Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be …
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Coming back from Campbell River tonight. I was working with a group of Churches who are currently trying to understand their future. The United Church of Canada is in a period of massive restructuring due to all kinds of causes. We are very clear, retrospectively, what these causes are…everything from demographics shifts to the overall decline of Christendom. Most folks I have been working with over the past few years actually welcome these dynamics and realities, even though it means that the Church has plunged into a period of deep uncertainty. For people that are both spiritual AND religious in …
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Interesting paper released that demands that policy makers adopt a complexity approach to policy making around environmental decision making. These principles are useful, and can you see how they would apply to social systems too? Create policies that have legs: When developing a policy to manage fisheries or allocate water distribution in agriculture, for example, make it flexible so it can continue to effectively manage the resource, no matter how it changes in the future. Support policies that encourage ecosystem diversity: Opt for plans that encourage organism and habitat diversity, because casting a larger net will let the policy …
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Regular readers will know that I’ve been thinking a lot about evaluation for many years now. I am not an evaluator, but almost every project I am involved in contains some element of evaluation. Sometimes this evaluation is well done, well thought through and effective and other times (the worst of times, more often than you think) the well thought through evaluation plan crumbles in the face of the HIPPO – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. So how do we really know what is going on? When I stumbled across Michael Quinn Patton’s work in Developmental Evaluation, a whole bunch …
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I was working with a couple of clients recently who were trying to design powerful questions for invitations to their strategic conversations. Both organizations are dealing with complex situations and specifically with complex changes that were overtaking their ability to respond. Here are some of the questions that cam up: How can we be more effective in accomplishing our purpose? How can we create more engagement to address our outcomes? What can we do to innovate regardless of our structure? Help us create new ideas for executive alignment around our plan to address the change we are now seeing? Can …