I’m on the road again, this time back to Ontario where I will be working with Jennifer Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle in a reboot of our “Reimagining Education” Art of Hosting on the shores of Lake Opinicon in eastern Ontario. Whenever I work out east I build in time to visit family for a few days. I arrived in Toronto on Monday, and stayed with my brother, visited with one of our TSS Rovers women’s players, Maddy Mah, who plays in the fall season for the University of Toronto, and then caught a train to Belleville. Last night …
Over the past 15 years I have worked with churches, faith communities and faith-based social justice movements using the Art of Hosting and participatory leadership. In many ways these organizations have been at the forefront of social and demographic changes, getting older while holding a fierce commitment to addressing issues of injustice in the world. Working with faith leaders and faith-based movements allows us to have a different conversation about participatory leadership, community work and spirit. The Art of Hosting seems to wake up the kind of collaboration that faith communities long for, even as they confront existential questions within …
Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership. —- When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three …
Tenneson, Caitlin and I are running a three day leadership course for MacEwan University here in Edmonton. It starts tomorrow and we are having a great conversation at Remedy chai cafe about why meetings matter for folks studying leadership. Here are some of the insights. —- Meetings are microcosms for leadership practice. They are places to encounter one’s own leadership gifts and leadership challenges. What you learn when you host a meeting is very much related to how you lead a team or and organization or a board. Meetings are a place to confront what’s real and meaningful. They contain …
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting. So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like …