Ottawa, Ont.
I’m here in Ottawa at the National Aboriginal Forestry Association meeting threading some World Cafe work into their annual conference. This is a real time harvest of the work we are doing.
This conference is bringing together about 130 people to dust off recommendations that were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples ten years ago. We are looking specifically at about a dozen recommendations relating to forestry. Certainly much has changed in the past ten years, but there are some essential things that would allow First Nations to take over much more control of their resources that simply haven’t been done. These include sorting out better access, and looking at tenure reform to allow for First Nations to log in a way that supports sustainable local economies rather than feeding the industrial forestry model.
The design for this work proceeds through a fairly straightforwad plan. We have four sessions which will take the group through divergence, a groan zone and into some convergence. The first session is aimed at getting a broad sense of what might be possible to leverage the power of the system. The two groan zone sessions deal with how these strategies might actually work in practice and our final session tomorrow afternoon will look at the good bets for supporting action that will ensure that the ideas we discuss get some legs post-conference.
The breakout sessions are dealing with the ideas for moving forward these stalled thoughts, and in the plenary we are using a really interesting blend of Cafe type conversations to think about the action part. Today we completed two parts of the Cafe and there are two more tomorrow.
We began the day asking this question:
What do we have to do if we are to leverage the entire power, potential and capacity of this whole sector to do things that we have never done before?
With delegates sitting around conference tables in groups of 4-6, we posed the question and had two rounds of conversation. Participants switched tables between rounds. At the end of the second round, we asked participants to capture their nuggets on an index card and to have those available to us. Close to 100 cards came back. The participants all departed for their first breakout sessions armed with the question of how we could leverage the power of the sector to move the ideas forward.
During that breakout session and over lunch myself and Chad, a NAFA staffer, went through the cards and looked for the main themes. I captured the essence of what was being said using FreeMind and produced a mind map with text weighted according to how much attention each theme received. I then redrew the mindmap by hand to show the emerging themes, photographed it and projected it on two big screens so people could see it while I presented these back to the group as a whole.
mp3: My explanation of this mind map as a way of seeding the second round of conversation
Once they had the whirlwind tour from me, I asked them to turn to one another again for one round of focussed conversation on what they are now learning about these strategies. We heard a few voices back after this brief 25 minute conversation and people had both questions and insights that I then invited them to carry with them into the afternoon’s breakout sessions.
Tomorrow we will use the Cafe process to move through the groan zone by jamming on these leveraging strategies to get the sector to address a number of emerging crises relating to climate change, consolidation and global trade impacts on local communities and small and medium sized businesses.
Back in the fall I published The Tao of Holding Space (.pdf), a small ebook I had been working on for a number of years. It seemed to get the attention of Lyn Hartley from Fieldnotes, the online journal of the Shambhala Institute. She ran a little interview with me, and this month it appeared in the most recent issue. The interview covers the origins of the book and then we get into some detail about my facilitation practice and the underlying foundation for the way I work.
Thanks to Lyn for the interest in my work.
\
Victoria, BC
Sitting at a window seat at Moka House in the funkyhip Cook Street village district of Victoria. In a tourist town, little neighbourhoods like this are the ones that keep locals sane. I’m here partly because it appears that I am turning into more and more of a local around here.
We did a good day of work today with the VIATT crew, cracking some solid communications questions and planning our Art of Hosting training for later next month. We are getting deep into a process of community linkage that will expand and solidify the capacity of the indigenous communities of Vancouver Island to participate and run the set of child and family services that are provided in their communities. There is some solid vision at play here and a very good team of curious, spirited and innovative people who bring a variety of perspectives to every question. The conversations we have are amazing, and there is deep a solid commitment to the core purpose of the initiative: to keep children at the centre of our deliberations. We have even taken to the practice of placing pictures of our kids on the table in the centre of our workspace, as you can see from the photo above.
One result of the good quality of the work here and the desire to go very deep into the fundamental work is the fact that it seems like I’ll be spending a lot more time in Victoria over the next year. And so, I’m looking for ways to bring some normalcy to my life here. Last night I trained with a local Taekwondo school and tonight I stopped by the house of a friend and colleague tonight to cook supper. He has been on long term disability for more than a year battling the extreme pain of chronic arthritis and suffering the attendant demons, slings and arrows that come with it. It was good to see him, good to stand in a kitchen and cook some curry and have a bit of a semblance of a real life, even if the family are back home on the Island that I rarely see these days.
I have been setting up my new laptop this week, which involves replacing all of the windows programs with free or open source utilities and adding bits and pieces that are useful. I think I’m about done, and my list so far looks like this:
Utilities
- AVG Free anti-virus – Anti virus
- CDex – CD Ripper
- OpenOffice – Complete Office suite
- Filezilla – FTP Program
- FreeMind Mindmap program
- NoteTab – Plain text editor
- Sunbird – Mozilla calendar software
Internet
- Free Download Manager – Download Manager for Firefox
- Firefox – Web browser
- Flickr Uploadr – For uploading photos to flickr
- Pretty May – For recording Skype calls
- Skype – Voice over Internet utility
- Telus Roaming Wizard – For dialup connectivity to my ISP from the road.
Media
That’s pretty much it for now. Most of these programs are old friends. I am trying out Pretty May, Switch and Sunbird (which I like alot). Audacity does a fine job of converting files to mp3s so Switch might not be needed, but Switch comes with a bunch of great little utilities that are worth playing around with, including a nice voice recorder.
In case you are wonder what John Heron, the author of The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook, is now up to, check out his work at the Centre for Spiritual Inquiry in New Zealand. There are some really remarkable resources there.