A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late. Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with …
I was in a meeting yesterday, a policy consultation actually, which went quite well. As expectations are sometimes low for these types of meetings, and ours came off as a pretty good time, I spent some time thinking about how we made it work. This was a very typical kind of policy consultation. Government creates a policy, in concert many others, and checks back with the “stakeholderss” (a term I loathe) as to where we should go from here. In this particular consultation, history has made relations between the government and the participants particularly rocky. Consultations are often characterized by …
Today a post by Peter Buys on the OSLIST caught my eye… I am fully convinced that Open Space is a marvelous tool to stimulate individual creativity; spontaneous collaboration (for the duration of the Open Space event); and an expression of trust in people by the client (in other words the ones who bought / decided for the Open Space event)…Many if not most Open Spaces are only very short blips (events) in typically much longer processes of change. But the Open Space does not really address that issue nor does it really offer (as far as I know) options …
From Doug at FootprintsintheWind.com: “Conversation changes the world. To suggest to someone that their ideas will be heard and acted upon is the most radical thing we can do. Any time we listen to someone that is what we are conveying” One of the most fundamental teachings for me from the Art of Hosting is about attention to design. When we sit down to consciously create conversational spaces in which people are invited to show up whole, we can have a significant impact on the work at hand. Meetings are popularly knocked for being all talk and no action. Business …
I was working with a client this weekend, the board of a quasi-professional association, and we were discussing ways to build better support for decisions. I introduced them to the consensus decision making model I use, something which is adopted from the work of Sam Kaner. They liked it and I agreed to write it into the report I was doing for them. Thought I’d share it with you readers as well… Voting certainly has its place, but if you are looking for sustainable decisions, where unity and long term support for a decision are important, a consensus decision making …