In the Cynefin framework, the domains are really shades with some clear boundaires. Strategic work using Cynefin is about making various moves between different domains for different reasons. This is called Cynefin dynamics, and there’s an old but good paper on it here. In Cynefin dynamics there is a strategic move of “taking a shallow dive into chaos” which is useful for strategic purposes when one needs to break pattern entrainment. It is a very useful move in teaching contexts when we are trying to get people to let go of some of their fixed ways of seeing and doing …
The other day a friend asked me who is doing good writing that can inform her own journey with reconciliation. She is a very involved white woman, doing work with universities and indigenous communities and even she was having trouble finding good resources to keep her learning going and share with others. I couldn’t point her to sources for a couple of reasons. First, the world is moving really quickly, and good articles and papers that are written are often out of date fairly quickly. But more important, to get published, a writer often has to sanitize the outrage, emotional …
Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here. It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from …
Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together in a traditional conference of panels, workshops and tours to learn and develop their own practices of social entrepreneurship, community development, planning and research. The conference organizers, led by the courageous Barb Davies of Momentum Consulting were resolved to make at least part of the conference a participatory plenary. The idea was to put the intelligence of the network to use and to ground and apply the learning and experiences of …
One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all. This paragraph sums up his premise: “We are beyond the hegemony of …