Category: Edited

• Always drawn to bigger picture. Here is one on sunspots, sunflares, and magnetic fields. http://bit.ly/vAcO5j
• Portable Principle from #AoCLNB: inquire about the whole. What is the system? Does it know itself as a system? What wants to happen?
• Portable Principle from #AoCLNB: recognizing emergence is a core capacity for collaborative leadership.
• Portable Principle from #AoCLNB: if you want a living system to be healthy, connect it to more of itself.
• Join Meg Wheatley in Salt Lake City, UT, 11/29 for a #WalkOutWalkOn conversation. Info and registration here: bit.ly/uFomIT
• Appreciating this invitation from Charles Eisenstein: “Not giving our gift in these times creates misery.”
• On wholeness from a friend: “There are times when I catch myself actually believing in a something separate from myself.”
• Reflections on the language of resonance, inspired by Bowen AoH last week and friend Simone Poutnik: bit.ly/sk8RTn
• Healthier Healthcare Systems – Join us here bit.ly/utVgwF to talk about issues like this nyti.ms/uJRAGJ. Thanks Marc Parnes.
• RT @iyeshe: The futility of control is written into the fabric of reality. bit.ly/vK6kjX
• RT @AmandaFenton: ‘Everything in moderation except laughter, sex, vegetables and fish. But not all at the same time.” Dr John TickellBeautiful poem, “Me and You,” on Dave Pollard’s site. In request to young writer, “your response to my generation?” bit.ly/uSPl8g
• RT @berkanainst: Help us share the stories of living the future now! Join our Sharing Our Learning campaign! bit.ly/psbGb4
• Favorite quote from the Experience Music Project in Seattle: Jerry Garcia — “Magic is what we do. Music is how we do it.”
• All Blacks are in the final vs France for World Rugby Cup. Exciting. bit.ly/5aZ7MI
• “Currency of the human heart” — lovely voice for what is happening in many places: bit.ly/ooJMCw
• Favorite new title of workshop: “We’ve Got to Stop Meeting This Way.” From Nancy Eagan, Martin Siesta.
• And Still I Rise — beautiful from Maya Angelou (and shared from Sarah Whitely): youtu.be/JqOqo50LSZ0!
• Consensus skills and consensus consciousness (or creation consciousness). On skills, from Tree Bressen: bit.ly/orlAwE
• RT @dfrieze: Why I believe #occupywallstreet can be a game changer. A @yesmagazine video. bit.ly/nIJVhr #neweconomy
• RT @berkanainst: Art of Hosting coming up in Bowen Island; Dieppe, New Brunswick; Pembroke, Ontario; and Ottawa bit.ly/oiJ5ZS

It was the poet Rilke that offered, “You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens.”

For the past several years, many of us have been paying attention to the future of healthcare. We’ve been able to work with some fantastic pioneers along the way. Innovative people with imagination. Real human beings that feel the pain of the system, yet hold to the hope of change. Courageous leaders of many ilks in the healthcare world that, despite feeling an isolation, a craziness, and fatigue, remain committed and daring enough to create the new.

January 11-13, 2012, together with Steve Ryman, Kathy Jourdain, and Marc Parnes, I am hosting a pioneering event that brings together health care leaders and participants from all walks of wellness professions — Healthier Healthcare Systems: Daring to Create What the Needed New Can Be.

Online registration is here.

I love the range of what we are calling in. The broad picture of daring to convene with others to change the pattern of the narrative. The closer-in picture of journeying in the interior of ourselves in relation to the big. Both require courage, the kind that comes alive in our company together.

Please join us in inviting pioneers to participate. It is a bold call to convene people to dare to create the new. In part because the outcomes aren’t known. The deliverables are of another quality than what many of us have been trained to expect. Yet, we can see that so many of us yearn for the new.

Please join us yourself. With your colleagues. Please pass the word with deliberateness. Our invitation is to look to the place within yourself that moves to the edge, to the trembling with awareness that it is our time. Our time to pioneer. Or as we’ve learned through our Berkana change model, our time to name the new work, to connect with each other, to nurture a new potential, to be with a network of friends and colleagues from which the trajectory can be shifted, and to illuminate what we learn. In consciousness. In the beginnings of whole-scale change.

We are inspired by work of dear friends and colleagues. Phil Cass and Tuesday Ryan Hart with Our Optimal Health in Ohio. Steve Ryman with Center for Human Development in Oregon. Tim Merry and friends with Public Health in Nova Scotia. Lauri Prest with Providence Care in Ontario. Marielle Pariseau with the Canadian Dental Association. Toke Moeller and friends working with Health and Community Services in Australia. Jerry Nagel working with healthcare leaders in Minnesota.

Some of those stories are featured in Berkana’s E-news for November. Check out stories, events, resources.

Thanks to Steve Ryman who crafted this email below. It speaks much of what we intend and dare to step into ourselves.

From a place of hope, possibility, and welcome to a journey that can only be taken together.

 

Friends,

I am excited to announce an event for healthcare leaders.  Tenneson Woolf, Kathy Jourdain, Dr. Marc Parnes and I will be hosting  Healthier Healthcare Systems gathering in Salt Lake City January 11-13, 2012. 

We are calling anyone interested in imagining together a different way of providing healthcare, one that involves health and caring, that honors the heart as well as the head, and one that recognizes the healing power of relationships and conversation.  What else might healthcare be if we brought a different consciousness and if we connected the courageous, innovative pioneers who are working in isolated parts of the system?  You all know the power of the Art of Hosting raise consciousness and to connect people and to support innovation.  We are excited to use the patterns and practices of Art of Hosting to tackle the challenges of healthcare at a systemic level and to develop a trans-local community of practice to sustain ongoing change.  As an added bonus, included in this training is an invitation to a year-long community of practicewith healthcare professionals and fellow participants, as well as two personal or team follow-up coaching sessions to support sustained learning and change.

One of my key learnings at The Art of Hosting on Bowen Island last week was from an Open Space session hosted by Annabelle Oakes. The focus was on the “Language of Resonance.” It was an invitation to explore additional words to describe the experience of resonance. It’s a lot more than academic exploration. Felt more like essential language and tuning for living in a more deliberate paradigm and medium of energetics.

The first part of our discussion was noticing some of what resonance is like. Falling in love, openness, flow, music. It is some of the bridging experiences that many people can relate to.

On resonance and falling in love, I later received an email from my hosting friend Simone Poutnik, in which she wrote this:

Sizzling resonance
falling in love with
not knowing
a possible future
so tender
yet so strong

Love opens my heart
true curiosity is born
exploration can begin
Let’s dance
with the unknown!

A huge gift in sitting with Annabelle and others was noticing that, for me, there are two core competencies or practices that working with resonance calls out.

1)Pointing to the Invisible — Helping to shine a little light on widely shared experiences that are often not seen or are left in a far more nebulous state. These would be the experiences that many people feel as energizing, yet are then often reduced to a background experience in attempts to “get back to the real world.” Ah, the fine art and commitment of daring to name what doesn’t quite fit normative experience. Just the simple pointing so that it can be attended to (and thus, brought into more tangible form).

2)Pointing to the Whole — Helping to see the bigger picture. This has always been a hunger for me. It comes with working from a living systems perspective, a self-organizing perspective, and working with emergence. In working with Margaret Wheatley much earlier in my life, we used to ask three questions that helped do this. First, what is the system? Second, does it know itself as a system? Third, what wants to happen? Replacing system with whole would work well also.

Thanks Annabelle, Teresa, Pam for such a rich learning space. Simone for sparking even more this morning.

These words from my friend Diana Durham, an expert and gifted soul at linking Arthurian legend to leadership, and wholeness to working with groups.

“… When we operate or gather in groups, the same dual set of ingredients is present as when we get together with just one person, except of course, there is more of everything.   More personality types, more roles, more relationship patterns, and also – at least potentially – more of the higher order flow or presence.  The more familiar we become with moving in and out of ‘Avalon’ the easier it is to let the field of collective intelligence work, and become energized.   We know what is common and what is different, we are at ease with both.   We have a detachment from our own patterns, and from the patterns of others, we don’t get hung up on outer structures, we learn to let the flow emerge from the undimensional and to keep things fluid.   

In this kind of setting, leadership becomes like relationship –  it is a kind of balancing act between the known and the unknown, between the space of connection, and the space of differentiation.   It is about allowing or facilitating this relationship in the group.  Its not about doing everything, its not even about delegating, it’s about allowing the conditions to show up, about trusting the invisible.  And whether one is playing the  ‘King Arthur’ role of leadership, or the ‘Peer of the realm’ role of leadership, its about knowing that this relationship is where its at, about knowing that this relationship between inner and outer works and about being at ease within this context.   And one cannot be at ease in this context collectively, if one is not at ease with it in oneself. …”