Over the past few years, I have enjoyed watching Otto Scharmer’s practice develop as he moves between the world of high level systems thinking and grounded facilitation practice. The first book he helped write, Presence, was a lovely distillation of his reasearch and I have been working a lot with his new book, Theory U, with its grounding in practice, to work with networks and communities who are trying to access the source of their collective futures. I have also appreciated his willingness to openly share the tools he and the presencing community have been developing at the Presencing Institute …
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Last week I was working with an interesting group of 60 Aboriginal folks who work within the Canadian Forces and the department of National Defense, providing advice and support on Aboriginal issues within the military and civilian systems. We ran two half days in Open Space to work on emerging issues and action plans. In an interesting side conversation, I spoke with a career soldier about fear. This man, one of the support staff for the gathering, had worked for a couple of decades as a corporal, mostly working as a mechanic on trucks. We got into …
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I have had an interesting few days working with Aboriginal leadership from around North America. In Michigan last week, I helped convene 24 folks interested in what indigenous leadership means, and today I am here in Port McNeil BC, hosting a community to community forum between First Nations and local governments. One of the things that folks in the rest of indigenous North America don’t realize about the cultures of the west coast is how radically different they are from the cultures of the plains, desert and forests of the rest of North America. This is true in many ways, …
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Following a great talk from Gil Fronsdel on how self is constructed, I had a nice insight yesterday about personal identity. Fronsdel says that when something happens, there are three things going on: There is the reality There is what we think about the reality There is the “I” that is thinking. These are conditional, that is, they depend on and arise from each other. When I see something, I think something about it and my self in strengthened. For example: It’s raining today I hate rainy days. I’m not suited to living in a rainforest! In Buddhism, …
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Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.