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I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container. Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular…
Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture. I think the short answer is, yes, in my practice I make good faith assumptions about people. But let’s expand that. I found a blog post of mine from twenty years ago that lays this down: The essence of his argument is this: in…
The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat: …I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.
Another rainy day, perhaps the last before the summer high pressure system establishes itself in the Gulf of Alaska. Despite the call for showers for the rest of the day, a thin line of cloud edge appears this morning out over the Strait and a robin is singing plaintively in the tree tops. It's that moment when it isn't clear if it is still rain or if the sounds coming from the trees are the drippings of the canopy. For the forest floor, it doesn't matter. This morning I have been reading the…
The view from my house across the Terminal Creek valley to Apodaca Ridge, which is shrouded with cloud blowing in off the Strait of Georgia. From time to time we get strange weather days here on the west coast. Yesterday three dense tracks on thunderstorms flowed north from California bringing rain, thunder and lightning to our region. Summer thunderstorms are quite rare here; it is more common to get one or two in the winter when there is much more convection in the atmosphere. Nevertheless I…
Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers. So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that…
I had a lovely call with Cynthia Kurtz on Friday, discussing all manner of things including an upcoming retreat with a client where we will explore complexity and use Participatory Narrative Inquiry and a NarraFirma capture to explore an important issue for the organization. Like me, and a few others, she has gone back to her blog and has relaunched it, so if you had her in your feedreader, you'll need to update her RSS feed. Here's her call to arms.
Two years ago a young male cougar swam to our island. Its not clear where it can from, but most likely it crossed the Collingwood Channel from Keats Island, as distance of nearly 2 kilometres at its shortest point. The cougar took up residence on Mount Collins and the west side of Mount Gardner, and has made Bowen Island its home. Until recently it has been surviving on deer, of which there are plenty on Bowen. It has kept to itself and very few people have seen it, although hit has been…
I am sitting on the pier, fuelled by an espresso, just having completed volume 2 of Solvej Balle’s story On the Calculation of Volume. Volume 3 is sitting next to me ready to be cracked open as I wait for a friend to arrive from the mainland. Balle’s work has been lauded for its beautiful writing (beautiful in translation too, thank you Barbara Haveland) that moves at a measured speed and is very clear and incisive. This is a story about noticing, set as it is on an eternally repeating 18th of…
Flags flying on the waterfront at Shearwater BC. There are two standard Canada flags and two of Curtis Wilson’s 2005 Indigenous Canada flag I spent yesterday, Canada Day, with my friend Pauline Le Bel inside the common room at our municipal hall. The room was filled with the “Canada Day Re-Imagined” part of the program. Michael Yahgulaanas‘ recent works were on display, there was a full collection of posters of the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we were there…
When the US government took down its climate science site a group of scientists put all the material back online at Climate.us Dave Snowden has been at his favourite knowledge management conference and offers blog posts with many reflections that caught my eye on intergenerational management cultures (older workers attend to contexts; younger workers to rules), the inability to preserve implicit knowledge through compression, the fundamental question of what is lost between wisdom, knowledge…
The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong currents coming in many directions. It produces some of the biggest waves in the world. Not easy to surf. It’s not my title. It’s the title of a book/treatise by Mark Downham, who publishes very long treatises on issues of philosophy, organization, and complexity. This one looks at hosting…
I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive…
A baby barred owl seen last Wednesday by Terminal Creek, near our home. These owls breed every year in the same place and the babies sit in the trees and wheeze at passers-by until their hoot-makers come in. Today I turn 58 and In a couple of weeks I will have lived on this island for 25 years. Being here for that length of time – a duration that has long exceeded anywhere else I’ve lived – tunes one to the finer rhythms and changes of time and place. Today, the thing I’m noticing is the change…
The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention…
For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go. The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are…
On May 1 we left for a month in France. When we returned we got the weekend at home which meant hastily harvesting spinach and making 15 spanakopitas for the freezer and a bunch of spinach pesto. Then it was off again on Tuesday morning and a few days of work in Toronto and then a lovely weekend with my brother and sister and nieces and nephew in Simcoeside, north of the city. And then yesterday home in time for a Carmena Bowena rehearsal. The less said about that the better. I was dirt tired…
Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects: Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants…
In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know. On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers…
I spent yesterday afternoon on a phone call with my friends and colleagues Jenn Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle talking about our next offering of Reimagining Education, to be held in Peterborough Ontario, near Toronto, October 16-18. Our conversation was very much about the role of the practitioner in fields and contexts of uncertainty and complexity and how our work aims to support the capacity of practitioners who shape those systems. This is an Art of Hosting, and its focus is one…
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs. I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a…
Dougald Lamont: Instead of addressing the economic crisis of the pandemic, monetary stimulus made it worse. It has contributed to a global affordability crisis in housing, a private insolvency crisis for tens of millions of people, provided the weathiest people in society with amounts ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions to buy more property and companies, all while increasing worker layoffs. It created the economic distortions and crisis that our countries are all living through,…
The Var River below the high village of Touët in France. This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity. I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my…
Coming to the end of our holidays here in France and after a short day of walking some 13kms around Monaco, I made it back to our rental to watch Spurs battle Everton in the final Premier League match of the season. It should never have come to this, but a win or a draw was necessary to stave off relegation and with West Ham winning 3-0, we could not afford to lose. It was a match which offered mostly one way traffic from Spurs but this season has had enough counter attacking disappointments…
Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing. It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic…
Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog. This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence. Here is a long quote: Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to…
Above Calanque Port-Pin looking back to the Cap Canaille near Cassis. I’m in the south of France on the first leg of a holiday that combines a few days in Cassis, a seven day walk through the villages of Provence and then some travelling and visiting of places like Arles, Avignon and elsewhere in the region. While we are in Cassis we have been hiking on the sea cliffs, which is my very favourite form of walking. Around here the cliffs are limestone escarpments that rise up out of the…
Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what…
We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings. This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into…
The leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of BC vow to roll back indigenous rights and stop returning land to First Nations. and also object to being called colonizers, which begs the question about what they think colonization is. Billionaires are colonizing our skies. If you think this is bad, the night skies will soon be populated with a million Starlink satellites and thousands more from other companies and nations. And it gets worse as there are companies like Reflect Orbital…
