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Items by Chris Corrigan

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• 

  Shocking!

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 11:41pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Dave Pollard has posted an item on his blog entitled G20: A Corporatist Show of Force and Power in Toronto.  It is a compendium of a number of videos showing what happened in Toronto last week. I have spent the last two hours watching these videos, and many more.  I challenge you to do the same.  Because frankly what I am seeing is terrifying and shocking, and I don’t mean the vandals.  I mean the actions of the police.

  None of these videos are the whole story, but they leave me futilely hoping for an explanation from the powers that be.  The police are the people’s force, and they are there to enforce the laws of society.  When they are challenged to cite the law under which they seize a man’s property, they refuse.  If you have to use force against your own citizens, you better be able to explain why, who gave the orders and what laws you were enforcing.  What I saw in these videos was a shocking and one-sided use of intimidation and arbitrary arrest against peaceful, non-threatening citizens who were asking for explanations and receiving no help at all.  I’d love to hear someone in power explain what was going on.

  When I was younger I used to join tens of thousands of people every year marching down University Avenue from Queen’s Park protesting against nuclear weapons.  We had a massive peaceful march, without needing “free speech zones” and without thousands of police officers dressed in riot gear.  There was always a little vandalism and garbage strewn around.  One year in fact, I was working at a building on University Avenue and my job was to clean spray paint off our building.  No big deal.  Took four hours and a can or two of paint remover.

  Back then, most of us looked like the young people in these videos: impassioned, aware, concerned about their world and PEACEFUL.  The videos from Queen’s Park surprise and disturb me.  I can’t help but think that dozens of those officers clad head to toe in riot gear telling peaceful young people to “GET BACK!” must have been thinking that the whole thing was a stupid charade.  They were never in any danger.  The protesters were milling around in the designated free speech zone and they were moved, intimidated, cajoled and randomly wrestled to the ground by heavily armed riot police.

  What the hell is happening?  What about the group singing Oh Canada in front of Steve’s Music on Queen Street?  They sing and then are charged by the police.  That is a frightening image.  There isn’t a single one of them wearing the uniform of the so-called “Black Bloc.”

  After watching videos of these young people for hours, I turned my attention to a few videos of the windows being smashed and the police cars being torched.  I was immediately struck by how different the so-called Black Bloc anarchists were.  They looked strong, powerful and well trained in martial arts.  They were delivering accurate and well executed kicks to windows and cars, the same kicks that are used by police to knock in doors.  Police all over the world have used agents provocateurs at all the major summits of world leaders to stir up chaos and violence.  The Quebec police admitted to it at the Montebello Summit and there are many Toronto videos that show clean cut, muscular men posing as Black Bloc activists who are having nothing to do with the crowd.  Back in the day on our anti-nuclear protests, it was all about joining the crowd, and even today, anarchists don’t look to be the best fed group of people.

  So what is happening here?  How is it that a massive police force can intimidate and push around unarmed and generally disorganized young people at Queen’s Park and yet not stop the torching of police cars left inexplicably alone and unguarded in the city centre by men who look very much like police or soldiers.

  And who actually knows anything about “the Black Bloc?”  Did they release a statement claiming responsibility for the havoc?  Where is their website?  I have no doubt that there are  a few militant activists who undertake these kinds of tactics, and I condemn them.  They distract from the real work of social change and they are easy to exploit. All it takes is a few bait cars, a couple of cops dressed up as a friendly faction and away they go.  If they DO exist, they are naive and destructive and easily made tools of the very state and corporate agenda they claim to hate.  If they don’t exist, then who are they?

  What the hell is happening?   Why this show of arbitrary force?  Why was the limited but wanton destruction allowed to occur, but the free speech zone overrun by riot cops?  What has become of this country?

• 

  Scrubbed clean…details to follow

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 10:13pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  You’ll forgive my lack of posting from Kiluea this past week.  I certainly had intended a detailed account of our gathering, but things went to such a deep level that words and time kept failing me.  THis was one of the most tranformational experiences of my life, and one of the most difficult, challenging and exuberant facilitation experiences I have ever had.  It will take me a while to get the story straight, so forgive me if it trickles out.  I met fear in a new place, above my heart.  A fearless heart was born, but it was birthed in much fire and truth grief and elation, found in a windy misty and cold morning on the edge of Halema’uma’u when so much in myself and in our group was laid bare before Pele, the goddess of fire, of creation of life itself.

  I’m home but in a new way.  All is good!

• 

  From crystal seas to a brooding volcano

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 1:38am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Last night we arrived in Kona, on the dry side of the big island of Hawai’i.  We overnighted there and woke early in the morning for a swim in crystal clear waters at Hapuna Beach.  About 9am we hit the road, taking the Saddle Road over the island between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the twin 13,000+ volcanoes on this island.  As you crest the top of the pass between them, the clouds coming up from Hilo-side start flying overhead, and rain showers start.  We drove down to Hilo and then back up the south flank of Mauna Loa to Kilauea and Halema’uma’u, the active crater in Volcanoes National Park.  Kilauea is the home place of Pele, the goddess of creation and tonight Tim and Andrea – one of our colleagues – and I drove to the rim where, in the dark and drizzle, the plume of steam was clearly seen, illuminated from above by a bright quarter moon and below by the lava glowing in the crater.

  Surrounded by earth, fire, air and water, all of the elements appeared.  A very powerful synthesis of the earth being born below our feet, beneath an ancient sky that in these parts of the world is the map for navigating.  We are wrapped in time, treated to a window on the liquid centre of our planet, standing on ground that is emergent and compelling.  The crater began to hold the archetype of the centre of our gathering – a purpose that burns regardless, that steams and smokes and is visible in its production but not in its source.  A purpose that defines the form that holds it.  It became clear to us tonight the way in which this gathering, this purpose and intention is to be hosted: in a deep container that can hold the fire of creation and let itself be moulded by whatever flows out.

  This is not easy work and there are few roadmaps for doing it.  But to prepare by  sitting with Halema’uma’u is a great teaching, and we haven’t even begun hearing the Hawaiian perspective on all of this.

  Work is afoot.  Tomorrow participants arrive and we begin to welcome them in, prepare our space and ready ourselves for ceremony and practice.  We are ambitiously pursuing the small openings that invite the transcendence of world views that have been at conflict for centuries.  To see what the next level of human consciousness could be if we married indigenous wisdom and wester wisdom.  If we understood each other and invited all to join in the space in the middle.  What would we learn about values?  What would our relationship to the earth be?  What IS a community of leadership based on a platform of reverence and what could such a community do?

  Like the stea, plume

• 

  The Slips

  Posted: June 4th, 2010, 12:50am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  

  I’ve been trolling through Geoff’s harvest of our Open Space conference last month in Melbourne and just enjoying the memory of working with friends.  Our friend and conference cartoonist Simon Kneebone drew our hosting team.  We call ourselves The Slips.  The term is from the cricket world and has two purposes.  First it signals that this is an all-Commonwealth team, which is lovely, and second, it’s a large cordon and nothing gets past us.  From right to left, our members are Anne Pattillo from New Zealand who is our wicket keeper, Aussie Viv McWaters at first slip, Johnnie Moore from the UK at second slip, Geoff Brown also from Australia at third and me on the end, occasionally moving out to gully or silly point when needed.

  At any rate I love this drawing.  It bring back some lovely memories and has me salivating when we join together again in Amsertdam in September for the Applied Improv Network Conference where we will play together mostly and probably end up opening space again.

• 

  Time is relative

  Posted: June 1st, 2010, 3:29pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Thanks to Benjamin Aaron Degenhart for pointing this out.

• 

  Harvesting learning about design

  Posted: May 31st, 2010, 4:44pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne.  If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written.  As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate!

  PS  there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.”  This one would win it.

• 

  Researching the soft stuff

  Posted: May 31st, 2010, 3:18pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will be better than if we use top-down and mechanistic modes of working. This is such an elusive inquiry, let alone an easy project to undertake.

  Of course there are models for looking at the world that balance interior and exterior modes of seeing the world, including Ken Wilber’s integral models and others. But I’d like to invite us to look beyond the Western scientific methodologies for some other clues.

  In many traditional indigenous North American cultures, there are well established methodologies for understanding the world and understanding the social context for individual action and collective dynamics. Specifically, some of us in teh Art of Hosting CoP have been learning about Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of “tsawalk” which is a view of the world that is as foundational to Nuu-Chah-Nulth science as Cartesian world views are to western science. Tsawalk means “oneness” or “interdependence” and the methodology for understanding this world views is called “oosumich” which is a methodology in teh same way that empiricism is a methodology for Cartersian world views. Oosumich is both an individual and collective practice of accessing and understanding the collective and individual spiritual worlds (or the deep interior worlds, from which all forms derive their basic organizing pattern). It is a way to tap what is often called “source” and is therefore a very useful methodology for understanding design of structures and processes. Oosumich is also an evaluation method, being used both in real time and in reflective learning to gauge the various effects of things against the principle of Tsawalk. If something is understood to be contrary to Tsawalk, it can be said to have “failed” – if that is the right term, although I think there are more nuanced ways of looking at this.

  Tsawalk has been written about in a very valuable book called “Tsawalk” a Nuu Chah-Nulth worldview” by Richard Atleo, who is a friend of our work. I sometimes use it in indigenous communities as an alternative to Theory U. Last december we structured an entire workshop on participatory process based on Tsawalk, and the participants were given Atleo’s book as a text. I wrote a little about it here.

  At least one of our list members, Pawa Haiyupis, has been in this inquiry with me for several years. I think what it points to is thinking about the valid epistemologies that can help us understand what is happening in collective intelligence. It makes sense to me that we look at models that have been employed for centuries by societies who are collective in nature and whose concepts of the world are less about the split between subject and object and more about exploring the connection between things and their context, and especially the “unseen” dynamics that are at play in social and other fields.

  Those of us working in the Art of Hosting community with indigenous communities have had this conversation and are in this inquiry with Navajo, Hawaiian, Anishnaabe, Skwuxw7mesh, Kwa’kwa’kawakw and other indigenous cultures. It doesn’t necessarily help us in putting western science to work, but I think it provides perspectives on ways of knowing that could open the inquiry in ways that are helpful from a foundational and conceptual point of view.

  PS: Here is a report from a few years ago about using Tsawalk as the primary view to see systemic breakdowns in the child welfare system in BC.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: May 15th, 2010, 12:18am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Enclosure: [download]

  Been too busy to read the feed lately, but here’s some stuff:

  • Dave Snowdon argues for data over information.
  • whiskey river posts a little something that Dave might therefore appreciate.
  • WFMU shares some really interesting older progressive music sounds.

  And for your further listening pleasure: Steve Mason – All Come Down from Said the Gramaphone…very nice mellow tune.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: April 2nd, 2010, 9:49am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Good Friday.

  • Geoff Brown on doing great things by working with authentic story and having a ball too.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 19th, 2010, 9:26am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  There is an omlet in this weeks batch of feed food:

  • Christopher Niemann repurposes Google Map aethetics to make cleaver pictures.
  • Jordon Cooper points to a beautiful tilt-pan movie of my favourite city: New York.
  • Laura McGrath’s blog.  A new friend and colleague.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 12th, 2010, 10:53am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Chewing on these:

  • Performing the world is a conference in New York this fall.
  • Teaching social media to environmental activists.
  • Lianne Raymond gives the gift of words for International Women’s Day.
  • Rob Paterson on new careers in sustainability.
  • Andre Hardin posts an outstanding video of a Rube Goldberg machine from the band OK Go.
  • Jordon Cooper with a nice find: a video about the photographer BlueJake of New York City.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 5th, 2010, 10:09am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Back to the weekly collection of interesting finds:

  • Rob Paterson fins cool stuff on the new shape of non profit boards.
  • Viv McWaters on how she decides to say yes to a job.
  • Rolling Stone on Wall Street’s trickery.
  • Harper’s on the junior hockey life in Flin Flon, late 1990s.  No gold medal glamour there.
  • New York Times on the sound of a close finish at the Olympics
  • You Tube: a stunning clip of a high tension power line worker.  Stunning
• 

  Winter Olympics Day One

  Posted: February 12th, 2010, 5:35pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  The view from my home island, Bowen Island, looking across the Queen Charlotte Channel to Cypress Bowl, where the freestyle skiing events will be held during the Olympics.  It’s 10 degrees and raining, and that cloud deck shows no sign of lifting.

  Yes there is very little snow.  It’s February in Vancouver.  It’s always like this.  In fact I should have had my snow tires off the car two weeks ago.  Daffodils are coming up and spring is just around the corner.

• 

  Random thoughts about South Africa

  Posted: January 30th, 2010, 4:18pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place.  I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind.

  ***

  I visited The Apartheid Museum today.  The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides.  The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams were a part of daily life in many parts of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships.

  The museum really traces the history of apartheid from 1948 until the Constitution was completed in 1996, with a post script about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and modern day South Africa.  I was struck by the section on the 1940s and how there was one huge wall full of all of the laws that went into setting the legal framework for apartheid.  Many of them are echoed in Canada’s Indian Act of the time, including laws about everything from owning land, to pass laws to drinking liquour and entering into contracts.

  The museum pulls no punches.  There are hours of video presentations with brutal violence perpetrated against both blacks and whites, with scenes of police brutality, torture, right-wing white terrorism, necklacing and murder.  One room, devoted to the legacy of execution of political prisoners contains dozens of nooses hanging from the ceiling, one for each person who was killed by the state.  There is a whol gallery focused on the violence of the early 1990s that almost took South Africa to the point of no return. If you had any illusions that the legacy of apartheid can just be wished away, they are dispelled in this place.  It makes the subsequent work of constitution, nation building and reconcilliation seem miraculous.

  I spent a great deal of the morning in tears, and when I emerged from the museum after three hours of intense learning, I sat quietly in the garden and sobbed.  When I was a young man in the 1980s I was active in anti-apartheid support groups in Canada, calling for sanctions and insisting that my Church, the United Church of Canada divest itself from the country.  Today I was reminded of the conviction I felt back then and it came back in waves of anger, grief and astonishment.  What a place.

  ***

  The Apartheid Museum is interesting in another way too.  It doesn’t have a typical story arc: peace – crises – resolution.  There is no happy ending here, just the ongoing struggle for balance, justice and peace.  And no one is under any illusions in this country that that struggle has ended.  Over the past week I have noticed that South Africans do not tell stories with happy endings.  Instead they tell stries with a much more real structure, stories that live in the cyclical nature of time, of events repeating themselves, of small choices taken with large implications at every turn.  I have been inquiring a little about this as a particular African form of storytelling.  In North America we like the Hollywood ending.  Here, they smell bullshit a mile away.

  ***

  The other day my friends Busi Dlamini and Vanessa Sayers and I were having dinner which included ostrich neck stew by the pool where the zebras were drinking and we were talking about unusual foods.  I was sharing some of the North American standbys like oolichan grease and fermented seal meat and they were returning the favour with fried grubs and goat hoofs, they told me about a special dish that is made from the head and feet of a chicken.  The dish is called “walkie-talkie.”

  ***

  There is a brilliant film that I saw on the way here called Jerusalema about a gangster/community organizer in Hillbrow, the roughest part of Johannesburg.  At one point as he is flirting with a life of crime he gest out only to run into his former boss at a gas station.  The boss says “crime is the fastest growing industry in the new South Africa” to which our hero replies that actually private security is.

  There is no doubt that this is a dangerous city, although I have been staying in affluent suburbs and have perhaps a false sense of security about the place.  On these suburbs, the sidewalks are lined with walls which in turn are topped with either razor wire, spikes, barbed wire or, increasingly, high voltage electrical fencing.  The walls have doors in them that lead to courtyards and gardens, but the streetscape looks like a corridor, covered over with trees.  Occasionally instead of walls you see “palisades” – tall fences topped with three or seven spikes and sometimes with razor wire on top.  Most streets have a roaming security guard whose job it is to immediately report suspicious behaviour which is met with “armed response.”  The largest security firms are ADT and the curiously named “NYPD.”  In the public parking lot across from the “Wollies” where we have been buying food, there are three or four car guards patrolling the lot.  The take note as you park and presumably also call for armed responses if someone else leaves in your car.  All of these security folks are really nice.  They chat and say “howsit” as you pass by and they are friendly.  But these guys are on the low rungs.  The armed security guys around are tough looking and aloof.

  ***

  Everything is privatized here, not just the police.  The public transportation system is terrible, largely due to the fact that there is a huge fleet of “minicabs” private vans that run on largely predetermined routes.  The minicab lobby is so strong that any attempts to build new public infrastructure are met with threats and actual strikes from the minicab operators and the whole city comes to a halt.  Minicab trf wars break out frequently, wth shooting and murder and maiming a part of business, rendering the services effective on the one hand but insanely dangerous on the other.

• 

  Updates from Haiti

  Posted: January 18th, 2010, 6:52pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  A quick break from being unplugged to point you to my friend John Engle’s blog from Haiti.  John is an Open Space colleague who I have known for nearly ten years now.  He is in Haiti, where he lives with his family, assessing damage and needs for Haiti Partners, the NGO he works for.

  Here is his blog.  Consider donating to his work.

• 

  Unplugged for two weeks

  Posted: January 11th, 2010, 10:56am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Off to a warmer place for a couple of weeks to unplug and soak in sun and waves and some ono ki ho’alu.  Here is Ledward Kaapana for your edification while I am gone.

• 

  Cold day

  Posted: January 10th, 2010, 3:05am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  Snows cover the British Isles.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: January 8th, 2010, 10:25am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Enclosure: [download]

  Goodness:

  Links

  • Heather Haley, friend and neighbour, extends a conversation some of us were having on west coast music.  Nice stories about the west coast punk scene of the 1980s and later.
  • Another friend and neighbour, John Dowler: a photography site with questions.
  • From Common Dreams, 12 things from the last decade that could save us
  • Metafilter post on the ironically inimitable Harry Dubin.
  • Franke James draws Canada’s problems with greenhouse gases. (via facebook friend Amy Robinson)

  Audio

  • Frozen Silence, a new age/ambient project from Finland’s Matti Paalanen.  Piano and guitar music for winter mornings.
  • Tim Hart singing the Ploughboy and the Cockney, an old English song about the conflict between the city and the country, and one which is in my repertoire because of its modern implications.  Hart died last week at his home in the Canary islands.   And here’s Hart singing another song with contemporary implications: The Dalesman’s Litany.
  • And one more, this time from Tim Hart’s long time musical partner, Maddy Prior singing with her long time musical partner June Tabor: Four Loom Weaver.
  • Another musician who died this week was Lhasa de Sela, taken by breast cancer.  Here is Rising.
  • Podcast of the week: A feature on Sue Townsend (Adrian Mole author) and her thoughts on going blind.  Compelling listening from CBC’s And the Winner Is…
• 

  Fixing bullet problems in Open Office

  Posted: January 1st, 2010, 12:39pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  If you are a user of OpenOffice on the Mac, like I am, you have probably noticed that in converting documents back and forth between .odt and .doc formats messes with your bullets.  Instead of little dots, you get clapper boards, which are cute but not useful for a professional documents.

  Today, buried deep in a page discussing this bug, I found a very useful manual fix that has worked for me:

  “I’ve had success using the Font Replacement Table, located in the  OpenOffice.org ->Fonts.  Enable “Apply replacement table”, select “Symbol” in the lefthand FONT drop down, select “OpenSymbol” in the righthand “Replace with” dropdown. Press the checkmark to the right to add the substitution to the table. Make sure you check the Always box.

  Once this is set up, opening and saving in MSWord 97/XP format preserves the bullet characters in both directions.”

  Hope this helps you.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: January 1st, 2010, 10:22am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Happy New Year!

  Some random pickin’s from the feed:

  • Psychology and Security Resource Page .  Learn about FEELING afraid and FEELING safe.
  • The Conferences that Work blog.  Cool, even though it seems like he has reinvented Open Space.
  • jack/zen blogs the 7 principles of improv.
• 

  The 2010s: Train together in clarity and love

  Posted: December 31st, 2009, 12:44pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Good riddance to this decade.

  I hadn’t meant to make a post about the past ten years, but a comment from my friend Doug Germann, who is a lawyer by the way, prompted me to write a response that became a little manifesto for action in this next ten years.  Here is Doug’s comment:

  Chris–

  The opposite of love is fear; conversely, the opposite of fear is love. Chris, you have named it well.

  We are in a cycle of fear—an attack is made, we become fearful, hunker down, do something however ineffectual. We could somehow accept that there is a certain level of danger past which we can do nothing except be vigilant. But making people sit for an hour with nothing in their laps but their freezing hands will do nothing but make us all more fearful. And fear does not watch very well.

  How do we help us to break out of this circle of fear?

  Love is somehow the answer, but I do not have the way to apply it. Should we love the terror? I don’t think so: the very attempt was successful in increasing the level of terror in the United States—just touch the fear already there in any way, and the victim will crank up the terror willingly and quickly. Do we love the perpetrator? Somewhere it is written to do so. But we can also and more quickly love the victims—us—by realizing that we cannot stop all attempts.

  We must calm ourselves first. We must love ourselves first.

  Right now, we do not love ourselves, we fear ourselves—we fear all of us, the other of us. How do we move from there to loving us?

  :- Doug.

  And in my response I pick up on this notion of victimhood.  Here it is in full, withe some further amendments:

  One thing about your comment Doug: this notion of the victim. I recall this starting in earnest on 9/11 when everyone declared “we are all New Yorkers” or something to that effect. We conflated concern and empathy for the families of those that died that day with an affront against US personally. We claimed the ground of “victim” and all the attendant outrage that goes along with that.

  Victims are not always the best people to decide on response to their wrongs. This is why we have a justice system, and especially why we have a restorative justice system in some places.

  The fact is that, I think it’s not a stretch to say that this latest attempt was actually a victimless crime. Sure it inconvenienced a lot of people, and no doubt there were some minor injuries but no one was victimized by this failed attempt.  No one killed, no one irreparably harmed.  Yet the desire for revenge burns and now Yemen is talked about as “tomorrow’s war.”  Wow.

  The response is unbridled outrage and everyone and their dog claiming the moral high ground of victimhood. This is why victimhood is so powerful. We build up victims in this culture to the status of martyrs for whatever cause we project on them. We give them a few wishes and nod solemnly in doing their bidding. And it’s one thing to do that with genuine victims like someone who has been disabled by a physical assault (it’s a good thing: comes from our compassionate desire to ask  ”can I help you?”  Is there anything I can do?”), but another to do it with people who claim “an assault on you is an assault on me.” That faulty logic has led the globe in a worldwide war against it’s own paranoia in which millions of people are becoming real victims of confused egos run amuck. That is probably the legacy of this insane decade: that American politicians (and some other, eh Blair?) got to claim the story of 9/11 as “an attack on our freedom, which must be defended at all costs.” From that, a borderline psychopathic President was allowed to divide the world into two camps, manufacture it into a rationale for two open wars and a bunch of nasty, nasty covert operations and medieval law enforcement,  and the result is that Americans are less free today than they were at the beginning of 2000.

  That was not due to those that committed the crimes on 9/11: it was entirely due to the response. but people who were not victims failing to love themselves enough that they lost their ground. Let’s let this next decade be one where we train together in clarity and love. The fierce love of courage and maturity that it takes to bring peace in the world, in our collective and individual realms.

  Happy New Year.

• 

  Security theatre and the cult of doing

  Posted: December 28th, 2009, 12:19pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Dropped my spouse off at the water taxi this morning at 8am.  She’ll get to the airport by 10 which hopefully will give her enough time to get through security for a 2:30 flight.  But we’ll see.

  I’ve been reflecting a little on the airborne events of the last few days and reading lots of blogs that say that the Transportation Security Administration in the United States (and CATSA here in Canada) has it all wrong when it comes to their latest response to an attempt to blow up an airplane.  The problem is that they are trapped in the fear loop that the United States government has created for itself since 9/11.

  US (and by association, the rest of us) security policy has been driven, at a base level, by fear.  The thinking goes that the more we are doing, the safer we are, and if there is a breach of security we need to do more.  The problem with this line of thinking is that the world will never be perfectly safe.  This means that every perceived (and reported) security breach drives the need for SOMEBODY TO DO SOMETHING!.  If the TSA does not act, they are accused of being soft and endangering the lives of flyers.  I have heard friends say to others this week “do you want to be unsafe or bear a delay in getting on board?”  This question creates a ridiculous positive feedback loop, equating more DOING with safety.   And one wonders if it will ever happen that these measures will be rolled back.  How do you argue that doing more makes us safer and then stop doing pat downs for example without being accused of doing less to protect us?

  Reactionary doing satisfies the appearance of safety and security, but it does not necessarily do anything to make people safer.  In fact, in times of panic or inconvenience, you could argue that people become more and more frustrated, their anger levels rise, and the skies are actually unsafer as a result, not from terrorism, but from air rage.

  Security theatre comes from the school of management that respects measurables.  But it arises out of a short term thinking mindset that disconnects the activity from the systemic context.  You can certainly show that three or four new procedures have been put in place, and you can measure things like delays to flights, how many acts of terrorism have been committed in the next few months and so on.  But all that does is take away from the systemic context of security. The problem is that the major measureable for security is zero - zero terrorist attempts.  Zero is unattainable, and unmeasureable in the long run.  As soon as zero changes to one, a whole new set of reactions is triggered.

  The net effect this has on the world is to make people more fearful of events that are highly improbable (I read yesterday somewhere that the probability of being on a plane that is the target of a terrorist attack over the last 10 years world wide is 20 times the probability of being struck by lightning).  And there is certainly no guarantee of safety, there never can be.  Mr. Abdultallab snuck explosives onto a plane after being cleared through an airport that had TSA certification.  He had a visa to the United States, and he got through Amsterdam’s security as well.  There are many ways to do this, and there will always be ways to do this.  Short of a strip search for every passenger and an xray to ensure that there is nothing INSIDE your body that could be dangerous, air travel is as secure as it has ever been.  Probably the best move of the last ten year shas been to lock the flight deck doors.  That alone has meant that there have only been 7 hijackings since 9/11. most of them in Africa, and all of them ending with no loss of life.  Crude attempts to fashion explosives in the cabin from innocuous materials have been tried twice and have failed.  One Bolivian claimed he had a bomb, but it was simply tins full of dirt and adorned with lightbulbs.

  Air travel is safe - as safe as it has ever been.  This is totally at odds with what we are being told this week and shown in the actions of the security organizations that have lost themselves in a feedback loop of panic and reaction.  The more patting down, personal searches and confinement to your seat you experience, the less safe you feel, without being any more safe than you actually are.

  “But we’re DOING something!”

  PS…just as I finished this post, Caitlin called from the airport.  CATSA is not allowing any carry on baggage at all today on her flight to Los Angeles.  All she can bring on is her laptop.  Everything else has to go in the checked luggage.  One assumes this will speed up the boarding process, limiting the personal searches that have to happen, but that makes for a pretty boring 3 hours in teh air and another 4 hours on the ground.  Not even a book is allowed.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: December 25th, 2009, 10:17am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Tasty holiday treats:

  • Meg Wheatley’s 10 ways to create healthy community change.  Nice set of videos.
  • Dave Pollard has moved his blog.  Update your bookmarks!
  • CBC News blogs the minute by minute development of the most productive thing to happen in Copenhagen last week: The Yes Men eviscerating our government’s shameful performance on the world stage.
  • Metafilter has a nice little article with some great links on the Christmas Truce of 1914

  Merry Christmas!

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: December 18th, 2009, 10:07am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Tasty morsels from the syndicated grapevines:

  • Thomas Arthur shares a beautiful reflection on his place and time.
  • Myriam Laberge with some excellent tips for improving information delivery in conferences.  For best results combine it with an insanely good slideshow.
  • Jordon Cooper has a nuanced take on big business and the environment.
  • Also from Jordon, Life’s pictures of the year.
  • Tom Atlee on Open Source Religion.
  • Worldchanging reports on young people using Google Wave to negotiate what the adults should be doing at Cop15
• 

  Balanced at Clayoquot Sound

  Posted: December 15th, 2009, 1:13am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  About to begin the three day Art of Hosting training here on the shores of Clayoquot Sound.  THis rock was my offering of balance to the land and the sea.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: December 11th, 2009, 8:29am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Returning to sit in the stream

  • Tenneson Woolf makes a nice meta-harvest of what we have been doing over the years with the Art of Hosting workshops we’ve been teaching.
  • Tom Atlee has released his new book: REFLECTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change”
  • Johnnie Moore finds the circle of life in stunning visual clarity.
  • JS Bouchard posts a great design for short and small collaborative meetings.
  • The Symphony of Science
• 

  Celebrating the circle

  Posted: December 9th, 2009, 8:35am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  Natalie Angier, inspired by Kandinsky, celebrates the circle,

  I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.

  Quirkily enough, the artist’s life followed a circular form: He was born in December 1866, and he died the same month in 1944. This being December, I’d like to honor Kandinsky through his favorite geometry, by celebrating the circle and giving a cheer for the sphere. Life as we know it must be lived in the round, and the natural world abounds in circular objects at every scale we can scan.

  Read on: Basics - The Circular Logic of the Universe

• 

  20 years on

  Posted: December 6th, 2009, 11:05pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  December 6, 1989

  Twenty years on, and I still remember them.

  • Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
  • Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
  • Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
  • Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student.
  • Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
  • Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
  • Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department.
  • Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
  • Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
  • Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
  • Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
  • Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
  • Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
  • Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.

  The work is never done.

• 

  Art of Participatory Leadership, day three

  Posted: December 6th, 2009, 2:43am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa.  He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building.  He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment.  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim it’s relationship to the west.  But like all good improvisers, he allowed the climate to change him, and he began deeply intimate with Estonian culture and language, married and Estonian woman and moved into becoming a steward of Estonian natural places.  He speaks the language fluently and beautifully and Estonians, who are normally wary of outsiders, embrace him and respect him, and always forget that he wasn’t born of this land.  I can imagine, after being here for only a week, how it must have happened that he became so quickly embraced here.  The land and the people are reserved but when they open to you and you open to them, the embrace is deep and multi-layered.

  Robert brought this consciousness to the beginning of our third day, leading us in a check in exercise on the land that taught so many things on so many levels.  We simply stood for a while in the cold gloom of an early Estonian autumn morning.  The air was very still, but an occasional light breeze reminded one that one still has bones.  Robert invited us to first of all become aware of the extent of our vision, noticing how wide it extended on either side of us, and how high and low a soft gaze can perceive.  From there we closed our eyes and let our ears open to the subtle soundscape around us.  For me this was wonderful because this is my morning practice at home.  here the soundscape is similar, but the sounds are totally different.  Many birds were quietly moving in the trees and shrubs around us, among them bullfinches, bushtits, creepers and hooded crows.  A raven called far away and a dog barked softly across the fields.  Deepening into this sense of place, Robert invited us to smell the mud, and the leaves on the ground, the apples that had fallen from nearby trees and were slowly decaying, turning sweet and pungent on the ground.  Our senses fully awakened, Robert then taught us how to walk again.

  One foot softly in front of the other, gaze open, like a hunter becoming aware of every sound and movement around us.  Each foot develops eyes of its own, feel its way on the land, so sensitive to what is underfoot that it’s is possible to walk without making a sound .  You become a part of the landscape, joining it completely, becoming enmeshed within it, so that everything that happens happens WITH you rather than as a RESULT of you being there. This is a huge and important teaching about harvesting.  As you learn to walk in this way - Robert called it “foxwalking” - you become a little quicker, a little more sure footed, you are able to move deliberately and yet not disturb anything around you.  It was a powerful way to experience hosting and being hosted, joining the field and harvesting in the moment, becoming fully present.

  And it was just the first of two morning acts.  Following a walk on the land in this way, Robert invited us inside and proceeded to make a fire, using his tools of a fireboard, a firestick, a bow, a handhold and some dry moss tinder.  He gave a beautiful teaching about the archetypal elements of this practice, the fundamental unity of male and female with the firestick and fireboard, the notch that allows dust to come into the space that is created by the friction to birth the spark, the notch is the womb and the spark emerges from the union, the bow that turns the stick through the four directions, gathering the energy of the circle to create powerful life.  Such a rich practice, such a beautiful fundamental teaching about application.  It continued to resonate through our final day.  As I left Estonia this morning, Robert gifted me a set of these tools for my own, a deep invitation into practice and learning this ancient art, the first act of survival to build a fire out of nothing, and the primal act of community building.  the spark begins the possibility of coming together.

  The rest of the day flowed.  Toke and I gave very simple teachings on application.  I talked a little about the improv principle of “notice more and change less” speaking about the fact that what we had experienced is a more profound way to open to possibility than feeling that we need to change all the time.  the world changes enough as it is.  If we can simply stay still long enough in one place, everything we need will flow past, timing will present itself and pass away, the possibilities for action become expansive.

  The group went into Open Space to work through their design questions for projects that they are deep within.  We rolled and flowed and talked and drew and at the end of the day, ran a little intention grounding exercise that involved milling around and collecting questions on our next steps, and then we checked out with voices of appreciation and gratitude and an eager commitment to meet again in February when this cohort of learners will assemble for their final co-learning journey.

  It has been a great pleasure to spend time with this group, to make many new friends who are cracking good work in Estonia, exploring the leading edges of participatory leadership in a country that is slowly coming back to life, and to remembering its deepest gifts and resources.  Many stories, practices and inspiring thoughts are coming home with me, right into work with First Nations on the west coast of Vancouver who are reclaiming their own resources of cultural strength and the renewed use and management of the marine ecosystems on which they depend.  My big learning is that the skills and practices of participatory leadership are all around us, deep in the ground of the cultural legacies we have inherited as humans on this planet.  And when we can talk and learn and share between traditional indigenous peoples, we discover so many modalities that are from the same root.

  Sad to be leaving, but happy to be coming home from four days of teaching, fuller than when I left.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: November 27th, 2009, 6:52am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Plucked fruits from surfing the web

  • Cool rapid prototyping workshop design
  • Viv McWaters has a nice post on the Open Space we did at the Applied Improv Conference, and how it flowed into other activities.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: November 13th, 2009, 1:49pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Feedy:

  • Ole produces a primer to graphic facilitation.  This one is going in my resources list.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: November 6th, 2009, 5:26am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Food leads the feed this week:

  • AskMetafilter has a great list of squash recipes for all those winter squash that are plentiful and cheap in the northern hemisphere right now.
  • Terry Patten on exploring big questions in an integral world.  Good notes on polarity management and conscious evolution.
  • CassetteBoy meets Sir Alan Sugar (and Spurs fans will love this revelatory takedown).
  • Rosa Zubizarretta on Deepening Democracy.
• 

  Note taking hack

  Posted: November 2nd, 2009, 11:32am PST by Chris Corrigan

  In my work I often have to troll through long lists of pages of material looking for patterns and noting significant trends.  I largely don’t like doing this, as it often requires switching back and forth between the document I am reading and the one I am taking notes on and something about that bugs me.

  Today though, I am working on a report and I inadvertently discovered a hack.  I started entering notes at the top of the document, but as I paged through, I noticed that my notes were appearing on every page.  I had accidently been typing them in a header window which repeated over every page.  This was very cool!  As I read each page, I just kept adding notes to the header window without ever having to scroll back to the top or go to another window.  When I finsihed, I just copied the text to a new document and started writing my summary report.

  Thought I would share this little hack.  I never thought about using repeating elements in a Word or OpenOffice document like that before.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: October 30th, 2009, 9:33am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Intriguing beauties:

  • Jeff Altman has digitized his grandfather’s home movies: San Francisco, 1958.
  • Johnnie Moore on social creativity.
  • Metafilter post on the WKBW Buffalo 1968 War of the Worlds scare.  Great stuff to curl up with this Hallowe’en!
  • The New Scientist maps how small and connected our world has become.
  • Geoff Brown with some fun=behaviour change videos.  Going to be fun working with him on this!
  • Rob Paterson blogs about KETC’s approach to the flu: a new model for conversational leadership in news.
  • Alex Kjerulf bounces into the weekend.
• 

  Finding What You Didn’t Lose - John Fox

  Posted: October 29th, 2009, 6:54pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Finding What You Didn’t Lose

  When someone deeply listens to you

  it is like holding out a dented cup

  you’ve had since childhood

  and watching it fill up with

  cold, fresh water.

  When it balances on top of the brim,

  you are understood.

  When it overflows and touches your skin,

  you are loved.

  When someone deeply listens to you,

  the room where you stay

  starts a new life

  and the place where you wrote

  your first poem

  begins to glow in your mind’s eye.

  It is as if gold has been discovered!

  When someone deeply listens to you,

  your bare feet are on the earth

  and a beloved land that seemed distant

  is now at home within you.

  ~ John Fox ~

  via Finding What You Didn’t Lose - John Fox.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: October 23rd, 2009, 9:48am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Plucked from vines of RSS feeds and tweets:

  • David Abrams on The Air Aware
• 

  Optimism as strategy

  Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 11:07am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.”

  Noam Chomsky

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: October 9th, 2009, 10:43am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Harvesting.  Happy Thanksgiving

  • Jill Lepore on how scientific management became a way of life.
  • Creative Cloud: 10 Cutting Edge Paper Artists
  • Ria Baeck shares with us her inspiration (thanks for the call out!)
  • Johnnie Moore finds an ebook from Jeff Conklin on Wicked Problems and Social Complexity
  • Rob Paterson on Julia Child, institution and capability
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: October 2nd, 2009, 9:24am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Gardening, etc.

  • Rob Paterson on how one woman is crowdsourcing a garden
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: September 25th, 2009, 9:05am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Delights:

  • Tajik Jimmy and more.
  • We’re number 37 from my friend Jerry Nagel
  • Malcolm Gladwell on what Atticus Finch was really up to.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: September 18th, 2009, 9:43am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Morsels on inspiration and thought:

  • Ashley Cooper on Chris Jordan’s trip to Midway to document the catastrophic results of our plastic world.
  • Dave Pollard articluates a framework for personal action.
  • Phaedra Eliis-Lamkins on Van Jones, green jobs and the meaning of the moment: “Our team doesn’t feel fierce enough to be a team.” (link via Dave Pollard)
  • Keith Loutit produces a stunningly cool film about a coast guard helicopter rescue exercise using time lapse and tiltshift.  Has to be seen to be believed.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: September 11th, 2009, 10:31am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Steamed and ready to eat:

  • Dave Pollard publishes a valuable personal redux of Joanna Macy’s work.
  • Holger Nauheimer on whether people resist change.
  • George Por on connecting our conversations
  • Jaime Casico on how collective intellegence makes us smarter
  • Sustaining powerful collective conversations - a discussion at The Presencing Institute
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: September 5th, 2009, 8:07am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Harvested this week:

  • Jeremy Hiebert reflects on the life and death of Oliver Schroer.
  • Alex Kjerulf finds a beautiful film about passion for work - in a specialty soda store.
  • Mushin is building a mind map to look at reall community building.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: August 21st, 2009, 9:12am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  The week that was of webby goodness:

  • ANAblog continues with their series of Mercury Prize nominees, with full length sounds samples.
  • The Onion with the best analysis of US health care reform.
  • Geist magazine posts a photo essay of dying British Columbia towns
• 

  What the CMA really thinks about universal health care

  Posted: August 20th, 2009, 2:38pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  You know, truth has been in short supply in the American “debate” over health care reform.  Today now everyone is quoting the outgoing and incoming presidents of the Canadian Medical Association using the word “implode” to describe our system.

  So here is my last input to the American debate, as if facts and truth matter.  Read the speeches of the CMA Presidents.  It is true that they are shilling for more private care, to make more money, have more opportunity and maybe some of them even believe that patients will be better served by choice.

  But nowhere do they say anything about abandoning universal care.  In her inaugural address this week, the new president, Dr. Annie Doig, said this:

  Canada’s physicians have always stood four-square behind the principle that no Canadian should do without needed medical care because of an inability to pay. That is an irrefutable fact. Canada’s physicians also stand four-square behind the principle that all Canadians must have appropriate access to the care they need. That, too, is an irrefutable fact.

  Even the outgoing president who took a pretty hardline in favour of more private care said this:

  Start by building a patient-centred culture that ensures that the patient has unfettered access, with no financial barrier, to continuity of care dispensed at the right time. In concrete terms, this means that when the patient arrives at the hospital, doctor’s office or other facility, he or she is seen quickly. And it means that when a patient requires surgery, he or she receives it within an acceptable timeframe.

  In the United States right now people are actually debating this point. We might have differing opinions on this, and radically different ways of getting the job done, but no serious leader in Canada would question equal and fair access of all patients to the care they need, regardless of their ability to pay.  That is universal health care.  It means that people get cared for, and not that 10s of millions of people don’t ever get care because they are afraid that they can’t afford it.

  So, understand this.  In Canada the debate is about coping with rising costs, making services more efficient and ensuring that everyone gets the care tey need.  It is not about fundamental access.  It is a debate that is alive in every country in the world.  But it is not the same debate as the one going on in the States right now.  And using single words like “implode” from a rhetorical speech that actually supports improving universal health care to oppose Obama’s plan is like quoting Einstein in a divorce settlement: sure you’re both talking about “relativity” but the similarity ends there.

  Good luck my American friends.  I hope the level of discourse returns from its dive into the ridculous soon.  And I hope no one gets hurt before it does.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: August 14th, 2009, 9:54am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Cleaning my plate:

  • Bella Gaia, a poetic view of earth from space.
  • Donella Meadows‘ classic piece on places to intervene in a system.
  • Nancy White on her software and web apps set up.
  • True North Records has a great podcast of contemporary Canadian singer/songwriters.
  • Common Dreams reports on Starbucks’ intention to fool us all.
  • Beware of the Blog posts something funny and absurd.
  • Ria Baeck tweets a Bodhisattva on the subway.
• 

  Updated music pages

  Posted: August 7th, 2009, 3:05pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  I have updated my music pages and finally migrated them here.  Go visit if you want to learn about my musical history, watch some videos  and listen to a few tracks and sound samples from my musical career.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: August 7th, 2009, 9:46am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Goodness that came my way this past week:

  • Norma Flores, a participant on our Food and Society Conference core team this year, has a blog about her work for farmworker justice.
  • Brad Ovenell-Carter and the void of voids.
  • Dave Pollard shares a travelouge from Joanna Macy in the Tar Sands
  • Also from Dave, The Transition Initiative.
  • Dojo Rat on his practice over the next 50 years.
• 

  Reconciliation and possibility

  Posted: August 6th, 2009, 10:48am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them:  reconciliation is possible:

  To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.

  Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.

  Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.

  Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.

  “Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”

  To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral!  Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years.  And vice versa.

  That is the world we certainly would wish for, no?  And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future?  What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?

• 

  Happy Birthday Mr. President

  Posted: August 4th, 2009, 1:20pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him:

  Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

  Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.

  via Links (Harper’s Magazine).

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: July 31st, 2009, 9:26am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Fresh from the feed garden:

  • Ria Baeck on collaborative classroom design.
  • George Por on his contemplative co-tweeting experiement, Parts 1 and 2
  • Geoff Brown continues the holding questions thread.
  • Euan Semple on what constitutes radical action.
  • Mushin on living social fields.
  • Johnnie Moore on Dave Snowdon and complexity in government
  • Rob Paterson has a TED talk from Stewart Brand on environmental heresies.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: July 24th, 2009, 8:37am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Links I’ve grazed this week.

  • A soldier writes from the front, and from the grave.
• 

  The dawning of practice

  Posted: July 16th, 2009, 4:07pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  

  My friend Adam Yukelson took up rock balancing after hanging out with us at the ALIA Institute last month.  He made this sculpture on the shores of the Dead Sea a couple of weeks ago.

  Beautiful.

• 

  Driving on PEI

  Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 4:28pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Prince Edward Islanders like to caution vistors to drive safely and not to speed.    I understand this, coming as I do from a slow island.  However, the motive here seems to be different: after driving around eastern PEI today I have concluded that Islanders like vistors to keep a steady speed so they can pass you 15 km/h over the limit!

  Glad to know that.  Happy to do my part!

• 

  On the road in Atlantic Canada

  Posted: July 1st, 2009, 7:25am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  …and searching for summer.

  After ALIA ended the family and I went down to The Shire, near Yarmouth for three days of hanging out with good friends from the Art of Hosting community, the Berkana Institute and the Split Rock Learning Centre.  Our program consisted entirely to mastering the idea of pacing.  We paced ourselves so well, that time itself slipped away.  Matt cooked brilliant food, and there was music everywhere.

  Following that, one night at Windhorse Farm near Bridgewater Nova Scotia and then on to Charlottetown last night.  We are now firmly ensconced in Rob Paterson’s barn, lolling around and enjoying a late morning, before we head into town to catch the Canada Day festivities.

  We’re hoping for some decent beach weather while we’re here, but is has been cold and raining for a month.  That ought not to discourage us though.

• 

  Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer ...

  Posted: June 21st, 2009, 5:32pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax. The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive. Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another. We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field.

  Today we held a little open space and one of the things we were invited to do was give some thought to what is alive in the field of the Institute this summer. Sensing like this helps us to be able to pay attention to the collective experience and gives voice to what is showing up, and what we can serve. At the conclusion of the Open Space, we checked out and I harvested a little poem that captures something of the flavour or what we’re in. Part of the set up for this poem is knowing that today the weather has been wild with high winds and driving drizzle, and even though the air is warm, there is a sense that the winter/spring part of the year is keen to leave its legacy on the summer/fall part.

  Here’s the poem:

  What’s alive in this field
  
  We’re going to be at home.

  The depth of passion that we own
  expands out to connect
  the alternatives that sing, circumspect,
  from the hill tops,
  that reach the ears of the young
  who stand in the storm, sung
  songs of drenched longing,
  wanting to tap creative energy
  to quiver with the joy that
  lives in the edge of death and life
  the light that redraws the breath of summer.

  The directions are called,
  the integration invites a falling into place
  a space of compassionate embrace
  of all we are related to.

  My daughter – an image held in the hand,
  at arms length, on a touch -
  there is much that is held here,
  much that isn’t here.

  What is clear is not-knowing -
  uncertainty growing like the clouds
  of drizzle that shower our container

  Can you feel the wind?
  Can you feel the breath?

  Settle down. Then step.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: June 19th, 2009, 7:45am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Morsels for chewing upon from the RSS pantry and the tap of tweet:

  • Viv McWaters goes open source with her facilitation methods.
  • Tweeting the revolution
• 

  41

  Posted: June 13th, 2009, 11:44am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  The sun is shining here on Bowen Island and I am relaxing on the porch enjoying my 41st birthday. Hope all is well where you are

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: June 5th, 2009, 10:32am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Harvesting things from the RSS fields:

  • Rob Paterson begins a series on The Natural Organization which uses a model of systemic change that is very similar to the one we are using with the Berkana Institute in Art of Hosting learning events.
  • Geoff Brown’s new blog design looks great, and his link to Kaki King is a bonus.
  • Euan Semple finds a film that describes what it’s like sometimes to be a consultant.
  • Time on how twitter can be used in conference settings.
• 

  Where you been?

  Posted: May 24th, 2009, 10:58am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Well, among other places, hosting and teaching at ALIA West this past week, and on my way to Cornwall Ontario this week to work with Tenneson Woolf and Esther Matte and a team at the Canadian Labour Congress as we explore the Art of Hosting Conversations with folks from many different unions.

  In transit I have stumbled on some great links this week, so here’s what I am reading:

  • Dave Snowdon has an important post on measuring impact rather than outcomes.
  • Drawball is worth a look for the way it takes chaos to community with art.
  • Myriam Laberge on helpful interventions for tricky group dynamics
  • Ashley Cooper shares the film she and Thomas Arthur made as a harvest from Leadership in a Self-Organizing World.
  • Wendy Farmer-O`Neil says change is dead in a lovely provocative way.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: May 15th, 2009, 9:06am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Back to a regular diet of RSS goodness:

  • Rob Paterson posts a great find on love and optimism
• 

  Travel facts

  Posted: May 6th, 2009, 10:53pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Facts from the longest business trip of my life

  • Number of days on the road this trip: 20
  • Number of seperate projects worked on: 5
  • Total number of people hosted: 835
  • Customs officials spoken to: 4
  • Number of those officials who wished me a good flight: 1
  • Number who welcomed me to their country: 3
  • Number who have said “Welcome back to the United States, sir” to me in the past ten years: 0
  • Number who did on Sunday: 2
  • Aircraft flown on: 12
  • Airports landed at: 8
  • Number of these I visited on more than one separate occasion: 3
  • Number of Kazakh pickerels eaten in Manitoba: 1
  • Estimated distance travelled in kilometers by that fish: 8771
  • Distance between my plate and the Red River, where pickerel can be found, in meters: 200
  • Colleagues I collaborated with: 26
  • Gray whales seen: 5
  • Porpoises seen: 1
  • Minutes it took to fly over the flood waters south of Winnipeg: 10
  • Number of times pulled over for running a red light: 1
  • Number of tickets received: 0
  • Hours I played a talking drum and got paid for it: 2
  • Number of passengers who snarked rudely at an Air Canada flight attendant when the captain of the plane was an hour late due to HIS flight being delayed: 7
  • Minutes by which the delay was reduced thanks to these interventions: 0
  • Approximate number of rock balancing sculptures set up by a group of us on the Pembroke, Ontario riverfront: 30.
  • Number of local senior citizens who said they were going to go home and try that: 3
  • Age, in years, of Highland Park Orkney whiskey served to me by Allistair Hain: 25
  • Minutes it took me to drink it: 30
  • Number of juggling balls I left home with: 7
  • Number I returned home with: 1
  • Indigenous languages heard spoken: 4
  • Number of these I understood enough to talk to the Elder about it: 1
  • Different guitars played: 3
  • People spotted wcearing paper face masks during a three hour wait in San Francisco: 7
  • Number of poems I wrote and read out as part of my professional duties: 2
  • Number of pieces of olive and sundried tomato pesto stuffed calamari that come served on a roasted cauliflower and fennel salad at RauDZ in Kelowna: 6
  • Number of beds slept in: 9
  • Percent of annual rainfall that fell in Hoopa, CA during the two days I was there: 4
  • Number of elk heads on the walls at Cinnebar Joe’s in Willow Creek, CA: 7
  • Number of hockey sticks on the walls: 1
  • Number of times my credit card was returned to me by a cab driver who drove 20 minutes out of his way to do so: 1
• 

  Phew

  Posted: May 1st, 2009, 8:26am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Happy May Day to all my labour movement friends!

  In Ottawa now, having helped host a lovely Art of Hosting workshop in Pembroke Ontario.  This was my 20th Art of Hosting gathering as a participant or a teacher.  It was a sweet one, with lots of work on personal hosting and what it takes to connect to source, individually and collectively.  Rich threads emerging, but I wonder when I will have time to reflect on them.

  Off to Kelowna now to do a half day Open Space for my friends at the ASsembly of BC Arts Councils during their annual meeting.  From Kelowna I return to California for the last leg of the 20 day road trip with a vistt to Hoopa California, to look at how radio station KIDE has had an impact on the community, part of a project I am involved in with Public Radio Capital out of Minnesota to create an easy to use framework for measuring the multiple impacts of Native public radio stations in Native communities.  If anyone has doen similar work, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

• 

  Collective live blogging at FAS 2009

  Posted: April 21st, 2009, 9:24am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  The 2009 Kellogg Food and Society Gathering for Good Food began 45 minutes ago here in San Jose.  Two and a half days of  conversation is now underway.  The gathering will feature a nearly full day in Open Space tomorrow and a participatory half day of closing.  Today is the kick off - speakers and presenters and so on.

  Last year we tried to awaken to social networking spirit when we were in Phoenix, but the hotel wanted $10,000 a day for universal wireless (Sheraton Wild Horse Canyon, in case you wanted to know) and so it wasn’t possible.  This year, the Fairmont San Jose has realized that providing wireless means people can talk live about how great your hotel is.  So we  have wireless and lots of folks are twittering and blogging and flickring and facebooking.  So if you would like to follow along with the collective live blog stream, you can do so through the conference website or by following the twitter feed directly which is acting as the defacto collective live blogging platform.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: April 17th, 2009, 9:30am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  On on the road again and posting will probably be light for the next little while, but here are the links that have caught my eye and fed my curiosity this week:

  • Ton Zylstra on closed systems and the financial collapse
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: April 10th, 2009, 9:00am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Morsels that are left on my plate:

  • Mary Statcy on solving complex problems
  • Omegle.  Hmm.
  • Steph Larsen on the systemic solutions to food reform.
  • A collection of traditional teachings from five First Nations, including audio
  • Johnnie Moore on a great workshop on noticing
  • Tom Atlee and Peggy Holman start a list of videos about Open Space
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: April 3rd, 2009, 9:30am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Hungry?  Eat…

  • Niels Teunis invites us to kill the mission statement and find three words instead.
  • Dervala Hanley tweets the death of the MBA.
  • Ria Baeck republishes Fancis Moore Lappe on wyas systems can redesign food systems
  • WHoisTV on blip.tv is a very interesting channel.
  • Johnnie Moore blogging Dave Snowden blogging some interesting peer learning in the hotel industry.
  • Aftab Erfan blogs about a Deep Democracy event in South Africa.
  • Peggy Holman is blogging her new book on Patterns of Change and looking for comments
  • Henry Mintzberg on the failure of management training
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 27th, 2009, 9:38am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  A light week of blogging as I have been in a deep Art of Hosting, but here are some things that grabbed my eye this week from the newsfeeds in my life:

  • Nancy White on why Sharepoint is NOT the solution you’ve been looking for (and I agree).
  • Ria Baeck on Collective sourcing for living wholeness.  
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 20th, 2009, 9:32am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Juicy:

  • Jack Martin Leith on the generations of innovation
  • Dan Oestrich on reflective leadership in lean times
  • Dave Pollard on Christopher Allen’s musings on group size
  • Geoff Brown works through Everything’s an Offer
  • Crooked Timber on power and deliberation
  • Common Ground explains why some contracts honoured and others are not.
• 

  Tools to see the forest through the trees

  Posted: March 16th, 2009, 11:43am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Hello Webby world…I have a request, especially of you systems thinkers out there.

  I’m working on a project with a network of Native public radio stations in the United States to assess the unique impacts that these stations make in their communities.  One of the things we would like to do with the stations is to provide them with tools to work with the feedback they get from the community and identify key things that make sense to work on.

  I’m thinking that some systems thinking tools would be a useful contribution to the work here, and I’m looking for any tools that people use to work strategically with environmental scans to identify leverage points and possibilities to enhance the impact of work a radio station might do. The easier the tool is to use, the better.

  So anything out there to point me towards?  I’ll cruise through the Fifth Discipline books but I’m wondering what you might have discovered on the web.  References and ideas in the comments please, soe everyone canbenefit from this inquiry.

  Thanks in advance.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 13th, 2009, 10:00am PDT by Chris Corrigan

  Links that made me think this week.

  • Holger Nauheimer release the newest version of the Change Management Toolbook
  • Peter Rawsthorne blogs a great BBC documentary on what a post-fossil fuel farm might look like
  • Siona van Dijk finds Paul Hawken naming the people I play with.
  • Jean Sebastien Bouchard turns me on to art.
• 

  Thunder Bay

  Posted: March 10th, 2009, 12:44pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  A cold day to be on the outskirts of a cold city in a cold part of the world.  When you travel midweek into Canada’s hinterlands and northern small cities, you share a plane with mostly hard and tired men who work for government or various companies doing business in the far flung nether regions of this nation.  Whether it’s travel to Prince George, Thunder Bay, Prince Albert or Yellowknife, it seems like the same guys are on the flight - steak eating, overworked, tired, introverted, hard men.  Once in a while, if they are coming home from a job well done, and travelling in groups, they are more garrulous, raucously celebrating and teasing one another across the rows of the small regional jets and Dash-8s that seem to be bulging at the seams to contain them.

  On a late winter Tuesday afternoon the flight from Ottawa to Thunder Bay isn’t at all out of the ordinary.  Mostly public servants on this trip, a couple of guys wearing jackets with CAT logos on them, two or three professional women, and a young couple who have seen better days, and who seem to be holding out for better days to come.  The flight is quiet, descending through an oncoming blizzard to land on a snowy runway.  When we disembark, the jetway doesn’t fit the fuselage very snugly and a blast of cold Northern Ontario air stings the face.

  Here at the Valhalla Inn - a nod to the nordic history of this part of the world - wood trim and gas fireplaces in the lobby distract the eye from the cinder block hallways, and new carpets in the room offset the aging wood and vinyl topped room furniture.  It seems like the meeting rooms are full of Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men.  Almost every space has a sign that says that people are planning, and being the end of the fiscal year, everyone is turning their thoughts to next year, which starts on April 1.

  There is something about the bleakness of being out here, far from downtown Thunder Bay, that brings loneliness on.  I have two days of work here, but already I can’t wait to get home to my little house on an island in Howe Sound, where my family are.

  It has been a long winter in many ways, and I’m ready for a rest and for spring to come on.  Here, it feels a million miles away from that - not even the geese have dared venture this far notth yet, and the storm coming in deepens the mood.

  Hunker down , do some good work with local First Nations leaders and youth and then get home.  That’s the work of this week.  Looking forward to ten days with the kids, writing some reports and getting my hands into the soil of the spring garden.

• 

  Back in Ottawa

  Posted: March 9th, 2009, 4:16pm PDT by Chris Corrigan

  For the second time in two weeks, I’m back in Ottawa, one of my former residences, and a part of Canada that I love very much.  I arrived yesterday afternoon and spent the evening walking around my old haunts on Elgin Street, going to see Milk and then finishing with a late dinner at The Manx Pub, a place located four doors down from the first place Caitlin and I lived after we moved to Ottawa in 1991.  The Manx opened three weeks after we got there and it’s still going strong.

  Today a day of teaching hosting, cricle practice and Theory U with a group of people involved in our Urban Aboriginal Economic Development Network of learning circles.  Many of the people with us today are involved in setting up learning circles BC and Ontario on Aboriginal women’s social entreprenuership inspired by the work of Penny Irons and the Aboriginal Mother’s Centre in Vancouver.

  Tonight its off to supper at Canada’s second Aboriginal restaruant, Sweetgrass Bistro in the Byward Market, another former stomping ground.  Good to be back here, good to be working with friends, good to be doing good work.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: March 6th, 2009, 9:00am PST by Chris Corrigan

  From my newsreader this week:

  • Peter Rukavina blogs a fish eye view (or sushi eye view) of a Japanese evening out.
  • Dirk at mediabuzzard on the history of Chinese - First Nations relations in British Columbia
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: February 27th, 2009, 9:00am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Interesting reads this week:

  • DeAnna Martin on a design for using Dynamic Facilitation with large groups
  • Worldchanging Canada has a great post about art derived from the complexity of nature
  • Metafilter link of an insane film about fishing for Great White Sharks.  From a beach.  Surfing is involved.
  • Rob Bailey on the perfect crab curry
  • Ravi Tangri on innovation in the service industry in hard times
  • Nancy White, with palpable delight wraps up her take on Northern Voice
  • Sheri Herndon emailed an interesting link about how Obama communicates by George Lakoff
  • Dustin Rivers takes his blog to new digs.  Get the new feed and follow along with the Sḵwxwú7mesh resurgence.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: February 20th, 2009, 10:31am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Things to chew on from the last weeks newsfeeds.

  • Viv McWaters writes a great piece on the role of facilitators in disastery recovery.
  • Christopher Gohl’s new blog, diagoal.
  • Rob Ballentyne will take you to see the solar eclipse of a lifetime this summer (he’ll also show you a comet for free!)
  • Jack Ricchiuto on using a moleskin to manage to do lists.
  • Nancy White and others launch the Community and Networks Connection.
  • Viv McWaters blogs about the community site for facilitators helping with the bushfire tragedy in Australia.
• 

  From the feed

  Posted: February 13th, 2009, 10:31am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Scoured from the corners of the web this week:

  • Luke Mitchell on the challenges of establishing universal health care in the USA.
  • Courtesy of my friend Vera Wabegijig’s facebook page, a list of Aboriginal CBC personalities.
  • Peter Rukavina finds a great site on mapping your childhood
  • WFMU shares some blue excerpts from Obama’s autobiography.  Great ringtone potential here.
• 

  Could it be, CBC?

  Posted: February 12th, 2009, 1:19pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  could it be that I actually like the flow of music on CBC Radio Two? …hmmmm….

  Last year when Radio Two changed its format, it was met with stinging criticism as it cut back it’s classical music offerings and diversified the genres it plays.

  But last week I was hanging out in Toronto at my brother’s house and he put on Radio Two in the morning and we left it on all day. I was struck by how well the mix of programming seemed to go with my mood. Most of the day is still classical music, the afternoon drive show is all kinds of songs by bands I have never heard from, and in the evening we get jazz, a concert recording (which lives online afterwards) and The Signal, which is the closest thing - though not close enough yet - to the BBC’s excellent Late Junction.

  I’m going to give CBC Radio Two a chance and see where it takes me.

• 

  Sending out love and support

  Posted: February 8th, 2009, 3:27am PST by Chris Corrigan

  With the way the world is - connected and interdependant - from time to time disasters from afar touch me from half way around the world. In Australia, around Melbourne, bush fires have ravaged communities this weekend, leaving 83 people dead and untold millions of dollars in damage. Viv McWaters posted a call to action today and I pass it on. Wnatever you can do to help, especially if you know people there, would be good.

• 

  Travelogue

  Posted: February 7th, 2009, 5:24pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  A couple of days ago I headed across the northern United States on a Boeing 757 on United airlines – the hungry skies. United is a quirky airline. They have three classes of seating on their domestic flights: executive, economy and then what I call the “hole in the bagel class:” Economy Plus. Economy Plus consists of a third of the rows of the economy cabin with four inches more legroom than the back two thirds of the economy cabin. In practice, Economy Plus seems to offer pretty much the same legroom as every other airline, but the economy cabin is cramped and uncomfortable, esp[ecially if you are penned in and the person in front of you decides to recline. At that point, your tray table becomes unusable and if there is anything under your seat, your legs start to cramp up. They should properly call Economy Plus, plain old economy and refer to the other section as Economy Minus.

  To enjoy the stretchy legroom of Economy Plus will cost you $40 extra dollars – ten dollars an inch – and wil almost certainly guarantee you a row to yourself, because it seems on the Vancouver-Chicago and the Vancouver-Denver flights, almost no one is enough of a sucker to pony up for legroom they would get on any other airline.

  And then the Starbucks at the G terminal in Chicago won’t take my travel espresso cup because, the barista was worried about “cross-contamination.” When she said that I walked away, for there was little I could to persuade myself that a shot of espresso was worth the risk that Starbucks would contaminate my travel cup. Interesting.

  Anyway, I’m in Michigan now meeting with 24 very interesting people from across Native America and Hawai’i engaged in conversation about the nature of native leadership and looking now at places in which that leadership is having an impact in the world. The retreat is being sponsored by Native Americans in Philanthropy and the Fetzer Institute. The weather here is very mild, and a big thaw is on. Snow and ice have been plunging from the roof of the amazing retreat centre here called Seasons. One more half day and then it’s off to Toronto where I get to see my family and my new niece Rebecca.

• 

  On the road

  Posted: February 5th, 2009, 8:03am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  Off to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend a retreat with the Fetzer Institute on Indigenous leadership.  We’ll gather together 24 or so folks from around the US who are working with leadership in Indigenous communities, organizations and governments and ask some interesting questions about the kinds of worldviews that drive our current practice of leadership, moving us away from traditional collective leadership capacities and towards individual leadership and scientific management models.

  The photo above is the scene I just watched, the sun rising over Mount Baker.  My friend Dustin Rivers says that the [e Sḵwxwú7mesh word for this time of day is kwakweya, the moment when the sun peeks up over the mountains.

  New day dawning.

• 

  Simple conditions for real engagement

  Posted: February 3rd, 2009, 11:28pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Thinking today about the challenge of engaging community for real change, and I am playing around with two simple on the surface, but difficult to execute ideas. I think though that if these ideas are executed, it creates the best possible conditions for sustained action and transformative change.

  The ideas, expressed as patterns, are: operate from a clear centre, and embody your future now.

  I was riding the ferry with my friend Patti DeSante who is at the moment in deep Zen training with Roshi Joan Halifax and exploring many aspects of embodied practice in the world. We were discussing what it takes to act fearlessly and enter into transformative work in the world. She shared a story with me that was simple but important. She told me about her days as an energy broker and how the sole reason her company existed was to make money. It was a simple and powerful centre around which the company organized itself. It provided an easy way to evaluate what kind of action was worth pursuing. It allowed the company, and the people in the company, to be out in the world fearlessly, knowing clearly why they are there.

  In other words, the company had a centre. To me the idea of centre is more than a mission statement or a vision statement. It is instead an assailable reason for being. Something you can feel, that is core to who you are, out of which you act. As Brian Arthur has said, in martial arts, if you think, you are dead. So to with any fearless action: if you need to think about why you are doing it, you are not operating from your centre. When you drink water you are acting out of an unstated need, a powerful and compelling centre that makes drinking a natural act. In martial arts we train in acting from that place as well. Developing a centre means developing clarity. If you haven’t got it, you move in the world from a position of confusion, and that kind of moving creates lots of problems: unnecessary effort, poor choices, emotional stress.

  Developing a shared centre is not something one does overnight, or in a weekend retreat. In involves much work and diligent attention to being in relationship with each other, discovering what is true and powerful for us and exploring the way that centre can unfold into the world. Otto Scharmer provides an excellent map for the work that is required to do this, and most of the facilitation and dialogue processes I use are designed explicitly to, with enough time, connect to that source and act from it.

  The second pattern is the pattern of embodiment. This is also about operating with clarity and it requires a deep discernment process. Embodiment simply means to bring into practice the principles of the world you are seeking to create. For example in the work we did on Vancouver Island with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, we chose “Children at the Centre” as our primary centre from which we operated. In practice this meant all kinds of things, including meeting whenever possible with children present, or placing their pictures in the centre when we met. It meant making a practice of thinking first about how children would live with the decisions we were making. It meant taking inspiration from children for the work we were doing. When planning our engagement process, we asked ourselves “How do children inspire us to engage with them?”

  Embodying these beliefs and centres in the world is a kind of deep practice. It makes daily work a spiritual practice, and results in tremendous emotional power and momentum. Taken to the broadest level. It finds it’s practical expression in Gandhi’s quest to transform Indian society by implementing his beliefs in peace, non-violence and equality at every turn, even being sure to clean toilets as a mark of solidarity with the lower castes..

  Creating a centre, and finding its creative expression in the world. Sounds easy!

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: January 29th, 2009, 10:09pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Friends who fed me this week:

  • Ashley Cooper on a piece by Parker palmer on teaching with heart and soul.
  • Rob Bailey writes the owner’s manual on the coconut.
  • Tenneson Woolf uses Wordle to produce a harvest
  • whiskey river on the emotional mechanics of inspiration
  • Mark Woods celebrates Edward Abbey’s passing with some excerpts from his work and meditations on deserts
  • Peter Rukavina’s unorthodox diary of his day without digital technology.
  • Peter Rawsthorne on the ways we are shaping citizen eGovernment on Bowen Island.
• 

  Bread as transformation

  Posted: January 29th, 2009, 9:27am PST by Chris Corrigan

  This is Peter Reinhart, a master baker, a theologian and a story teller who has written a great book on baking called The Baker’s Apprentice. In this talk he discusses the science of baking, but puts it in the context of the meaning of bread as an act of transformation from living components to new forms.

  Reinhart speaks from the four levels of the literal, metaphoric/poetic, political/ethical and mystical level. As a novice bread baker, I have to say that my exploration of the literal level is just beginning, and although I make some pretty good breads now, this dive into the deeper meaning of baking bread is fascinating, and takes my mixing, kneading, forming and baking to new levels.

• 

  Now I get twitter

  Posted: January 26th, 2009, 2:28pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  After being registered for a year and using it actively for a few months I now get twitter. Two recent uses have twigged me to twitter’s terrificness.

  This month when the roads on Bowen Island were slippery and dangerous a group of us worked over twitter to create a road status tool that uses crowdsourcing to report on road conditions on our island. Road conditions are incredibly variable depending on the altitude of the road (from sea level to 500 feet and more) and so it’s not enough to say “Grafton Road is clear” because it might be snowchoked up the hill from you. So twitter was the way we connected and did real time updates to the tool.

  Then today, I read a quick entry on Rob Paterson’s blog about Iceland’s government collapsing and I went to search for more. I checked Google first, but it’s a firehose of content, tried searching for blogs on Google, but that isn’t satisfying. Finally went to twitter, searched for “iceland” and got a slew of great articles and even a timely podcast.

  So hooray for twitter.

• 

  Maui redux

  Posted: January 25th, 2009, 11:49am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  Back from Maui and here are the things that you need to know about that amazing island.

  This was our fourth trip there and we’re very much in the flow of Maui as an almost second home.  If there was a theme to this trip it was LOCAL.  We stayed close to our living quarters for the most part, ate local food, consumed local media and tapped in to local issues.

  When we are in Maui we rent a little condo at a place called Hale Kamaole, which is an older condo complex in Kihei on the sunny south side of the island.  It lies right across the street from Kamaole Beach III which is a great beach for kids and about a half mile from our favourite beach, Keawakupu, a huge stretch of sand with a variety of surf breaks, snorkeling reefs and swimming waters.  If the surf is up, the boogie boarding and short boarding is good here.  If not, there is some decent snorkeling around the Mana Kai hotel front.  Att all times of the day, there is a good view of the flying humpback whales that were incredibly active this year out in the whale refuge.  The other local beach we camped out at was Ulua which is renowned for it’s snorkeling and diving, and although the water wasn’t crystal clear, swimming with sea turtles was pretty fricking amazing.  Other beaches we got to on this trip included Makena Landing beach in Makena, Ka’anapali in West Maui and D.T. Baldwin Park in Pa’ia which is the boogie coarding capital of Maui, but not for the novice sponger.

  On the local food front, we bought most of our fresh veggies from the farmers market in north Kihei, which is now open every week day and sells mostly locla food.  Our groceries were purchased at Hawaiian Moons in Kihei and the odd piece of fresh fish (a nice piece of Mahi Mahi for the grill) came from Star Market.  One of the highlights of the trip was a visit upcountry to O’o Farm, which provides food to two local restaurants in Lahaina.  We got a tour of the farm and a lunch prepared on the spot.  Nice crew of people working there and great to be eating off the land like that.

  Local media, easy.  Maui Time for news and commentary, KPOA for na mele Hawai’i, and I came back with another crapload of slack key, hula, and mele chanting CDs, almost all of them from local artists.

  In terms of local issues, perhaps the biggest one was the inauguration of a Hawaiian in the White House.  That played well across the whole state, and it was fun talking with folks about what Obama means to Hawaii.  We got a look at some of the development being done at Makena, which is a hugely sensitive issue right now and I chatted a little with my friend Luana Busby-Neff who lives on the Big Island, but who is deeply involved in the restoration of Kaho’olawe, the island off Maui that was used for 60 years by the US military for target practice.

  Sustainability is a big issue on the Hawaiian islands and lots of people are asking the question what would happen if the boast stopped coming?  Lana’i has built a huge solar collector and is set to become power self-sufficient in 2013 and the windmills keep turning on the West Maui Mountain.

  Highlight of the trip for me though was actually not a local thing at all.  It was seeing the zodiacal light again, for the second time in my life, and this time I photographed it.  Hawaii is one of the best inhabited places in the world to see this wedge of glow extending from where the sun set up into the sky, and it never ceases to amaze me.  This is the dust in the plane of our solar system glowing in the sun’s light and in Hawaii, it stands straight up and down.  On this trip, Venus was floating in the top of the light.  It gives me this spine tingling feeling to see this, to recognize that we are simply small beings on a small planet that floats like an island in a sea of space.  And that pattern is enhanced by being fractal in the Islands, where your whole world is limited to a few pieces of lava sticking up out of an ocean that goeas on forever in all directions.

  Mahalo a nui to the Kanaka Maoli keepers of the land who hold us while we are there, even if people don’t see them much.  We are so privilaged to be guests on their islands.

  (Photo gallery)

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: January 10th, 2009, 2:58am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Stuff people threw my way:

  • Brad Ovenell Carter has been using Webspiration.  It works for me in Chrome but not Firefox…
  • Mark Brady on when times will get good again.
  • Dervala Hanley, whose taste I trust absolutely, posts her favourite books and music from last year.
  • My own Bowen Island Journal has a new home

  See you all in a couple of weeks.

• 

  Why is my website hosed in Explorer?

  Posted: January 10th, 2009, 12:00am PST by Chris Corrigan

  I’m closing up shop, unplugging and dropping out for two weeks and going on holiday, and I don’t have time to work through this problem, but can anyone speculate about why my wesite shows up as a smiley face in Explorer but works fine in Firefox and Chrome?

  See you on after the 24th

• 

  Eating in San Jose

  Posted: January 7th, 2009, 12:31am PST by Chris Corrigan

  San Jose, CA

  We’re planning a gathering of the good food movement, so naturally, the pursuit of good food is everything.  Since arriving here yesterday I’ve eaten in three places, all of them good for various reasons.

  First, the Grill here at the Fairmont is crazy expensive, but if you cover your eyes and just order, the food is good.  I had a cabrese salad with buffalo mozzerella that melted in my mouth and some lamb chops cooked on the rare side of medium rare (which is how I like them).  Lamb was good, but the side order of creamed spinach was heavy and unpalatable.  Not to quibble but at 35$ for that entree, you expect a little beeter on the veg.

  Today, lunch and espresson at Cafe Trieste near the hotel.  Good espresso, mellow taste and well made shots.  Had a heavy cream of brocolli soup and a nice salad.  My mate Tim had two orders of the quiche and reported good things.

  Best of all though, tonight we hiked through the San Jose State University campus and ate at the Naglee Garage.  they’re a small place with seasonal food and all cooked in good time.  Tonight I had a winter salad of squash and pear and pecans, a cornish game hen with a maple glaze and a side order of kale, squash and bacon.  Lovely all round and capped with a desert of choclate and vanilla bread puddings which got shared around our table.  Worth a visit if you’re downtown here and only a mile or so from the hotel.

• 

  The way to San Jose

  Posted: January 4th, 2009, 11:41pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  God willing and this storm lets up, I’ll be bound for San Jose at 8am tomorrow morning, arriving in San Francisco at noon.  No promises to be able to meet up with any Bay area friends, but if you get this, I’ll be staying at the Fairmont (no it’s NOT my usual digs…).  Call me there at (408) 998 1900 and we’ll see what’s possible.  Be nice just to say hi, and who knows, I might have time.  Leaving Friday morning.

• 

  Crowdsourcing at home

  Posted: January 3rd, 2009, 6:30pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  We`re living through a mighty big snowfall here on Bowen Island, the likes of which haven`t been seen for at least 40 years.  As a result there is much handwringing about what other people should be doing about things like keeping the citizenry informed about the current road conditions and such. Most of our municipal government officials are on holiday and there have been no official releases of information since before the snow started falling on December 16.

  As a fan of passion bounded by responsibility, I decided yesterday morning to set up a weblog which provides a space for the crowd to get to work.  The idea is that people will visit to check on road conditions and while they are there, leave a comment about how things are in their neck of the woods.  It’s a gift exchange and so far it’s working marvelously.  Yesterday, up for half a day, the blog had posts from 7 people describing conditions on most of the major roads on our Island.  Today with a massive snowfall (30cms) ongoing since early morning, we have had reports from 16 people covering all of the major routes on the Island. Even the bus company folks wrote to announce schedule cancellations.

  A group of us were also up late last night tweaking the blog and working on a Google maps mashup creating a road status tool that users can colour when conditions deteriorate.  Stu Cole is leading the charge on that one.  Also, one islander, Boris Mann created a FreindFeed home for some of the Bowen Island eGovernment iniatiatives that John Dumbrille and Peter Rawsthorne have been musing about.  Richard Smith, James Glave and Brad Ovenell-Carter are looking into a wifi mesh and a webcam network across the island.   James Glave and the One Day Bowen crew are hosting the development pages for these projects at the Bowen 2020 wiki.  Most of the development chatter has been happening over twitter.

  Everything we are doing is gift based, and we are hoping that the municipality will steal it (or better yet , post links to all of this on their infrequently updated web page.  What amazes me is what a small group of us can do, in responding to a need, in so short a time using freely available tools.  We’re lucky that this has happened while we have had a little time, being snowbound and all over the holidays, but when there is a need, it’s amazing to see what can come of it.

  If you have anything to add to our efforts or tools we should know about, post them in the comments or visit the Bowen2020 wiki and join the effort.

• 

  From the feed

  Posted: January 2nd, 2009, 12:05pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  The Friday “From the Feed” returns for 2009.  Great finds by other people:

  • John Dumbrille blogs Clay Shirkey talking about egov and citizen engagement.
  • George Nemeth retweeted Valdis Krebs‘ link to a list of great ambient recordings from 2008.
  • The Tyee publishes a great series of 10 new ideas for the new year
  • The Edge posts its annual question edition: “What will change everything?”
  • Jordon Cooper and Stowe Boyd on the best windows desktop and web apps of the year.  I love posts like these.  If you have others, add them in the comments.
• 

  Happy New Year

  Posted: December 31st, 2008, 12:09pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  Another year is drawing to a close and I’m feeling very tired and very excited about what the year has been like. Taking a cue from Viv, here is my end of year post.

  In general 2008 was a year of teaching and travel. For the first half of the year I was on the road for 120 days, visiting places throughout British Columbia as well as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nova Scotia and southwards to Washington, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, New York, Michigan and Georgia. Most of the teaching I did was with my mates in the Art of Hosting community of practice and we taught on Whidbey Island, on the Navajo Nation,

  2008 began with a trip to Maui with my family in what has become a standard mid winter family retreat. We ind this to be a precious time to turn everything off, shut the office down and give two weeks of undivided attention to our kids. Following that, I returned to do some amazing community planning work with the Quinault Nation in Washington State, and a great Open Space with the Urban Aboriginal Strategy in Regina, where the windchill was -55.

  One highlight of February was working with Jennifer Charlesworth and Thomas Ufer at the BC Federation of Child and Family Services annual meeting, That work has morphed into an offering Jennifer and I are doing at the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute this May in Victoria.

  Later in February was a return trip to the Navajo Nation to run an Art of Hosting and support the Shiprock Health Promotion folks in some planning.

  In March I worked a little with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, a project which has since suffered a fatal blow by political forces that we underestimated. I also went to Georgia to begin a project with Native Public Media looking at the impact of Native American radio stations. After a year of raising funds, that project will kick start in the spring. March was also the hardest professional time for me. A facilitation project I did with Fisheries and Oceans went sideways in a stakeholder meeting, and lots of lessons ensued.

  In April, the work of nine months with the Kellogg Foundation came to fruition as Tim Merry, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Monica Nissen, Toke Moeller, Phil Cass and I hosted the 2008 Good Food Gathering for 550 active participants in the US Good Food Movement. This was a huge project and we had a good time in Phoenix, and we worked our butts off. Tim and Tuesday and I are returning to design and host the 2009 gathering with a great core team of 20 or so people.

  May was a month of teaching with as Art of Hosting in Florida and an Open Space training with Tenneson Woolf in New York City. The New York trip was brilliant and the whole family came to take in museums, Broadway shows and street festivals. The New York Art of Hosting circle hosted our trip there and Nancy Fritsch-Egan, Angela Amel and Kelly McGowan set up enough work that we were able to make it a busman’s holiday.

  June was another month of travel and teaching. Teresa Posakony, Tenneson, Tatiana Glad and I worked a lovely Art of Hosting in Cochrane Alberta, and then I joined my dear friends at Tim Merry’s place in Nova Scotia for a week of retreat with our Art of Hosting friends. Following that a number of us headed to the Shambhala Institute where Toke, Monica and I presented an Art of Hosting module. I turned 40 in June as well…

  July and August were spent resting although we went to San Fransisco to attend Open Space on Open Space and in August our family went to the Okanagan for a retreat which included a weekend of traditional music performance in Princeton, BC.

  Highlights for September included working with the Canadian Union of Public Employees and hosting an Art of Hosting on Bowen Island, which was the first time I have taught with my partner and spouse Caitlin Frost.

  This whole autumn has been less travel, but more projects, and lots of conference calls and design work. In October I got out a little and helped set up a national network on urban Aboriginal economic development with a kick off meeting in Ottawa. That project continues to grow and gain momentum.

  In November I finally got to teach with my friend Peggy Holman, and we delivered a lovely appreciative inquiry training for a dozen public servants in Victoria. Tuesday Ryan-Hart and I also traveled to Battle Creek Michigan to host the first meeting of the 2009 Good Food Movement Gathering core team.

  December was the culmination of two big projects. The first week consisted of work with the school district in Prince George, running four community engagement gatherings to establish an Aboriginal choice school in Prince George. Following that I traveled to Boston and worked with the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education running a coaches retreat alongside a great design team with my co-host from PEJE Sharon Haselkorn. I was struck by the similarities in both of these projects.

  As a facilitator in my practice I explored questions of collective leadership, connection and relationship and spent time working on a very good design tool which has been very helpful for many of the clients I have worked with this fall. I also began incorporating more graphic facilitation into my work and did some brilliant stuff with the best guy I know, Steven Wright.

  Most importantly, I think I have made good on my promise to “never work alone.” In the past these end of year posts thanked my clients and I had relatively few partners. This year, it’s all about the folks I worked with. Here are the fine folks I got to work with this year, helping to serve our best to the clients and communities that asked for our help:

  • Sono Hashisaki

  • Gabriel Shirley

  • Tracy Robinson

  • Steven Wright

  • Tenneson Woolf

  • Teresa Posakony

  • Christina Baldwin

  • Ann Linnea

  • Thomas Ufer

  • Steve Ryman

  • Tim Merry

  • Toke Moeller

  • Monica Nissen

  • Phil Cass

  • Tuesday Ryan-Hart

  • Tatiana Glad

  • Cheryl dePaoli

  • Zrinka Glavas

  • David Stevenson

  • Jennifer Charlesworth

  • Derek Evans

  • Roq Garreau

  • Bob Wing

  • Chris Robertson

  I think that’s everyone! Clearly making progress on the goal of working together.

  So thank you friends, colleagues, readers, stumblers, clients and all. See you in 2009.

• 

  Van Jones on the new politics of activism

  Posted: December 31st, 2008, 9:52am PST by Chris Corrigan

  

  Van Jones - my inspiration for 2009
  Photo by luxomedia

  I’ve blogged about Van Jones before, but last night I listened to a podcast of a talk he gave at a Social Change Forum at Hollyhock on Cortes Island earlier this year.  With a powerful mix of humour and truth telling, he describes the confluence of social justice and environmental justice and calls for a new politics that transcends dualities, us vs, them thinking and win/lose outcomes.  He also make a powerful point about how our absolute reliance on deliverables, outcomes and achievables makes us liars, as we pretend to be able to tell our donors, funders and stakeholders how we will shape the future.  Van makes a powerful point that when we tell the story that we are successful, and hide that fact that half the time we don’t know WHAT we are doing, we prevent the ability to learn from one another.

  The world is a complex, chaotic and changing place, and what is needed now is not winning against but winning over.  We need to invest in prototypes not pretend we know the solutions.  We need experiment, relationship and integrity.  That is the new politics of activism - it is the new politics period - and it is what I am committing myself to here at home on Bowen Island, and in my work in the world for 2009.

  Happy New Year and see you out there.

• 

  Knitting textures with gravity

  Posted: December 30th, 2008, 11:54am PST by Chris Corrigan

  Play, movement, beauty, and grace - this is why I love juggling.  It uses a hard constraint (the predictable inevitability of gravity) as a resource to create beauty.  Thanks to Thomas for the link, who is my own master at this aesthetic.

• 

  Our experience of dialogue

  Posted: December 29th, 2008, 1:45pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  I have noticed over the years that much public discourse is informed but what we see on television.  Whether it is the cross-examination of the courtroom drama, or the witty one liners of sitcoms, or the over extended drama of soap operas, the way we talk to each other is heavily influenced by what is screened around us.

  This clip is interesting: interviews with screenwriters who point out the function of dialogue in a television show.  One of the high points of writing dialogue, it turns out, is that it will never be effective if people are actually seen talking to each other.  So it’s no surprise that bringing these forms of conversation into the real world creates all sorts of dysfunctional social situations.

  The only character you should be in real life is you.

• 

  Worry and presence

  Posted: December 28th, 2008, 11:41pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  With no future there is no worry.  If we are truly present in this moment, the story we hold about the future drops away and with it goes worry.

• 

  Ritual for hope

  Posted: December 26th, 2008, 10:55am PST by Chris Corrigan

  My friend Thomas Arthur is ensconed on San Juan Island and has decided to charter a personal ritual of hope.  From Solstice to Obama’s inauguration, he is making a short video a day and posting them when he can at his Vimeo page.

  What are YOU doing to ring in the changes and see that they take root?

• 

  The poetry of ice

  Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 3:15pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  This Christmas might be the first white Christmas for all of Canada since 1971.  To celebrate, I’d like to point you to my friend Jeremy Hiebert’s stunning collection of photos of ice from Lake Okanagan.  This is not a photo collection, it is a poem of the highest order.  Sit still and watch the slideshow fill your eyes with the wonder of this earth.

  And to accent it here is a poem from me, using the wonderful language of ice:

  Crawl to the edge of the fast ice

  where the ice front holds still

  as the pancakes form up.

  Not from the breakdown of nilas or ice rind

  this pancake forms under the swell that tossess

  slush ice, shuga and grease around in the bay.

  This morning a lump of anchor ice rose

  honeycombed and rotten and washed ashore

  stranded on the beach.

  Out in the open sea, ice sky glistens

  with ice blink where the multiyear floes

  nip each other, calve and tumble and raft.

  crowding the polynya with brash

  turning up bummocks

  on the growlers and bergy bits

  tonight I head inland across the rime

  home to a warm room

  and an old book on navigation and hazards

  The leads will open in spring

  and the water sky returns, dark and hopeful

  icefeet slowly retreating to the beach.

  Winter is here.

• 

  Feeding

  Posted: December 23rd, 2008, 2:29pm PST by Chris Corrigan

  This week in the feed:

  • Rob Paterson concludes his harvest of the Boyd Conference on a pessimistic yet exhuberant note.
  • Staffordshire Oat Cakes and Easy No Knead Bread
  • Brad Ovenell-Carter’s medieval teaching methods.
  • Michael Herman distills work he and I did for a few years into a poem and an offering.
  • Steve Moore tweets a great story of mutual aid