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Join us for Complexity from the Inside Out October 13-December 15.

September 22, 2022 By Complexity, Featured

Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity. I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with …

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Weaving connections and exchanges by

September 20, 2022 By Complexity 5 Comments

Found this morning on Network Weaver: Over the past few years, I have been increasingly influenced by the concept of “weaving” — what for me means connecting people, ideas, and projects to foster more collaborative social change. Weaving is a skill, a mindset, and a way of being. More art than science, it requires deep listening, being responsive to interests and needs, and “sensing” opportunities to bring people or projects together. Nice post on a set of practical strategies for increasing connections and exchanges at work. One of the more powerful ways to shift patterns in complex systems and catalyze new …

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The stages of engaging with conflict in small towns

September 5, 2022 By Bowen, Community, Featured 3 Comments

A couple of years ago i posted this on our local facebook page. There was something happening that caused me to reflect on how one’s approach to conflict changes the longer you live in a place. As we have turned over our population by more than 50% in the past five or six years, I was trying to give folks a helpful road map. I daresay this is pretty much consistent in every small community anywhere. For folks experiencing their first Bowen Island conflict, here’s generally what happens next. Years 1-3. You move to Bowen and fall in love with …

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How do you work from the soul of a community?

August 26, 2022 By Bowen, Community, Culture, Democracy, Featured 9 Comments

Image: a word cloud capturing Bowen Island culture from the 2017 Cultural Master Plan About 15 years ago I met Lyman Orton, who is a small town entrepreneur who created a very successful mail order business from his family’s General Store in a small town in Vermont. He tells the story of how he got involved in town planning and ended up creating a community plan that was top-down, based on a template and not engaged with the community. When a developer with an idea for a carnival park and zoo came along, the community got quickly divided and Lyman …

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Living in a non-regenerative tourist town

August 24, 2022 By Bowen, Featured 4 Comments

Here is a great article from Canadian Geographic that describes many different approaches small communities are taking to addressing the impact of tourism in their communities. When I look at the examples of the small towns in this article I see some commonalities and some differences with our own little island. The small communities in this article are Rossland, BC, Manitoulin Island in Ontario and Fogo Island in Newfoundland and Labrador. They are all small communities quite far from larger cities and they are all quite self-contained. Every community has a chance to take control of their local economy because …

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