These sea lions are afraid to be in the ocean, because a small family of orcas are nearby, and they hunt sea-lions for food. Years ago I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for people working in philanthropy, several of which were self-identified libertarians. They were unfamiliar with the process, and had the common misgivings about it seeming “unstructured.” People often confuse an empty container with a lack of structure, but in truth, Open Space meetings are highly structured. They offer a form and a process to help a group self-organize around issues of importance to the participants themselves. The …
Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture. Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow …
Sunday was one of these magnificent days we get on the south coast of British Columbia at this time of year, where the deep summer makes a preview appearance with warm temperatures, bright sunshine, and the scent of berry blossoms and new grass wafting on the air. It’s just humid enough that it is warm in the shade, and there is no bite in the breeze by the water. So it was a perfect day to launch the kayaks. Our first paddle of the year took us out of Galbraith Bay on the northwest side of Bowen Island and had …
From the time my daughter was born in 1997, my partner and I went hard on studying learning theory to understand how kids learn, what’s good for them and how to support their growth. These little beings don’t come with instruction books. It’s hard enough to learn how to feed and maintain them, let alone figure out how to help their brains and hearts grow. We studied for a lot of years and gradually landed on the work of John Holt, an educational psychologist who, in the 1960s and 1970s, studied how children fail in the Boston school system. Motivated …
My friend Elizabeth Hunt reminded me on twitter of a conversation I had with her in Glasgow a couple of years ago when she attended a complexity workshop I was offering with Bronagh Gallagher. It was a conversation around what is sometimes called the mid-life crisis, and somehow the image that came to mind when Elizabeth told me how she was doing was one of a chrysalis. This will be a non-scientific post, so if you are an actual entomologist I apologize for appropriating your field here. But chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can …