I was hanging out with my mates and fellows from the Art of Hosting yesterday here on Bowen Island. Any time I get to spend with these guys changes the way I see things. Yesterday Toke Moeller was describing a game he has developed called Flowgame, which is a way of asking questions and hosting conversations to sustain flow on these questions. In passing he mentioned that in order to play, you have to have a real question, and he described a real question as a question where you have something at stake. That’s a wicked definition if you think …
After a couple of conversations around the practice workshop I am offering in two weeks, and a lot of midnight interruption on his part Michael Herman has distilled the thinking again on the practices of Open Space.: 1. Being Open-Hearted – not just the act of opening, but the practice of being that way, resting in that state. The tool here is experience, our own life experience. The workshop conversation is about the life experiences that have opened our hearts, in gentle or devastating ways – and how we’ve managed to maintain various states of openness, in spite of everything. …
So on Saturday, i stumble across a nice piece of music about Vanuatu and I write a little post about it and mention my old friend John Salong, with whom I lived in 1988. Not five minutes ago I just got off a Skype call with him. That’s less than four days from the Parking Lot to Google To John and back over Skype. Turns out that someone who was working with him Googled him, found my posting and John called to say hi and to catch up. We’re both fathers of 8-9 year kids, we’re both working in the …
There is a great flowering of dialogic facilitation training this month around these parts in southern British Columbia and northern Washington State. First Peggy Holman and Tom Cato are offering an Appreciative Inquiry training in Seattle from October 18-21. Following that, Toke Paludan Moeller and friends will be right here on Bowen Island offering the excellent Art of Hosting gathering which I can highly recommend. That workshop will run October 30 to November 3 which is a great time to be here on our island, as we celebrate Hallowe’en as a quasi-national holiday. That workshop will also feature an alumni …
Port Alberni, BC I am on the road here, travelling around Vancouver Island hosting conversations with people about what seems like an impossible future. And as we move into discussions about the work we are doing, I find myself more and more focused on finding the questions that help us discern these two subtle presences: the seed of the emergent future crossing the abyss back to our present moment, and the place where our feet fall on the other side of that abyss, the place where we our hearts are all ready present in that desired future. I am facilitating …