Somehow that statement is worth keeping nearby in my work. For me and everyone I work with. I spend a lot of time working with people who need or want to do something new. And no level of new work – innovation, boundary breaking, next levelling or shifting – is possible without failure. A lot of it. Much more often than not. Today, working with 37 leaders from human social services and government in our Leadership 2020 program, Caitlin asked a question: “How many of you have bosses that say it’s okay to fail? How many of you have said …
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“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago This. And a small vignette. In our circle yesterday, Caitlin arrived a little late, and took a seat on the outside of the rim. The one who noticed was a Chinese-Vietnamese woman who had come to Canada as a child refugee in the 1970s, stuffed into a dangerous boat with hundreds of others fleeing …
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I’ve been working in the world of program development with a lot of complexity and innovation and co-creation lately and have seen these three terms used sometimes interchangeably to describe a strategic move. As a result, I’ve been adopting a more disciplined approach to these three kinds of activities. First some definitions. Taken explicitly from Cynefin, a probe is an activity that teaches you about the context that you are working with. The actual outcome of the probe doesn’t matter much because the point is to create an intervention of some kind and see how your context responds. You learn …
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This morning I’m listening to a lecture from Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, who recently gave the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture on “Doing the Right Thing.” Nenshi shares his thoughts and stories on citizenship and on how that is changing in Canada. And he doesn’t pull punches. The lecture is divided into two parts. The second part talks about citizen action, but the first part talks about our history of racism. There is a deep thread of racism that runs through Canadian society. As a white skinned man, I grew up hearing racist chatter. “Privilege” in Canada – being an “Old …
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Over the past four years, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry and I have been sitting down and thinking about our learning about the way participatory leadership intersects with power, systems change, large scale and sustainable engagement and deep personal practice. We have combed through years of our stories and experiences, and developed a learning offering that shares some of our theory, deep practices and stories of systems change. Over the past two years Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics has travelled across Canada, the United States and once to Europe and we have been lucky to welcome nearly 300 …