Just coming off an Art of Hosting with friends Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and Teresa Posakony. Something Tenneson said on our last day as we were hunkering down to do some action planning, has stayed with me. He said something like “it is easy to create actions that go off in a million different directions, but much more sensible to create actions that come from a common centre. There is something about holding that common centre together invites trust so that we can release responsibility to action conveners and known they are initiating works that comes from our common shared …
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This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system. Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where …
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Graphic from puramaryam.de Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results). There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate. Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in …
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Working with a client tonight who is beginning a process of trying to find some questions for moving forward. The client is a group of churches who are exploring how they might collaborate to undertake their joint mission together. There are a number of factors at play, and the environment they are working in is diverse. Tonight, with a few short hours, we’ll do a little story gathering. We’ll begin by exploring an uncontextualized Cynefin framework and then invite small anecdote circles to form around the question of “What are the challenges and role of our Churches in this …
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A great quote from a post by Mark Simon: The more power you have, the more people will lis ten respectfully to your story. Consequently, listening to some one’s story is a way of empowering them, of validat ing their intrinsic worth as a human being. ~ Kay Pra nis A very important principle for design work.