> I’m about to board a flight from Toronto to Vancouver and I had the thought this morning that I might share this flight with the Vancouver Whitecaps FC my local football (soccer) team. I am a huge fan of these guys, a member of one of the supporters groups and a seasons ticket holder. And I was dreading sharing the flight with the team. The reason? The Whitecaps absolutely blew the best chance they have had in years of inning the Canadian Championship cup final last night. They came out against Toronto FC – a team that has lost …
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting: on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own, participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold. the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, …
My friend Ginny Belden-Charles told me a great story today. She was working in Detroit on some community development issues with a number of activists and others. Their focus was on empowering community development and social action and creating the kinds of citizen based responses that Detroit needs, and she was invited to come and host a circle. When Ginny arrived in her circle of folks, she was amazed at the presence of the famous revolutionary activist Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is an institution in social activist circles and at 96 years old, with 70 years of practice …
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent …
The Cynefin framework is helpful in making a distinction between the worlds of complicated problems and the worlds of complex ones. One simple distinction between these two worlds is the extent to which they can be known. In a complicated domain, the parameters of the problem can be known and several good practices can be hammered out, with largely knowable results. In the complex domain, the initial conditions are unknown and the results are unknown which is why small experiments designed to tell us more about what is going are very useful for creating emergent practice. Financial markets are famously …