Chris Corrigan

Continuing on from my post yesterday, I find that Henry Mintzberg has been up to his good, outraged trickster self, and has published a redux of what is wrong with Public Management as a whole: There is no one best way to manage everything. These practices have done their share of damage to many government departments, and beyond. Many corporations and NGOs have also suffered from what can reduce to a contemporary form of bureaucracy that discourages innovation, damages cultures, and disengages employees. In essence, the New Public Management seeks to (a) isolate public services, so that (b) each can …

Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing projects towards the evaluation outcomes, in order to give the best chance of an initiative surviving and continuing to attract resources. One of the things I appreciate about developmental evaluation is its deliberate engagement with emergence. Making sense of emergence however can be a really time consuming affair, and so I’m thinking about how we can use good use of time to use dialogue and collective meaning making to help …

A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods. On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image There are a bunch of us …

Bruce Cockburn is probably my favourite songwriter. I like to say that he’s my favourite psalmist too, because his somgs are like little prayers that capture the full range of human experience from drop-down-on-your-knees awe, to deep and desperate despair. Yesterday I found myself, as I do in times of reflection, going to Bruce Cockburn’s catalogue for some quiet mirroring. When you’re lovers in a dangerous time Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight You’ve got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight. What …

One of the things I see as a Canadian working in the USA in these times is that politics takes a second seat to actually working on problems at the local and community level. My experience in the past few years has been working with diverse groups of people people on issues such as disability inclusion, the future of churches, anti-violence, social justice, immigrant and refugee services, health promotion, public education alternatives, fisheries policy engagement, and palliative care. Some of these groups have been made of of folks with shared politics, but many have included people from across the …

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Citizens or customers?

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Trying to make developmental evaluation easier

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What’s in the central garden?

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Lovers in dangerous times

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Working across the political divide in the USA

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Citizens or customers?

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Trying to make developmental evaluation easier

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What’s in the central garden?

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Lovers in dangerous times

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Working across the political divide in the USA

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