For those of you that read in newsfeeders you won’t have noticed that I changed the template of the blog again. I think it’s now a little easier to read, but let me know. At any rate, light blogging this month. I have been involved in some incredibly draining work of late, the most recent of which required me to be substantially bigger than I normally have been. I was holding space for a day long circle dialogue on Aboriginal child welfare in British Columbia. It was a full day with many important people from throughout the system who came …
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As Michael and I make some progress on our writing, I find that I have been assembling together bits and pieces of writing I have done over the years and putting some papers up at my site. Today I want to invite you to have a look at a new paper called “Six observations about seeing” which is composed from some blog posts I made 18 months ago or so. As always, comments are welcome.
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Inspired by a project I have been involved in with the Anecdote boys and Viv McWaters, I have written a paper on language and leadership practices in convening a dialogue. Here’s the introduction… William Isaacs book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is continually inspiring reading. It equates very well with the practices that we are teaching fo Open Space facilitation and it is a useful guide for other forms of process facilitation. In the book, Isaacs describes four fields of conversation, essentially politeness, breakdown, inquiry and flow. Within each of these four fields of dialogue, there are a …
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I have been listening this evening to a podcast (.mp3) by Buddhist teacher James Foster on the single most important question in any spiritual path: so what? That’s it. That is the question. It is neither a trivial question nor one that is completley cavalier. In fact it is a profoundly important question in very many realms and it is the utter foundation of the grounding practices that take facilitation, leadership and work from the esoteric to the real. So heading into a week of teaching, I think I will anchor a lot of what I am …
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Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it. The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action. But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen. Back in the fall, my business …