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Seeing ourselves in other’s histories

October 12, 2023 By Bowen, Culture, Featured 2 Comments

After the wedding by Leanne Romak My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23. Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos …

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Obliquity as a strategy for learning

September 27, 2023 By Complexity, Learning 2 Comments

From a lovely video post from Johnnie Moore: “ Sometimes giving instructions, offering advice and explanations or information may not be the best way to help people to progress and grow. And that sometimes what’s needed is a spirit of playful experimentation and a sense of companionship. When I coached kids at football, I was the third coach on our team. I am not a great player, so I couldn’t teach the kids deep strategy and techniques. But I was able to help them understand how they were learning the game. We had rotating subs, so when kids came off …

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Knowing our Place

September 22, 2023 By Bowen, Featured, First Nations 2 Comments

Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014 The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada. Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, …

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Time and affordances and a deep breath

September 13, 2023 By Being, Complexity, Culture, Emergence, Evaluation, Featured, Leadership, Learning

I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach. This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you …

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Leadership as jazz…no don’t stop reading!

September 11, 2023 By Being, Collaboration, Complexity, Containers, Facilitation, Featured, Improv, Leadership, Music 5 Comments

My Epiphone Emperor Joe Pass guitar upon which I am learning…leadership? Read on! It’s a cliche as old as time, one I have been guilty of using occasionally too. Leadership is like jazz, where the members of an ensemble support each other in improvisation. We listen carefully, respond to what each other is doing, offer creative responses and make something amazing together. Yes. Leadership is way more about improvisation than, say, following a step to step guide to assembling IKEA furniture. But there is another set of metaphors from jazz that I have never seen talked about, perhaps because it …

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