Funeral urn by Charles LaFond. My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time …
Me and Anthony White this week. Anthony is a professional soccer player who plays for Vancouver FC and is a former player for the team I co-own, TSS Rovers. He helped us win a championship last season. On Wednesday, he came to watch his brother play against us, and we had a long conversation about his career starting to take off. We didn’t pay attention to much else for about ten minutes! Mark McKergow is a friend and colleague in the field of both complexity and hosting (and whisky and jazz!). What I like about Mark’s work is the way …
The three-domain version of Cynefin, originally published on Dave Snowden’s blog. I’m trying to organize my thoughts on containers, complexity and constraints that span a couple of decades of work and grounded theory. In this post, I want to lay out how I see these phenomena in the context of anthro-complexity, largely articulated by Dave Snowden, with implications for complex facilitation, or what we in the Art of Hosting community call “hosting.” I’ll lay out some theory first that I’m working on, link it to facilitation and then share a case study of a recent meeting I hosted to demonstrate …
Someone asked me the other day about how to use constraints in facilitation and I thought I’d jot some quick thoughts down here. Let’s start using terms from Cynefin. Group work falls on a scale between ordered tasks and unordered tasks (or complicated and complex). The first question I ask myself in designing a container for facilitation is, “how much emergence is desired in this field?” In most of my work, I’m working in highly emergent situations, but for folks working around issues like safety or legal issues, there may be a prescribed outcome that the group needs to work …
Most mornings, when I’m at home, I stroll down to a local rocky beach, coffee in hand, to begin my day in meditation. The beach is a pleasant 15-minute walk from my house. When I reach the water, I step from the asphalt onto a gravel path that meanders through trees, past thickets of blackberry bushes, and ends in a secluded cove facing east, towards the rising sun that crests over the 1200 meter ridges of the Brittania Range, the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the inlet in which I live. I began visiting this spot regularly …