This is the year I finally turn my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool into a book. I’ve been intending to do this for a number of years now, and the planning guide that lives on this website (available for free in English and Spanish) is essentially the book treatment and summary. The book itself will include a little bit of theory as well, based on my decade long dive into complexity work. It will also contains some stories, case studies and inspiration. As a part of preparing the book, I’m offering a four week online course starting …
In his book Sea Room Adam Nicholson describes meeting John MacAuly, a Hebridean boat builder who has just built a boat for him to sail across the Minch to the Shiants. “And do you think I’ll make a good sailor of her” “If you had another life,” John said. “Ah yes,” I said reeling a little. “I suppose one needs to know these things instinctively.” “No,” he said. “You need to be entirely conscious of what you are doing and why you are doing it.”
Over the years the Art of Hosting community of practice has developed some methods for large group process facilitation that have become standards alongside the methods we have imported into our work, such as Circle Way, Open Space Technology and World Cafe. One of these, Pro Action Cafe, is one of my go to methods for hosting small and rapid fire project development. Ria Baeck, one of the co-developers of this method along with Rainer von Leoprechting shared the Pro Action Cafe origin story on the Art of Hosting list, and so here are her words and observations, for posterity: …
One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones. Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work. Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool. The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for …
John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius. The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I …