Some of my friends and I with in the Art of Hosting community create poems from our work as a kind of harvest, a way of listening to the voices shared in a circle and reflecting back to the group, it’s wholeness using the words of those in the room. The poems are written on the spot and read into the room, slam style. Such poems evoke energy, and honour the whole. We call these “dialogue poems.” Here is the one from yesterday’s check in in Montreal with our core hosting team… Hosting team Check in poem Where did you …
Here at the Art of Hosting in Chicago working with 70 people fromthe restorative justice field and the early childhood education world. Inspired by a design from Tenneson Woolf and an invitation from Teresa Posakony, my new friend Anamaria Accove and I hosted a lovely exploration of the Cynefin framework using movement and physical embodiment to help people understand the difference between the domains. The exercise went this way: We taped the framwork on the floor, which is the standard way I teach it. Before we talked about it at all, we invited the group to divide into four …
Richard Straub writes in the Harvard Business Review, on a great piece about what stops managers from adopting complexity views: Complexity wasnt a convenient reality given managers desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect. Here, the shareholder value philosophy, which determines so much of how our corporations operate these days, is …
A couple of days ago I was invited by Transition US to discuss the Cynefin framework and what it means to work with complexity in a one hour teleconference. The recording of that call is now available if you’d like to listen in.
It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly: Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture. Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility. The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it. Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous. Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they …