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In flow in Atlanta

March 25, 2008 By Being, First Nations, Travel 2 Comments

Westin Hotel, Atlanta, tornado damage
The Westin Hotel in Atlanta, which lost windows in last week’s tornado.

A strange week indeed. I left home yesterday morning bound for Toronto and then on to Atlanta where I am doing some work with Public Radio Capital and Native Public Media, looking at how Native community radio stations make an impact. Yesterday I made it as far as Toronto, but a flight delay meant I was cutting my connection close, and I still had to apply for a work visa at US Customs and Border Protection. I arrived in secondary screening at 10 to eight, with an 830 flight pending. There was no one else in the room, save a distraught Hispanic woman who was being denied entry and a tired Chinese man, waiting for his visa too. I have applied for four of these TN visas and it’s not an onerous process. All three officers however remarked on my short time, and I patiently explained to them that my flight was delayed, I was doing my best and could they try and get me on the 830 flight to Atlanta.

But alas, US Customs and Border Patrol is not about customer service. It is very much about creating an environment that seeks to put you off your game, get you to tip your hand, spill the beans. Officers stay out of rapport, breaking eye contact should you try to engage, and in secondary screening, they move very slowly, laughing and talking loudly about clearly non-related stuff. It seems designed to put you on the defensive. They’re cool…what’s bugging you? So alas at 830, after sitting alone in the customs hall with five officers trading stories, an officer finally called me forward, asked a few questions and gave me my visa. By then the plane had gone and I was bound for a night in Toronto. There was no apology to be had. But I don’t complain – that is their job: to screen anyone entering the United States and ensure that no immigration laws are broken. That is how things are with Homeland Security. For me it’s just good practice in patience.
As for Air Canada, they were good enough to recognize their part in the timing delay and they nicely put me up at the Sheraton right at the airport. So props to them.

Luckily my connection was non-essential, and so I rebooked for this morning, and shot down here on a quick CRJ flight, arriving at noon, which was too early for this Shearton, so, stranded again, I set out around downtown Atlanta searching for life. It was long before I discovered that life, even on this lovely cool spring day, was all underground, in the Peachtree Center mall, where long lines of office workers were queued up at fast food outlets for lunch. I found some decent pad thai (Atlanta is a very multicultural city, despite your prejudices about what Georgia must be like) and settled into read the Globe and Mail. In the Life section I read this quote by the poet James Richardson, which sums up my week:

The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.

Sweet. And so with that, I headed back out into the downtown core and shot some photos of the buildings, and especially the Westin Hotel which lost a whole lot of windows in a tornado last week. Tomorrow I run a two hour world cafe on measuring the impact of Native community radio stations, then I hop an afternoon flight to Toronto and on to Vancouver so that I can arise bright and early Thursday for the first day of two with the Department of Fisheries and Ocieans. I finish that job on Friday at noon, debrief, hit a 5pm flight to Nanaimo and head up to Parksville to run a weekend retreat for the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service until Sunday at noon. Then I’m home, and staying there for about two weeks. That will be the longest stint at home this year, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to play with my kids and tend our new garden.

If I didn’t have flow, and if I didn’t see travel and work like this as one long extended meditation, I don’t know how I’d survive it.

Vicki Robin on Conversation Week and the art of hosting

March 22, 2008 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation One Comment

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This week is Conversation Week.

I’ve known Vicki Robin for a few years now.   She’s a lovely, lively and curious soul, not shy about standing up and taking responsibility for leading shift in the world.   She developed the Conversation Cafe methodology, and conceived of Conversation Week in 2001.

Vicki was with us at the Art of Hosting on Whidbey Island in January, where she did something I’ve never seen before.   She stepped out of her own methodology and facilitated an Open Space gathering.   She was skeptical about Open Space, not having had great experiences in Open Space gatherings, and she is a developer of process, and in my experience, those who have devoted their lives to developing and polishing methodologies rarely step out of their cherieshed processes and try something new.   Vicki held space beautifully for us and was incredibly generous with the group about her learning and observations.   I have never seen a person so closely identified with one methodology step out and practice in another one.   It was really very cool.
You can now hear for yourself some of these observations and learnings from Vicki’s many years of experience.   She recently produced a short podcast on Conversation Week and the art of hosting, which is a lovely summation of the role of a host and ways that you can host everywhere.   This is a great way to get into Conversation Week and contemplate a deeper practice of hosting.

Notes

March 22, 2008 By Collaboration, Emergence, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Links, Organization

Window Rock

Photo of the rock wall at Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation, where I was visiting and working last month.

Links that I have come across recently:

Art of Hosting, June 9-11 in Calgary Alberta

March 19, 2008 By Art of Hosting

Just announced…Tatiana Glad, Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony , Cheryl De Paoli and I will be working together to host an Art of Hosting retreat near Calgary, Alberta, June 9-11, 2008.     We invite any and all to join us for three days of inquiry, exploration and learning into organizational leadership, community development and strategic and meaningful conversation.

The invitation and registration form is now available for download.

For more upcoming Art of Hosting events in Boston, Tampa Bay, Ireland, Bowen Island and elsewhere this year, visit the Art of Hosting website.

Why Obama matters

March 19, 2008 By Flow, Invitation, Leadership 6 Comments

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Photo by jurvetson

Being a Canadian means watching US politics like most people watch major sporting events. You admire the players, ooo and ahh at the spectacular moves they make, but ultimately you know you will never have a chance to play. It’s all entertainment.

Except that it isn’t. The President of the United States is often styled as the “leader of the free world” which is true in some ways, although the leader the rest of us in the “free world” might choose for ourselves is very often not the ones Americans choose for us. So, in case any of my many American friends and colleagues are curious about the opinions of those of us who have to live with whoever you elect, here is my most concise redux on Barak Obama.

Obama matters because he is inviting us to see the world differently. He is bucking the trend of western society by offering hope instead of hate, by challenging us to be better rather than to be afraid, but encouraging responsibility rather than dependancy. And if we needed any further evidence of that, along comes his masterful speech of yesterday in which he addressed the real life racism and divisiveness that plagues American society and rests just beneath the surface.
The world right now is about segmenting everything – market share, demographics, political polarities. In the corporate world, we are subjected to team building exercises that using various typologies to label what kind of thing everybody else is. We are not seeing each other clearly. Prejudice, be it economic, racial, demographic or whatever, fuels everything. Companies and campaigns reach out to different groups in different ways to get them to buy into the same thing, leaving people divided, bitter and suspicious about the “other” even as we all end up drinking Coke.

If Obama is doing anything – inviting anything – he is inviting us to rise above the ways in which we have been segmented, and the ways in which we segment ourselves and find partners, collaborators, creative sources of tension and cohesion by USING the diversity that exists everywhere. Diversity and multiculturalism in the America I know currently holds that country back. It is exploited for gain, whether political, social or economic. Obama is calling for it instead to take the country forward, and as a citizen of America’s closest neighbour, I applaud that call and hope it resonates in November.

I think Obama is raising the stakes with the magnificent speech. If his campaign dies because his message is destroyed by the very things he is calling out, it will represent a Pyrrhic victory for the the winner, be it Clinton or McCain. Whoever defeats that message of hope and cohesion will have inherited a country which glimpsed the light of possibility and lowered the shades against it.

So I invite my American friends to think about the kind of leadership that is being offered in this moment and imagine what it will mean not only for your country but for the rest of the world as well. If I was voting, I’d throw it to Obama. To the extent that any of these three candidates can, he has the best chance to really help things shift. That shift, as I see it, can only be a good thing for America and the rest of the world.