things to life.
We have a real life example of this in the community that has collected around our learning centre here on Bowen Island. Just finishing its third year, the learning centre is a place for homeschooling families to connect with others, use the expertise of hired teachers and for the kids to supplement their homelearning with up to 2.5 days a week of work with others in a class room and resource rich setting. Each family is responsible for the learning of their own children and so we have a number of approaches being used in the community. Our family unschools, and other families use curriculum to various degrees. We are involved in a variety of activities outside of the learning centre but we also come together to work with and support each other.
The learning centre program is supported by a group of parents called the planning council who make top-down decisions about how things run at the centre. They hire the teachers, and look after the finances and also set and maintain the principles of the program. One of the principles is family participation, and so the organization runs as a bit of an Open Space. If you want something to happen, make it happen. If you need help, ask for help. Connect passion and responsibility within the principled parameters of the program and we can do stuff. If what you want doesn’t fit the program, find some other parents and offer it on your own. In this way we support 20 homelearning families, all with different styles, in a common set of activities. It works really well, and is actually surprisingly little work for the planning council. I think their biggest stress is not time per se but wrestling with the edges of the principles to maintain the integrity of the intention of the program. And that, it seems to me, is what top-down should do, while bottom up is taking care of the quality of the offerings and the details. It is, in the words of our Open Space practices, holding and supporting connection, to keep the space open for creative learning and offerings to occur.
[tags]Kevin Kelly, chaordic[/tags]