This afternoon I’m coming home after a morning running a short process for a church in Victoria, BC. The brief was pretty straightforward: help us decide between four possible scenarios about our future. Lucky for me, it gave me an instant application for some of the stuff I was learning in London last week. The scenarios themselves were designed through a series of meetings with people over a number of months and were intended to capture the church’s profile for its future, as a way of advertising themselves for new staff. What was smart about this exercise was the …
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This afternoon Caitlin and I were in a delightful conversation with new colleagues that ranged across the landscape of the work we are all trying to do in the world, supporting leadership, supporting quality and addressing the ineffable aspects of human experience that pervade our work on leadership. And in the conversation we found our way to the idea of friendship. In our Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics offering we are exploring friendship as a key strategic pillar to transforming the nature of engagement, organizational life and community development. And today as we were discussing friendship as the highest form …
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My son has been working on a project for his grade nine year. At his middle school, graduating students are required to complete a year-long project called a MasterWorks. Finn has chosen the reconstruction of a downhill bike skills park. Earlier this year, our local government flattened the one we had without consultation, and Finn has been part of the team leading the charge to rebuild it in a different location. My dad has been active in his community working on developing a dog park and also helping the village with it’s official community plan. As a result, he has …
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For the past few weeks I have been trying an interesting experiment in civic dialogue. Here on Bowen Island we are in the midst of local elections. We are a small community of 3500 living on a liece of land about the same size as Vancouver, with fairly limited resources in terms of being able to fund local services. It is a beautiful and inspiring place to live, a place that almost wills one to dream about it. It inspires people to move here, to build, to steward, to preserve, to write. Folks run for election because deep down they …
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Chris Hadfield, Canada’s greatest guitar slinging astronaut, has this to say: “… I was up (on the space station) for five months and it really gave time to think and time to look at the world, actually to steal 90 minutes at one point and just float by the window and watch the world, go round the world once with nothing to do but ponder it. And I think probably the biggest personal change was a loss of the sense of the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It’s really we sort of teach it to our children, you …