Thanks to a rich conversation with artistic researcher Julien Thomas this morning I found this video of Olafur Eliasson at TED in 2009. In this presentation he talks about the responsibility of a person in a physical space, and discusses how his art elicits a reaction beyond simply gazing at a scene. It address one of the fundamental problems in our society for me: that of the distinction between participation and consumption. So much that happens in physical spaces and in our day to day lives has been geared towards gazing and consuming and away from participation and responsibility.
I’m prepping for a small gig with a non-profit moving to a shared leadership model, and also reading a bit more on Cynefin strategy, and so there are a lot of tabs open in my browser this afternoon. instead of saving them all to an Evernote folder, I thought I’d share the best ones with you.
A couple of good blog posts in my feed this morning that provoked some thinking. These quotes reminded me how much evaluation and planning is directed towards goals, targets and patterns that cause us to look for data that supports what we want to see rather than learning what the data is telling us about what’s really going on. These helped me to reflect on a conversation I had with a client yesterday, where we designed a process for dealing with this.
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 …
Back from London now from a four day deep dive into complexity theory and Cynefin practice with Dave Snowden and Tony Quinlan from Cognitive Edge. It was a packed full four days with many many many bits and pieces of philosophy, natural science, organizational theory and a few exercises thrown in. It was presented in a straight up lecture format, eight hours a day with one or two exercises and some short periods of conversation. The best reflection periods were the three to four hours afterwards with classmates engaged in what my new Welsh friend Sion Charles and I called …