Just out from an Art of Hosting practitioner. The guide is a free download: The Lotus – A Practice Guide for Authentic Leadership in Strategic Sustainable Development – presents nine personal leadership capacities that authentic leaders find essential in their work when facilitating large-scale, complex, transformational change in organisations and communities. Furthermore, it suggests practices (ranging from contemplative and spiritual to physical, engaging both head, heart and hands) that help in developing your personal leadership capacities via The Lotus | A Practice Guide for Authentic Leadership in Strategic Sustainable Development.
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Come an join Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and me for an Art of Hosting learning retreat on our home island, Bowen Island, near Vancouver this October. Held at Rivendell, atop Cates Hill, this Art of Hosting will explore recent work and learning about self-organization, participatory leadership and community resiliency. We will explore a number of participatory facilitation methods, engage in personal reflective practice using The Work of Byron Katie and delve into models of systems change being developed through the Berkana Institute. For registration information, visit the Berkana website, and please consider joining us for a power …
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I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were …
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This past week I have been in Minnesota working with colleagues Jerry Nagel, Ginny Belden-Charles and Mandy Ellerton. We were conducting a second residential training in collaborative leadership with a number of planning grantees working in communities to make impacts on the social and economic determinants of health. In this residential we spent a fair bit of time working on tactical community organizing, exploring how to teach this from the perspective of the Art of Hosting. The traditional tactics of Alinsky-style community organizing operate by creating strategic targets for action and mobilizing community power against those targets. It’s a zero-sum …
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A lovely description of what happens when the magic of conversation flows. This past weekend I had the opportunity to be part of a Quaker-style “clearness committee” with a few twists thrown in. I have done a few similar sessions in the past, though it has been a while, and once again it proved to be a remarkable experience. The impetus for the session was a friend who, acknowledging that she is at a crossroads in her life and career, reached out for help with discernment. My wife, Emily, and I suggested convening a small group of …