Happy new year! I’m back from our annual two week winter retreat and have been working with the Quinault Indian Nation this week in Washington State alongside my friend Sono Hashisaki. We’re working on a process to bring more integration to the work of the Tribal government by creating interative planning processes that involve community members, government program managers and political leaders. It’s a fascinating piece of work, and a very interesting community. Over the break, and partly as a result of this work, I’ve been thinking a little bit about some of Adam Kahane’s current work in which he …
Little gifts from around the web, deposited into my nest: Dervala, whom I have read and loved for years, is writing beautiful things about chickens. And as for what came first, if only the original had left a note that would last as long as the markers on the Hoover Dam, we would know Amazing presentation of processes of complex problem solving, and some very cool harvesting stuff from Idiagram. In support of this, Jack Martin Leith has a nice set of decision making tools. And here is a nice story about a highly practical tool: perl, the prime programming …
Those of you interested in exploring the Art of Hosting, our pattern language for working with conversational leadership in living systems, might consider joining Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea and I at teh Whidbey Institute near Seattle in the New Year. Invitation and information is here. You presence is desired!
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel: “When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.” And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him: Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit …
Farmed salmon are killing the wild runs of fish on our coast. Sea lice infestations now threaten almost all of the existing pink stocks that swim through the Broughton Archipelago. With the loss of wild salmon comes the loss of so much more, including the health of First Nations people on the coast. In the past 5 years a number of studies have been done showing that the diabetes epidemic that plagues First Nations communties can be managed by eliminating non-indigenous carbohydrates and relying more on wild foods. To allow salmon farming which is bringing wild salmon stocks to their …