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Rainy day randoms

December 18, 2025 By Democracy, First Nations, Notes No Comments

The wind and rain has swung east again and it’s stormy and very dark out, and so I’m out of the house and spending the day at the library which is such a nice bright and warm place to be. As I walked in I see that my friends Erica Olson and Marysia McGilvray have announced a S?wx?wú7mesh History Book Club for 2026 and I’m excited by that. It picks up on an initiative my friend Pauline Le Bel and I are doing to raise money for a Welcome Figure on Bowen.

Back in the day on the blogs we used to issue hat tips to other bloggers who steered us onto some good stuff. Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for this hefty article by John Lanchester on financialization published in the London Review of Books. And a hat tip to Patti Digh for this truly great list of book recommendations.

Happy 25th anniversary to Coastal First Nations, an incredible organization that has worked hard to protect the central and north coast of BC including Haida Gwaii and northern Vancouver Island. When people ask me what reconciliation really looks like I point to that organization, rooted in First Nations jurisdiction and governance, working in partnership with community, western and Indigenous scientists, knowledge keepers and experts. It’s a remarkable organization and long may it continue to represent the best of what can be in this country.

Managing tankers in the central coast is a key challenge for Coastal First Nations and everyone else who lives in the region. In Strong Coast yesterday, Kashmir Falconbridge, the deputy mayor of the community of Port Clemence on Haida Gwaii, writes about why diluted bitumen tankers should never be allowed on the north coast, specifically the Hecate Strait:

The strait is shallow, which makes the waves steep and violent. Winter storms regularly produce seas of eight to ten metres. Historical accounts describe waves reaching ten to twenty metres during exceptional storms. Short interval waves slam vessels from unpredictable angles. Currents tear through channels at speeds that can overpower even modern ships. Even our seasoned mariners will tell you that the strait demands respect at all times.

The Wall Street Journal installed a vending machine powered by AI and it ran a business for a while until it sunk it into the ground. Which, if you read the Wall Street Journal, is what much of their core market does every day. Even the way it signs off is so typical of how CEOs wrap up operations with their staff.

Unpredictable stuff happening

December 17, 2025 By Bowen, Football, Notes No Comments

It’s nice to see a systemic look at what’s plaguing the healthcare system in BC. Today, The Tyee publishes an article on emergency room capacity, and the strain on the acute care system brought about by several decades of decisions, the consequences of which are coming home to roost. This piece is part of a longer series The Tyee is publishing on the hospital overcrowding in British Columbia.

It’s been a wild weather week here on the south coast of BC. The rains and southeasterly winds have subsided, which always means a backing northwesterly and last night while it was calm here on the east side of our little Island, a few kilometres away the west side was being battered by 100km/h wind gusts and several trees came down over power lines, making today a hunker down at home day for most of the island. The cold front came through around 1:00am last night, when the wind direction swung almost 180 degrees and went from 10km/h to 70km/h+ gusts. The library is closed as the staff were trapped on the other side of the island, so I’m just quietly enjoying the sunshine and calm ocean here on the east side and listening to the water drain off the mountains and into the sea.

It was a torrid weekend for sports in our house. Tottenham had a terrible performance in Nottingham losing 3-0 to Forest. It’s hard to know what is plaguing Spurs, but the joy seems gone from the game for many of them. And it’s diabolical that we have perhaps the best centre back pairing in the league (if not one of the best in the world) and yet, we’re conceding silly goals. Things were looking good after the midweek Champions League win against Prague and the 2-0 Premier league win against Brentford. We sit in 11th place. On the ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have been on a decent run of form lately, choked against the Edmonton Oilers and lost 6-2. Edmonton is my daughter’s team and she and I watched the game together. It was a lopsided energetic in the TV room on Saturday night. Much was redeemed though yesterday. The Leafs had a fantastic come from behind win against Chicago with a couple of very late goals to erase a TERRIBLE first period and a 2-0 deficit. And The Vancouver Goldeneyes returned to the city after an extended road trip and stopped a three game losing streak to take a 2-1 win and slot themselves in at second place in the standings.

Some research on the Art of Hosting and education

December 17, 2025 By Art of Hosting, Evaluation, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning No Comments

I was having a great conversation today catching up with colleagues from the New Jersey Education Association who have long used the principles and framework of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting for their work. One of their offerings is the NJEA Teacher-Leader Academy which is an accredited course in participatory leadership for New Jersey school teachers. It is anchored entirely in the four-fold practice.

In chatting today, I was sharing with them some of the published peer-reviewed and other research that has been done over the years on the Art of Hosting specific to or adjacent to education. I threw a bunch of links in the chat, and before I close the tabs, I thought I’d record them here for posterity.

I’m struck at how much of the research here focuses on methods. There isn’t A LOT on the four fold practice as a scaffolding for leadership and facilitation practice. My friends in New Jersey are underscoring the importance of that, and I hope at some point they will contribute to this body of knowledge with their own reflections on the work.

We continue to explore this world, most recently through an annual Reimagining Education offering that is called by Jennifer Williams along with me, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle. This has been a truly amazing offering the past three years and we will offer it again in 2026 in a new location in the fall.

Leading in tension

December 16, 2025 By Complexity, Leadership, Organization, Uncategorized No Comments

Khelsilem reflects on his most valuable lesson from his first term of a Masters of Public Administration, and he hones in on insights from the Competing Values Framework relating to how good leadership holds tensions :

At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.

Frameworks that help people hold tensions are useful in complexity. There are many, and here’s a collection of them from Diane Finegood who taught the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. They can all be useful depending on context, needs, and intentions.

An Art of Hosting in the woods

December 16, 2025 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting No Comments

I was replying to a question on the Art of Hosting Facebook page about whether anyone had done a low stimulus training, without a facility that fills with posters, and stickies and graphic recording and all manner of artifiacts.  

I sent this reply:

I once did a one day Art of Hosting that took place on a walk in a forest here on my home island. We first sat together by a water fall to check in on the question of what is flowing and what is staying the same. We stopped at a set of old hollowed out cedar tress for a cafe conversation, where we were able to fit four groups of three inside the burnt out trucks of the old cedars. We walked around a lake while I taught about the four fold practice to a small meditation sanctuary in the woods next to a 1100 year old Douglas fir where we sat in circle. And then we set a round of of Open Space conversations and we walked halfway back for the first round. Then stopped in a meadow to start the second round. and finished those conversations before returning to the village, and the pub for beer and dinner and then I sent my friends away on the ferry. There was no writing, no sticky notes, no posters, no flip charts, nothing other than a few good questions, a teaching on the ground and some lovely conversation. I'd do it again in a second.