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How to diagnose a living organization
June 30, 2011
With gratitude to Art Kleiner and David Sable Catalyzing Organizational Change: ALIA 2011 How about creating a human sculpture that illustrates an organizational system? Recipe: Pick the actors to represent your key players: Who’s moving a change? Who’s opposing it (helpfully? not?) Who’s following? Who are the bystanders (interested? involved? disempowered?) Put them all in the space where […]
Posted in: Human Systems
Clarity from confusion
June 29, 2011
Michael Chender spoke on opening night at the 2011 Authentic Leadership in Action summer institute: We have a greater capacity for wisdom and courage than we may think. Habits hold us back…habits of rushing away from what is irritating and confusing. His contention is that complexity and confusion create irritation for us, from which […]
Posted in: Mindfulness
Time and how I choose to spend it
June 15, 2010
Revealing new report today from the Canadian Index of Wellbeing… Caught in the The Time Crunch: Time Use, Leisure and Culture in Canada. I work in an organization where I have to track and charge out my time, so I think about this a lot. What do I do with my time? How many of […]
Posted in: Human Systems, Measurement and evaluation
Peter Senge on change from the periphery; juggling and finding the tune
June 11, 2010
Peter Senge spoke this morning about what he calls ‘the era of transformation’… his optimism about the collaborations and mutuality that is happening today, that might take us to a new place. His examples were various and all about work that encourages people to consider the system, to think of the world, community, organization as […]
Posted in: Action Enquiry, Human Systems
Action, Logic and getting it all together
June 11, 2010
Do we have to know exactly what we are doing before we act or can we start somewhere? On the other hand, is there a way of getting a better understanding of how people in the system are responding before we act? If you’re working in organizational development, do you ever get the feeling people […]
Posted in: Action Logics, Human Systems
It’s all a pot luck
June 10, 2010
In her Massey Lectures twenty years ago, Ursula Franklin talked about a peaceful global community being like a pot luck… everyone shows up with what they can, diversity is essential, and if you can’t cook, you can still clean up. Yesterday — various self-organized workshops to get together with those whose interests intersect. Instead of going to the usual “how […]
Posted in: Action Learning Circles
Moving energy, adaptive systems, power and love and “the blood business”
June 10, 2010
Wednesday am Bob Wing of Mountain Warrior Institute in Boulder worked with people on a variety of exercises that are based on Aikido. How to hang on to energy or release it to someone else. Apparently you really can pass on energy to someone else, but without becoming depleted. So I guess that’s like when my […]
Posted in: Adaptive Cycle, Human Systems
Addiction to Action
June 9, 2010
Yesterday we were talking about Addiction to Action, at the expense of enquiry and reflection. Matt Lauer on NBC tried to bait Obama yesterday, because apparently he is not displaying enough righteous anger, not looking hard enough for people to blame, and spending too much time looking for information. He was baited — asked why […]
Posted in: Action Enquiry
Seniwati Knits 
July 1, 2011
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