Author: Tenneson Woolf

Spirit of Wisdom, direct our hearts.
Spirit of Wisdom, direct our hearts.
Guide our visions, free us to risk.
Spirit of Wisdom, direct our hearts.

The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA) have lifted up a new leadership team for the coming four years. A president, a vice president, and three mission councilors. Five very impressive FSPA Sisters from a nominee circle of ten very impressive women. They represent a team that will steward essential direction, shifts, and some major decisions facing the community. They are also a touchstone of vision that will invite input and collaboration in the spirit of what my friends Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea aptly name as “leaders in every chair.”

My partner Teresa Posakony and I helped design and host an elections process that took place over the last seven months within the FSPA community. It involved deliberate circles of community discernment, individual reflections, and a discernment weekend at which 20 sisters participated. It culminated these last few days with an Elections Assembly. Prayers, openings, and closings offered by sisters. Questions to reconnect and re-animate mission and the experience of the June 2013 General Assembly. Small table conversations. Movement. Play.

 One of the things that really impressed me in the Elections Assembly was the commitment from the nominees to a transparency. In a few places, we asked the nominees to respond to questions as if they were holding a circle together in front of the room. Ten people talking and listening together. 110 people witnessing it. Not campaigning. Not regurgitating. Just speaking what was in their hearts and what they were hearing during the days that felt important. This distinction — “on the spot for transparency and witnessing,” is very different than “on the spot to synthesize everything that happened” — was important. It is less testing. It is more tuning. It shows a value that I believe the current leadership team will try to strengthen in the FSPA community and with partners and affiliates, the practice of transparency and inclusion.

It takes a kind of maturity to suspend individual certainty, to suspend individual bias, to open heart, mind, and soul to the discernment that comes uniquely from engaging with the group.

These FSPA Sisters did this in spades this week. I was happy to be a part of it.

I’ve been lucky to work with a few people who do great graphic recordings. I think of them as visual maps that capture some of the content, direction, and spirit of a meeting.

I’ve also been lucky to work with a few people that are just starting to learn this craft. I look for examples to share with them.

Ria Baeck, a friend and colleague from Belgium, recently shared the photo below on the Art of Hosting list serve. It was made by the people of Danish Bigger Picture, from a Social Business Innovation event in Strasbourg. It now hangs on the walls of the meeting room of European Commissioner Barnier, in the main EC building in Brussels.

I love the contrast in this image of the formal boardroom setting with the free flow of the graphic illustration.

My favorite line about why these help is from friend and graphic recorder, Steven Wright. He shared, “We have 3 million years of recognizing patterns and only 10,000 years with words.”

Below is the same illustration without the boardroom table. Click on it to see more of the detail.

Thanks Ria.

May 19, 2014

Here is another example created by Sara Cook of Viterbo University in Wisconsin, and one of her friends, Sammie. Neither of these two hand created these before. Sarah was great at catching ideas and patterns. Sammie put them to more artistic form. Fantastic work!

 

The passage below, spoken by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was shared with me by a good friend and colleague, Glen Lauder.

I love the reference to the unspectacular.

“Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks of how the omnipotent God we worship chooses to be impotent in the world, unless God’s work is manifest through the collaboration of human beings. In this, God entrusts the world to us. And so the miracle rests with us and is seldom spectacular, but more the work of humble people choosing to give what they have. By doing so, we become vehicles of the Devine, not in being a spokesperson for the mind of God — no one can claim that — but more, in being a conduit of the vitality that keeps everything alive.”

• “I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun-warmed rock in the center of a rushing river.” Dawna Markova. Thanks Glen Lauder.
• What today might be called “field,” or “the power of the whole,” 19th century sociologist Emile Durkheim called, “collective effervescence.”
• I’ve redone my website and blog. Thanks to Robi Gareau at CentreSpoke. Several resources there if you want to look. https://www.tennesonwoolf.com 
• A great 4 min video on systems. From when wolves were introduced to Yellowstone. Thanks Jerry Nagel. http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/how-wolves-change-rivers/#.UwVvmvkr-_o.facebook …
• BALLE offers some really good annual conferences on localism. This year it is June 11-13 in CA. https://bealocalist.org/2014-conference 
• BALLE has some really impressive resources on localism. Check them. https://bealocalist.org/resources-spreading-solutions …
• I’m really enjoying Steven Johnson’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From. Connects innovation in nature to innovation in human systems.
• From Steven Johnson’s Good Ideas… When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.
• Love this from Steven Johnson: The history of life can be told as the story of a gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible.