Tag: Miscellany

Aligning

My friend Penny Scott is thinking a lot about purpose, vision and the structure of things these days, working to give shape to BALLE BC, the first Canadian node of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economy international network. Last September, we gave first shape to the BALLE BC organization in two days of OpenSpace. This morning she emailed me from Bowen Island: “…on aligning and order… what do you think about this statement from David Allen?” I’m not sure who David Allen is, but here is what she quoted:

When there are ingredients in a system not aligned to its purpose, the whole mechanism is inefficient. Negative pressure is created as energy gets dammed up at the blockage, and flow is diminished. An ineffective person on a team, a misaligned tire, the wrong tool for a job, and too many words in a sentence create static on the line and reduce productivity. “Get it together” is an appropriate admonition for maximum output and results.

And from my answer… I think he doesn’t know (or at least doesn’t let on here) about how alignment really happens. I think “back and forth we get there” or “keep jiggling” or “together and apart” are more accurate and helpful admonitions. Or how about “breathe, breathe, breathe.” These all point to and make space for the dynamic and pulsatory nature of all alignment.

Perhaps, as we said in one open space training and practice workshop, we could say “crumbling into the future” or “crumbling into best outcomes.” This seems to allow for the losses that are experienced in the process of literally letting go into the larger alignment, letting go of our holdings to smaller, partial, personal purposes that keep us out of larger alignment.

Reminds me now of my Dad’s frequent advice: “Get the best deal you can.” He worked as a lobbyist in 14 midwestern state legislatures and his emphasis was always on “can,” reminding me that we always work within larger systems that we do not control and commiserating in the reality that the deals don’t always go down how or when we think they should.

Slowly, teasingly, testingly, tippingly, then… we are learning to trust the larger whole purpose over our smaller individual attachments. I think we pulse back and forth, in and out, one and many, as and until we learn to be fully immersed in the power of larger being without losing any of the satisfaction available to us as smaller bodies.

I don’t think “get it together” is wrong, merely more mechanistic and less helpful than some of these others.

Retreat

Discovered in the opening pages of Wendy Palmer’s The Practice of Freedom, Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide, originally from Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching:

Truly, once the Way is lost,
There comes then virtue;
Virtue lost, comes then compassion;
After that morality;
And whe that’s lost, there’s etiquette,
The husk of all good faith,
The rising point of anarchy.

More Heart

This from Kathryn in a comment today…

Thank you for your poignant quote by the Dalai Lama. The movement on the planet at this time is toward the heart. Many tools exist — HeartMath Technologies — bringing heart to corporations, and PATHS (Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies) by Mark Greenberg — schooling for a good heart.

Thanks, Kathryn! I’d add ZapchenSomatics and NonViolentCommunication to these.

More Individual… Choice

David Kirkpatrick in Fortune, via Doc Searls Weblog:

David: What do these things have in common: the TV show American Idol, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, eBay, and the open-source Linux operating system? They’re all manifestations of a key trend of our time: the shift in power away from centralized institutions and toward the individual ? from the center to the edge.

Doc: I agree. But it’s also from the few to the many, from supply to demand, from controlled to networked. And on the far side of each “to,” autonomy. The ability to initiate, to form and join associations, to do for themselves. To have and make up their own minds. Choice. This is about choice.

This is exactly what I’ve been talking about here as Individual being the ultimate Local. Individual choice, autonomy, passion and responsibility. But in line with InvitingOrganization, I would say that we’re moving from networked to open markets, living communities, and SomaticOrganization. 20th century machines dissolving into 21st century landscapes and bodies… working in OpenSpace. See George Nemeth and BrewedFreshDaily for another reference to regional neurons… Somatics strikes again. Nice to be in such good company on this one!

Smart Communities Network

This from something called the Scout Report (?) via my friend Birrell Walsh…

As interest in creating communities that adhere to sustainable development principles continues to garner substantial interest, the Department of Energy has created this online clearinghouse of relevant information for areas interested in learning more about incorporating these principles into their new (or existing) developments. On the site, visitors can read about communities that have implemented sustainable development plans, locate technical and financial resources designed to assist communities with such plans, and access various codes and ordinances related to subsequent implementation of these development schemes. The Topics in Sustainability is quite helpful, providing a list of related themes (such as land use planning and community energy) that users can click on and view a brief synopsis of each theme, read articles on the theme, and examine the key principle behind each theme. For those who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments in sustainable development, a monthly electronic newsletter is also available at no charge.

…a good looking site. Found some interesting events on the calendar, too.

More Individual, Regional, Oneness

After posting yesterday about this continuum or wholarchy that builds from Individual, Local/Regional, Regional/National, Global to Spirit or God, I was struck by the miriad conflicts we continue to feed, often with great intentions and limited awareness: Local v. Global, Global v. AntiGlobal, Local v. Regional, Individual v. Local, Freedom v. Terror, Dollar v. Euro, Dems v. Bush, Dean v. other dems, on and on and on… This v. That. And then I come across the following:

At the end of a talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?” The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up and said with a gentle smile,”Well, war is obsolete, you know.” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back… but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.

Toward Individual, Regional, Oneness?

They are getting ready for the next round of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Global business and government leaders gathering inside and globalization protesters gathering outside. Global and Anti-Global, each giving energy, support and meaning to the other. The universe in balance?

So often it seems that here in Chicago and elsewhere organizers talk of countering Globalization with activities like Local and Regional buying campaigns. And always, it seems, these Local and Anti-Global efforts are organized with and literally embody, the very Corporate, hierarchical Dominance and Control patterns that they usually seek to bring down. Thus, the more they try, the more they make more of what they want to overcome, Defeat or displace.

Meanwhile, Don Iannone asks “why is regionalism so difficult in economic development?” and ChrisCorrigan quotes fellow Bowen Islander JohnDumbrille: “…we have to change – I do not think that books are enough or 3 hours of homework in grade 10 are enough, cramming for college entrance is enough, college specializaiton is enough. We cant outrun a train. We have to adapt… Children have to be raised to be independent enough psychologically to be entrepreneurial… “

Recently, I’ve been thinking that Local is not really the ultimate counter to global and Globalization. It’s not simply about smaller geographic circles. It’s about how we make decisions. And it seems that individual identity, awareness, responsibility, decision-making and purchasing is the only effective way to balance and Inspire an incorporated, globalized movement that supports all Life. Awake Individual balances a Global Corporate that must ultimately seek to deliver highest goods, union, wholeness, Oneness. Local is just a convenient point on the spectrum that runs from individual and must also extend beyond Global to some sort of God or Higher Good.

As a result, Local efforts that take on Corporate decision-making and control structures will necessarily fail to invite, support and value the individually-arising and -determined learning, contribution, decision-making and action that are the only effective counter-balance (and support) for continued globalization. So following from my last posting, my guess is that only as we learn to make, unmake and remake our individual personal identities and decision-making structures, we will be able to leverage these skills to make and remake larger, stronger, and more flexible Regional identities, as circumstances require. OpenSpaceTech seems especially useful for all of this.

Ultimately it seems that we just might be in the process of moving from a dualistic, Local-Global world to a trinitarian Individual-(shifting)Regional-Oneness world. Individual being smaller than local, and oneness (God) being the ultimate goal of our global coming together. Full implementation is likely to take a while. In the meantime, perhaps ChrisCorrigan will say something about the musical properties and pleasures associated with the interplay of two-beat and three-beat rhythms.

More Somatics

William Blaze on Howard Dean, via Jay McCarthy…

…Across the Dean blog space, the energy is intense, but its also contained. The collective organization of Dean people online is a massive amount of potential energy, but its not quite ready to be focused right.

Seems to me that this also does well to describe Dean as a physical body. The horserace aside, I find the patterns and parallels fascinating. Everywhere individuals (the most notables called leaders) giving shape to larger movements in their own likenesses.

Somatic Nation?

Lawrence Lessig has words for Iowans, via Jay McCarthy.

Good luck to my favorites in Iowa. As I’ve indicated a bunch of times, I’m a split Democrat

Deliberation Day

This in honor of the festivities in Iowa tonight …a radical proposal to help voters make better decisions, offered by Bruce Ackerman & James Fishkin:

In our soon-to-be-released book, we offer a new way of thinking about democratic reform, proposing a new national holiday: Deliberation Day. It would replace Presidents’ Day, which does no service to the memories of Washington and Lincoln, and would be held two weeks before major national elections.

Registered voters would be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of 15 and larger groups of 500, to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign. Each deliberator would be paid $150 for the day’s work of citizenship. To allow the business of the world to carry on and as many as possible to participate, the holiday would be a two-day affair.

If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fundraisers, the lobbyists, and the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public. When the election arrived, the people would speak with a better chance of knowing what they wanted and which candidates were more likely to pursue the popular mandate.

GlobalChicago gets RSS!

…and this is just amazing. Credit for this shift goes to ChrisCorrigan, who recently RSSed his ParkingLot blog, and GeorgeNemeth, who recently asked if I didn’t have an RSS feed available. It could be a coincidence that these nudges came so close together… or it could be a blogosphere conspiracy. I rather like the latter explanation, even though my RSSing here hardly warrants even the minimal effort such a very small conspiracy would require. But no matter now, the damage is done!

For those unfamiliar with RSS, it seems to stand for “Really Simple Syndication.” On this end, it means that I’ve put an XML button and a bit of code at the bottom of the left sidebar. On your end, it means that if you go get an RSS reader, you can click that button (or click here) and other RSS/XML links on weblogs and major news websites worldwide and the “reader” will collect all the latest news for you in one place. Like email, RSS readers are either (small) applications you download for free and run on your machine, or free services that run totally on webpages (like web-based email).

For someone tracking many blogs and a fair amount of world news, this feels downright magical. Brain is still sorting this out, but starting to relax and stretch and ease into what feels like a good bit more space. It’s the low-gravity, higher-powered, “whoa” sort of sense one sometimes gets with a new computer… “NOW, what can I do that I never thought about doing before? …why, I think I’ll go leap a tall building in my new spare time!”

Thanks to GeorgeNemeth who turned me onto the BlogLines RSS reader and also the ChristianScienceMonitor RSS page. Along the way, I found feedrolling service, so now there’s a bunch of news collecting here in the right sidebar, as well. Ta da!

UPDATED: XML feed is now the Atom feed from Blogger.com. feed

The World Beyond Email… is Wiki, Wiki, Wiki!

…last Monday in Reveries Magazine’s “Cool News of the Day”

Collaborative Wiki. “E-mail is a tremendously overloaded tool,” says Gary Boone of Accenture Technology Labs, explaining part of the appeal of “wiki,” as reported by Michael Totty in The Wall Street Journal. Wiki, as you may know — or wiki-wiki — is Hawaiian for “quick,” but it is also the name of a type of web page that is gaining favor as a way to help “companies and work teams to trade ideas, share intelligence and track projects.” While wiki web pages look pretty much like any other, the difference is that it is easy for any visitor to “add new material .. or change what is already there.” All the changes are tracked and saved so nothing is ever lost.

[Wiki is being used] to create an online encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org. However, its simplicity and low-cost (available as shareware) has made it attractive commercially, in fact some are comparing its potential popularity to that of instant messaging. “The disadvantage of not having the sophistication of more elaborate tools is outweighed by the ease of using it,” says Gary Boone.

A company calledStata Labs, for example, is using a wiki “to manage its customer-relations program. As customers e-mail requests for new features or relate problems, the information is added to the wiki, where it can be viewed by developers in India, or by Stata’s chief executive in San Mateo, California. Stata’s vice president of product management, Andy Stack, notes the advantages versus e-mail. “With e-mail,” he says, a lot … gets trapped in one-off conversations,” whereas the wiki “has the ability to capture … side conversations and make them available to all others.”

Accenture’s Gary Boone meanwhile says his group “uses wiki pages to organize reports on bugs and requests for new features in the software they’re developing,” as well as to post “speaker schedules, lab announcements and tech-related news.” The wiki, he says “may represent a sweet spot between nothing or just e-mail and … more elaborate systems.”

News from Malawi…

…that little country next to that BIG lake in southeastern Africa, where Marty Giannini, who hosted our OpenSpaceTech practice workshop in Dublin (yes, Ireland) last year, is doing some work for Save the Children this year. You just don’t read news like this in Chicago in January:

Have finished sitting in meetings the first three days back from a 10-day Lake Malawi adventure over Christmas and New Years.

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Watching the coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. – from The Heart of Darkness

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Lake Malawi is something too special to describe. Just some brief outtakes:

4 Toyota minibuses, packed, from Blantyre to Monkey Bay. A few hours wait and a spot in the back of a pickup takes us the final hour to Cape McClear where the lake awaits. Stepping out of our guest rooms we are on the same sand that is the beach itself.

Christmas dinner was nsima (corn porridge) and fish (kampango – unbelievable!), some beers and in the background, young men dancing, sweating, revelling. A young Hungarian woman that was with me at dinner could barely control herself amid the girating male bodies.

Hopped on the Illala Steamer for a two day trip North… imagine a bygone time… the only big ship on the water… and myself and friends stowed away like Huck on a grand adventure. With the bales of fish, bags of cement, too many people and their belongings, storms of bugs that migrate over the lake in billion strong “gusts” (they particularily took to the first class sleeping cabins and the lights of the first class upper deck bar… those of us regular people down in “economy” were never bothered… poetic justice?).

At one of the stops going North, Nkhota-khota, we cruised the market for needs and stopped at the Chibuku stand for a quick “one or two” (large containers of local millet / corn brew).

Landing at one of the beaches of Mozambique on the other side of the lake… taking in some new sounds and sights. My God! the shades of green at Cobue! Sleeping wherever we could find space… second night just a few broken hours resting head down on a table.

Nkhata Bay – swimming, diving, … some snorkelling… drinking… madness… too many foreigners with malaria… … insanity… more drinking… to town for Hot Spot and gorgeous dinners at $1 or 1.50 or the “Tree” and the lady serving rice & beans at $0.55!!!

A dance contest at the Sunshine Cafe… the drunken one just couldn’t complete those backward flips (and went home early with throbbing head).

Another boat (this one small and all the holidaying whites on the roof) North to heaven,… to Rurarwe… took 11 hours but oo was it worth it… intense sun and degenerating madness followed by the night sky, the Milky Way blazing, shooting stars shooting, and a 360 degree panaroma up top… where water was short… but beer was flowing… where some were passing out, others [not so lucky], where an egg fight erupted, and others were improving their Chewa or Timbuka with locals…

at Rurarwe, 20 metre dives off a rock in the lake… a 25 metre “jump” from a chalet at Chez Charlie… a natural slide down a river… a hard core extreme sporting experience… but more like an enlightening trip with mother nature… and dancing to national hero, Joseph Nkasa, a different step for each track, as 2003 passed away. a place that rests back a hundred years in the innocence of a fishing village with no roads but the lake and an ancient footpath extending hundreds of kilometres along the lakeshore. and dugout canoes…

Winter Forum 2004 – January 25-27 – Starved Rock

Enhancing Wholeness: How, When and Why Does Open Space
Become the Reality of How We Live and Work …in Spite of Everything?

If you are leading or planning meetings, conferences, mediations, or project teams, you may be interested in this opportunity to meet and work with peers. Our past gatherings have been relatively small, advanced, practical and personal learning sessions, with very experienced practitioners and always a few people totally new to OpenSpaceTech. The conversations have always been more than rich enough to feed us all. And we always seem to learn things we can really use, right now.

This is a good chance to learn about Open Space Technology through the direct experience of it. Having noticed that Wholeness is essential for the Living function of all organizations, from families to communities to the Fortune 500, we invite you to consider how it is that we preserve and enhance the essential, functional Wholeness and Life of organizations, even as so many distractions, disruptions and dysfunctions compete for our attention. And how Open Space invites and supports Wholeness and Health in our lives and our organizations.

This forum is an Exploration of the many things that are still/already really working, an Opportunity to work with like-minded friends and colleagues on whatever big, new things are coming up next for you, and an Open Space for learning and connecting with other corporate, union and community leaders. Please join us! TheDetails

Beginning Again

Rely not on the teacher/person, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words. Rely not on theory, but on experience.Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Happy New Year!

Poor Man

Electing Space

Not usually inclined to post politics here, but found this blog entry by Matt Stoller helpful in understanding the deeper shifts and choices that this coming year’s election represents. While doing my best to refrain from taking sides in this space, here is a bit of his post…

…both parties are facing internal wars between those who represent more space and those who represent reaction. ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are simply labels right now to keep score between two teams on symbol issues like ANWAR, late term abortion, gun rights, the lie du jour, but the real battle going on has little to do with any of the symbols. The real battle has to do with ‘the insiders’ battling to exclude and gradually losing, whether through having Howard Dean call Democrats in Congress cockroaches or Salam Pax, Iraqi citizen, blogging about how stupid the administration is in Iraq. McCain/Bush was the first battle of this war in the GOP; Dean/Clark/Everyone else is this war among the Democrats.

Joy

‘Tis the season for joy. Today I had conversations about work in corporate, government, higher education, and three different community-based situations, bits of it located on four different continents. The new year is looking as busy and happy as I can ever recall, in spite of everything else.

So this old favorite from George Bernard Shaw was a nice find today…

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Handel Rocks!

Tonight was the first of two performances of the “Do-It-Yourself” Messiah at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. There is something unbelievably democratic about 100+ volunteer musicians, a handful of world-class soloists, and 3000+ regular guys (and gals) like me slipping and sliding through more sixteenth notes than you could hope to count. They say Handel wrote the thing in 22 days. I’m not sure I could recopy it in that many days without mechanical support.

This was my first time experiencing this 28-year tradition, but hopefully not my last. I’d like to get the tutorial CD next year and be a little more ready to do my part. But ready or not, it’s hard to overstate the joy of making music or anything else in concert with several thousand others. I just giggled after every chorus.

You still have time to get to Friday’s performance. I’m told there are usually free tickets at the door, turned in by those who’ve found themselves with extras. Best to arrive by 6:00pm or so.