Smelhmelhélch (Passage Island) at the mouth of Átl’ka7tsem (Howe Sound) before the snows came earlier this week. Some notes on 2023 while I have a moment to review them. The year began with the death of my father and is ending with worries about the serious and lingering health issues of other senior family members and so in a lot of ways this year has been split between personal grief during the first part of the year, and the waiting, supporting and attending in the second part of the year. Several times during the year, I haven’t found myself at …
In the Art of Hosting world we have a few shared core teachings that show up in nearly all the learning workshops that happen. At some point we talk about complexity – we usually explore the Chaordic Path as a simple introduction into complexity – and we always touch on the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting. Back in 2014 I was doing a project with the United Church of Canada looking at the different levels of their structure in British Columbia and imagining what they could also be. If there is one thing that Churches have consistently …
It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news. Social media rethink On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in …
One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence. I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If …
I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online. Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June …