A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel: “When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.” And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him: Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit …
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A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system Photo by alastairb * NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it. At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation. At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or …
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The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act. There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.
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Photo by Darwin Bell Hyperlinks – follow these leads a thread. Haiku resources My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang! Richard Sweeney weaves with paper. A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of. Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven? Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world. Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…) Doug’s blog: Footprints in …
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From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold. …