Author: Michael

Posted on

Inviting Good Neighbors to Register

I met Cheryl Honey earlier this week at the international Transformative Mediation conference in Minnesota. She’s the creator of something called Community Weaving and the Family Support Network. Taken together they are a wildly ambitious — and effective — application of Asset-Based Community Development.

Cheryl and friends have created a site that allows anyone to register as a good neighbor and add skills, abilities, interests, experiences and other contributions to a national “resource treasury.” The treasury is searchable by geography, interest, skill, need, and many other ways — but only after you register.

I just registered myself in Chicago, and was able to find several others here to connect with. One of them is even listed as a facilitator of Open Space. I’d like to see the C3 leaders start registering here, too. There is a special designation for groups and we could use that for C3.

Posted on

Inviting Resolution in Iraq

Stratfor.com (a sort of ‘private CIA’) released this special report on Iraq last week, a fascinating look at the underlying dynamics of recent shifts (and, I would say, ongoing policy failure) in Iraq.

This proposal, advanced by Care2.com, fits well with the Stratfor analysis:

Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, have proposed their plan to President Bush and the Council on Foreign Relations. Biden and Gelb have sent a message to our leaders that ending the conflict in Iraq does not need to involve deploying more U.S. troops.

The only way to hold Iraq together and create the conditions that allow our armed forces to responsibly withdraw is to give Shiites, Sunis, and Kurds incentives to pursue their interests peacefully and to forge a sustainable political settlement.

Biden and Gelb outlined how this can be done through the following five steps:

1. Maintain a unified Iraq by decentralizing it in to regions. A central government would be left in charge of common interests.

2. Guarantee Sunis a fair share of oil revenue so that each group has an incentive to maximize oil production, making oil the glue that binds the country together.

3. Create a massive job program while increasing reconstruction aid – especially from the oil-rich Gulf states. This job program would be tied to the protection of minority rights.

4. Hold an international conference that would produce a regional nonaggression pact and create a Contact Group to enforce regional commitments.

5. Begin the phased redeployment of U.S. forces and withdraw most of them by the end of 2007.

This plan is consistent with Iraq’s constitution and has been endorsed by many experts on Iraq. It will help rebuild the country while bringing our troops home. Sign the petition here, to tell President Bush to support the Biden-Gelb five-point plan.

Care2.com is, itself, a remarkable place for connecting with issues and people in ways that can make a difference.

Posted on

Inviting Positive Societal Transformation
in Nepal

This in from my colleagues in Nepal last week, the third iteration of the Summit meeting we started in 2004:

It is our great pleasure to inform you that the third national summit of imagine initiatives of Nepal is successfully concluded on 10 September,2006 in Pokhara. The three day summit made a clear way about how NAINN, Regional Networks and Imagine Initiatives have to move forward in the changed context of Nepal.

The participants discussed on the roles of AI people and organizations. The entire nation is eagerly waiting for ‘NEW NEPAL’ (NAINN’s Ultimate Goal, set in the first summit, 2004). The election of Constituent Assembly and new constitution are at the gate. We AI people and organizations have to play a vital role now so that the election and constituent will be able to address the desire, wishes and need of people.

We can go to the people in the grassroots, every corner of the country and every individual. We can make the people clear how they can make their nation and future bright being positive. NAINN and Imagine Initiatives can facilitate to make the best constituent. This is what discussed in the summit.

The second important thing we discussed in the summit is that we all will continue gearing up the ‘positive mind setting’ and ‘positive societal transformation’ movements this year as well but faster…

Looking forward to joining them in November, for one-day Open Space meeting to follow up on this and other work.

Posted on

Inviting Individual Actions to Meet

Some of us are talking now about the invitation to a Chicago Summer 2007 conference that would be the extension of our Giving Conference in 2004 and Omidyar Member conferences in 2005 and 2006.

In writing the invitation, I suggested we focus on what it is we’re interested in, and who we *would* invite, rather than the groups of people that we think *should* be there. Too often, *should* begins as a fantasy and ends up as the excuse for NOT acting, not inviting. Better to focus on what we already care about and the people we already know or really want to meet and connect with.

Here is my interest and what/who I’d like to invite in Chicago:

…i’ve just finished the city’s conservation corps training. i’m giving a lot of attention to food, transportation and water practices. i’m also thinking about the nature of practices and habits. i’m still interested in a less visceral way in philanthropy and education.

i’m most interested in spending time with a group that would be willing to identify, share, expand and strengthen the body of things they are doing that seem to be part of the ‘solution.’ everything from turning off lights and faucets to conserve, buying organic, recycling, to organizing new foundations or community projects — or growing old ones, blogging and connecting other ideas, homeschooling, housing coop. whatever. i’m just into hearing more and more about what others are doing NOW that seems like it must be part of “the world we want.”

when i first went to outward bound, winter mountaineering in colorado, the told us it wasn’t about ‘survival’ skills… but about learning to be comfortable and easy in strange, quite often harsh, conditions and surroundings. that’s what i’d like now… to be with a bunch of folks who are good at a bunch of things that SUPPORT LIFE. i’m interested in things that help us feel more alive, as individuals and communities. how can we unfold more life and power out of the things we already have, already know, and already are doing? what are the simple things we can do now or next, to cultivate more LIFE — to be more comfortable and easy in the world we want?

i’d be most interested in spreading an invitation around chicago networks that i’m connected/ing with and at the same time having our central question or theme (different from design or outcomes) be something that is universal enough that many might choose to come from afar. giving, more good things happen, personal power and action, community connections… the sorts of broad themes we’ve had in the past work for me because i could be working on growing and inviting a chicago group of people and still invite and include friends and colleagues from afar. to the extent that any local group(s) would grow and prosper, it could be a easily replicated elsewhere.

My own proposal for theme: ALL AT ONCE.

more and more, we are being asked to do many things at once — not just multi-tasking, but be aware of many different views and realities at once, to function in conflicting roles, to accept conflicting realities, and change many habits… ALL AT ONCE

what are the issues and opportunities for practicing all of the things that we need to do personally and socially to cultivate and support more and more LIFE in ourselves and the world, working and living together to create the world we want. all at once is for all the things we do… and all the groups and networks in which we do it. what if we could do and gather all of those… ALL AT ONCE?

Would you join ALL AT ONCE? …or propose something else? You can join the planning conversation here. The bit about interests and theme comes up later in the thread, about here.

Posted on

Inviting Consciousness

Join us Wednesday, September 20th at 7pm at the Transitions Café 1000 W. North Ave, Chicago for a presentation by my friend Therese Rowley:

A Different Way of Seeing; A Different Way of Being

A Mystic’s Ride to New Realities… When you have a different way of seeing, you have access to a different way of being. And when you have access to a different way of being, you can create new and different realities in your life. Understand your life’s stories in new ways, unravel unhelpful patterns, and open the door to new realities. If your current reality has frustrating, stuck, or confusing aspects, even though you consider yourself a conscious person, tonight’s presentation will help you better understand:

  • The territory on the map called “your life”
  • “Maps” or unconscious assumptions you have been bequeathed or ones you have unknowingly created
  • The “organizing principles” that form the core of your current reality

Therese Rowley, Ph.D. is a strategic business consultant, educator, and intuitive who teaches and facilitates accelerated change for leaders, organizations, and conscious individuals. Join us for a lively and inspiring evening. Bring a friend! Admission is free!

Posted on

Inviting Desktop

I find that my desk this morning reflects well the shifting and mixing that I’m working on these days. I notice that I’m working simultaneously on several things… the hot cereal and fruit in my bowl… taking notes from a yoga book to improve the practice I just finished… still reading the latest issue of Yes! magazine, on our cultural/community shift from Empire to Earth Community… keeping an eye on market reactions to consumer confidence and Fed notes releases… two fledgling books on Open Space, one to edit, one to co-author… and into all of that Jill rings in from London to say good night. Add in the email box with responses due to Nepal, Sweden, Australia and a few other places… and you’ve got a pretty good snapshot of what’s attempting to come together here… body, community, environment, markets, books, conversations, relationship.

Posted on

Inviting Life

Yes, well, I’ve done it again. What started as the GlobalChicago Weblog, became Pea Soup when I moved to London, then (did I miss one in here?) became Practice Matters, after absorbing SmallChangeNews, has now been christened Inviting Life.

When Global Chicago (the site, not the weblog) started in 1998, the whole point of it was to connect Global movements with Local people and activities. What I like about this new name is that Life feels bigger than Global, and the practice of Inviting seems more intimate still, than Local. Growth in two directions, and still whole!

Posted on

Inviting the World We Want

Two years ago I worked with Phil Cubeta and some others to create something we called The Giving Conference. Since then, at least two Omidyar Network member conferences, something called Recent Changes Camp, staff meetings in Rio de Janeiro, and a bunch of other things have happened as results. Now there are conferences trying to happen in Thailand and Chicago.

Phil offered the following in the Thailand planning thread. This is why my facilitation of Open Space Technology is morphing into a larger practice of Inviting Leadership.

…the secret to a good open space is the invitation and also the invitation list. “Whoever comes are the right people,” but be sure to invite the right people. Go for broke would be my suggestion. Go for significant potential funders, political leaders, media, civic leaders, nonprofit professionals, thought leaders, moral leaders and religious leaders. Ask yourself who can convene these networks. Go to those “mavens” and enlist their support in not only emailing or writing the key people, but actively and personally inviting them.

The real work of open space is in networking networks together. That has to be done as the pre-work before the invitation goes out. In fact, the invitation will be drafted and redrafted, negotiated if you will, by each of the co-conveners as they insert phrases of important to their networks.

Michael Herman and I did this together three years ago for the Open Space on Giving. Our invitation was ultimately gibberish, because so many people pulled it in so many directions as a precondition of their inviting their networks. But the revision process led to their buy-in; and their personal invitation, not the words used, but their willingness to invite people over the phone, is what got the key players there. So treat the words as flypaper. Get key mavens stuck in the glue. The more they struggle with the the words the more involved they become, until the exact words no longer matter.

Phil and I worked by email two years ago, and lots of phone time. We traded 37 different drafts, many of them major revisions, of the invitation. We went round and round with words, but around a core purpose: Giving. And that is what’s been sustained and sustaining everything since then, that core purpose, in so many different languages. It’s just great to see so many ripples from something so simple as one short “invitation.”

Posted on

Great Great Great…

Today my friend Katie Brick and I traded several emails, trying to figure out if we share a set of great great great great grandparents. She and I met years ago through a Fast Company group in Chicago. Even if we’re not related, it seems certain that our ancestors partied together on the outskirts of Detroit, circa 1850. What I emailed her today was a bit of data from a family history a great aunt of mine did in 1945. Katie’s still checking the story on her side for overlaps.

The other reason this is exciting now is that I spent a good chunk of last week helping my Dad format and publish 200 pages of his favorite stories. Some of these things I’d never heard him tell and might never have heard him tell, about growing up, making choices, doing work, learning through life. Other things that the next generation will certainly hear me tell, but be able to read it in my Dad’s own words, as well. The details are delicious, but also the patterns. In the reading, I can see the patterns of who he is and how he thinks about the world… and then of course i can see them in myself, as well. What a treasure.

I remember with a strange clarity, one day in the fourth grade, when a new kid joined our class. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have been going to this school from the beginning, to have a history with the school and my classmates. These books give me some of that same gratitude and satisfaction and confidence, a history, a lineage, back to some of my great great great greats. As so much of the world churns and falls away, I can’t begin to imagine what it might be like decades from now, for the children of my newborn nephew and year-old niece to scan this sort of a record for new baby names and old family patterns.

I think what is most fascinating for me in all of these stories is the simultaneous realities: I, Michael Herman, could not have been planned, especially by those great-great-greats… and yet, the patterns that I carry are not random or accidental, they are (I am, we all are) generations-old mind and practice.

Posted on

Body, Soul, Spirit?

Doug asked me the other day about how I sort out body, soul and spirit. Here’s an answer I didn’t know I had until he asked:

in practical terms, i can find the edge of “me” that is my skin. everything inside is body.

then there is another layer, the energy of me. there are many layers, flexing and moving and shape-shifting all the time, but taken as a 3-D stack, they have a finite edge. everything inside of that edge is the space that i sense as “me” — and “mine.” i think of soul as this energy space, that extends sometimes quite far, and through time, and is ever changing its shape… but always i am making some story about how/why it is mine and what i think it should be or do.

beyond that edge, there is a wispier thing yet, a space that i find if i let attention follow the sound of the tingsha bells… and this space is bigger than my energy space, bigger than my story, boundless even. the bells are an invitation to relax into that, to relax the edges and efforts that are “me.” this space seems to be the ‘water’ we all swim in… and i’m inclinded to guess, swims through all of us, too. so this vast third space, all of stuff, all of space, all of awareness, all of everything beyond all of “me”, is what i think people are talking about when they say spirit.

sometimes we say, about open space meetings or other peak moments, that “spirit shows up”, i think that this means that some critical mass of people in the gropu, for some criticitacl mass of time in the event, relaxed their bodies and souls, their physical tissues and the stories and edges they each usually make around “me” and for some noticeable time, in some noticeable way, they were noticing that there is someting beyond those edges of “me” and noticing that they were all swimming in it, spirit, togetehr… so it’s not really spirit showing up… as them showing up and relaxing out into IT.

this might be another way to think about the gift of invitation, and open space. a chance to relax. “i’ve been invited,” we can think to ourselves, “they’ve asked me to join just as i am.” body rests just a little, on whatever ground we already have. story, and the efforts of mind that make it, rest a bit, too. we return from pushing to pulsing. breathe. now we can tap all of the vastness beyond our little isolated “me” selves, the whole soup of possibilities, in the direction of the next good thing.

maybe it’s only that we relax our little individual stories into the soul, the energy, the pulse of the organization, the spirit of the team, but even that is often quite something, to find and really feel the wave of organization, community, and fellowship carrying and supporting us as we go about our everyday work.

Posted on

Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day

The City of Chicago has scheduled its third Household Hazardous Waste & Electronics Collection event of the year. Materials will be accepted on Saturday, August 12 from 8am to 3 pm at the North Park Village, 5801 N. Pulaski.

Residents can rid their homes of old light bulbs, computers, computer printer cartridges, televisions, cell phones in addition to old paint cans, solvents, cleaners and other dangerous chemicals that can cause major health problems, for children and adults. Old gasoline cans that do not effectively keep fuel fumes sealed will be accepted as well as old medications.

Posted on

Phone Tax Dead at 108

Imposed in 1898 to help finance the Spanish-American War, (one of the) taxes on long distance calls end today. You can even get a refund for taxes paid in the last few years. Don’t spend it all in one place.

via Mises.

Posted on

Taking the Big Leap

My friend Colleen Taylor is taking a big leap, of the job change sort. Her story sparked some reflection about my own leaps and edges.

As far as I can tell, for all my leaping, I have never really gotten over the edge. Even when I thought I’d literally stepped off “the big one” some years ago, and fell to the rocks below, it turned out to be just 15 feet of falling and tumbling.

That one literal leap aside, it seems the edge just keeps moving closer to and then deeper into who I am. The leaps, even the apparently big ones, dissolve into so many daring little internal shifts.

Posted on

Campaign by Invitation

In Sweden last week, I met Brad Blanton, author of five books on Radical Honesty and independent candidate, in Virginia, for US Congress. How about that for a leap… radical honesty in Congress!

What’s more, he’s campaigning by invitation, similarly to how I proposed it in April. He’s held five world cafe’s to bring voters together to talk about issues.

These aren’t traditional candidate-on-stage town hall meetings. He sits in one of the small group (3-5 people) clusters as one of 100 or more participants. He shares the notes with all participants, uses the output to craft his platform, and encourages connections that he hopes and expects will out-live his campaign – win or lose.

We may yet have real democracy in these United States… if he’d only tell the story of these events on his website.

Posted on

Inviting Leadership, Rediscovered

workshop-map

the festival i’ve been writing about comes right after my wedding and honeymoon. as i get back to work, doing and teaching inviting leadership, i can’t even remember the names of some of these practices that i’ve been working on and writing about for… how many years now? as one guy said to me, “now that’s a successful honeymoon.”

i purposely did not look up my last drafts on the practices so that i could discover them freshly, in the course of this new work. here is what i found myself doing as i opened space. more importantly, it’s what i found myself explaining in a short 1.5-hour workshop, without the luxury of a three-day retreat nor a depth of open space experience in the group:

  • opening heart (as the mainstream label and basic mechanism, and then) the practice work being about appreciating and embracing and such.
  • inviting attention – the practice work is about focusing and articulating and listening and sharing, vision and story.
  • supporting exchange – the practice work being about movement, connection, flow, conversation, marketplaces, gifts and offerings.
  • making good – on promise and promises, the practice being about taking actions and getting results that honor the care, invitations and support we’ve been given, and what of those we’ve pledged to others.

the image above comes from the morning workshop we did for leaders, on the last day of the festival. this latest language seems crude enough to travel, and still true enough to capture all the subtleties of deep practice. feels like progress.

Posted on

The Power of the Pan

so now the story of our kitchen takeover at the festival. well, okay, so we didn’t exactly take the place over, we barged in 20 mins before the small cook staff was to serve 600 hot meals and they were kind enough to help us.

it was tuesday afternoon, three days into the festival, and we hadn’t met as a whole community since the opening saturday night. with so many concurrent activities, concerts, workshops, dances, and the like, the energy just kept getting higher and higher. there was no apparent way to ground it, and apply it in practical ways for ongoing connection, projects and everyday living. but how to rebel against a dominant culture and structure that might best be described as freedom and love?

we decided to take over the kitchen, even if quite peacefully and only for a few minutes. with the chef’s support, when she rang the dinner gong, we threw ourselves in front of small stampede of hungry people with empty bowls. we explained that soon we would ring a medium-sized roasting pan with a large wooden spoon and that would be their invitation to bring out their news – important stories and announcements that everyone should hear.

the purpose of the open space “track” of the festival was to connect the people and energy of the event with the rest of the world, to make some positive differences, to share the love in practical ways. so we went around the lawn explaining what we were about to do:

…if we want to change ourselves as individuals, we must concentrate our attention. and if we want the “bigger body” that is this festival community to change the world, we must concentrate our attention. in a few minutes we will ring the roasting pan and invite your attention in the center of the lawn. please join us for stories and news announcements…

if it sounds a bit dramatic, i suppose it was. changing the world can be like that. but it worked. when we rang the pan, people came in to listen. we used a small loudspeaker. a number of people announced projects and meetings and invitations, to cheers and applause. for a moment we were one, big, community circle, settling down and paying attention.

the next day, festival organizers discussed plans for including such all-community meetings into next year’s festival. we also discussed larger shifts toward much more open space, after what might fairly be called a rather timid first-run at it this year. we covered more ground this morning, in a workshop about leading in open space.

even it a much abbreviated form, the 40 or so breakout sessions that were posted did seem to result in some remarkable conversations. small groups that really dug into a wide range of issues and left many participants amazed and delighted at what showed up for them. but of course, this last bit is what we’ve come to expect in open space, timid first-run or not.

© 1998-2020 Michael Herman. All Rights Reserved.