My friend (and one time guest blogger here) Alex Kjerulf is ploughing ahead with his Happy At Work Project and he now has a website up and an international conference in the offing for next month.

In his inaugural English newsletter, he quotes from this article about Southwest Airlines and reiterates the following story:

This is from “Synchronicity” by Joseph Jaworski. It is from a conversation he had with Francisco Varela in which Varela tells him about the power of being open:

For me this is a perfect summary of what it is like to live a life of invitation. It also nicely describes the Open Space facilitation practices of Opening and Inviting.

I learned something at OSonOS which applies to unconferencing. Blogging DURING a conference is not good unconferencing behaviour. Unconferencing dialogue requires attention and you can’t do that while you are writing.

And so, my thoughts about OSonOS will trickle out here in the next little while. I start with this one, from Masud Sheik.

Masud said something in the closing circle that sent me thinking…he began his comments by saying “most of us are dead” by which I think he meant most of the people who have been alive in human history.

This immediately made a picture of a tree come to mind, with dead heart wood supporting the thin living layer of bark. Most of the bulk of a tree is dead, but the living skin is what ensures the future. Slice a thick circle of bark around the circumference of the tree and it will die, despite 1000 years of growth.

Humanity is like that and whether Masud meant this or not, it was a powerful image for me about how important it is to do good work in the world.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

What a hairy day of travel that was.

I’m here in Halifax for the 13th annual Open Space on Open Space conference. In an hour or so, 100 of us from all over the world will gather in in a church hall on Barrington Street, for our annual gathering, wherein we take stock of practices and the state of things Open Space. And of course we do it in Open Space.

Yesterday it took me a long time to get here. My 7:00am flight was cancelled by the Air France crash in Toronto which backed up traffic all over the country. When I finally did get on a plane (after a few moments of grief when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to) we left seven hours later, and arrived in Halifax at 2:00am. I missed the reception, but I’m just now wolfing down some breakfast and about to head over to the hall. If there’s wireless about, I’ll post notes from session topics as they emerge.

Now this might seem a tad trite, but I heard an interview on CBC this morning with the David and Nanelle Barash, the authors of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries : A Darwinian Look at Literature, a book that uses evolution as a lens for reading literature.

On preview, I thought this was a silly idea, but it seems that what they have done is to review the western literary canon and note how prevalent Darwinian ideas have been over time. This, the authors claims is simply evidence that the best and most enduring pieces of literature come from very accurate observations of nature. Evolution is all around us and informs many of our behaviours and so why wouldn’t the authors of the western canon not encode this awareness in their works?

The Barashs are not saying that authors from Virgil to Mark Twain were all about a literary program of encoding the idea of evolution in everything they wrote. Far from it. They are saying that the best writers can really see what’s going on, and if you read literature with an eye to this, then you will see it too.

This led me to two thoughts. First I wondered what other lenses people use to look at literature. How do you read? I read novels only occasionally and my eye is tuned to the hero’s journey and the moments of transformation within people, where they come into their own power. What are yours?

My second thought was somewhat more profound. If it true that Darwinian ideas permeate our best cultural products, even those that predate Darwin, could a saturation in such a culture have somehow tuned Darwin’s eyes to pick out the patterns in nature that eventually became his theory of evolution? I guess I see this as an integral question: science is so preoccupied with observing and measuring the world, are not the inter-subjective roots of theory not the encoded lessons that are transmitted through a culture’s stories? This is why stories are so important it seems to me. Tell stories and let listeners discern the patterns that lead to renewed observations of the world, informed both by observation and interpretation. I wonder what the Barashs would think of this question?

It certainly leads support to the idea that a balance of the arts, literature and science might create the conditions for profound innovation. A call for a little less specialization and a little more widening and deepening of engagement with the world.