I was recently reflecting on Vaclav Havel‘s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Acts of living in truth are critical for recovering power from those that have stolen it and are using it for oppressive purposes. Havel’s work has long inspired me and underpins the basis of how I see good dialogic work and participatory leadership. Small democratic acts of participation,collaboration, co-creation, inclusion and relationship are critical.

After a long career in politics culminating in five years as Canada’s ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae has some opinions on Canada’s place in the world and our ability to meet collective crises together. CanadaLand interviewed him today. The Economist today is also speculating on what’s going on and how NATO and Europe might face the current crisis. …

I spend so much of my time on Zoom in meetings and then trying to facilitate warm and engaging online spaces that it is hard to remember that Zoom is an incredible technology that was in place at just the right time to get an entire world through a global pandemic. I'm appreciating today Peter Rukavina's reflections on how Zoom changed his life…

There has been a spate of thoughtful writing on the issue of Aboriginal title in British Columbia since the BC Supreme Court ruled on the Cowichan Tribes’ Aboriginal title interest in a number of fee simple properties along the Fraser River last summer. That ruling prompted Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie to engage in an act of blatant fear-mongering over the future of private property rights and set off a whole chunk of misinformed British Columbians and others who now believe that private property rights are dead in BC.

This is the first of a series on facilitation, dialogic containers and context. In it I want to develop a theory of context for facilitators on that explains not only how dialogic work succeeds, but why it sometimes cannot. My whole career has been a conversation between my facilitation practice and what I am learning about self-organization and complex adaptive systems.

Dave Pollard has written a piece of fiction containing instructions for a new game that seems fun and interesting at first but goes deep. “It’s a game board, Dev. I’ve invented a new game based on ikigai. It can be used as an ice-breaker, to help people who don’t know each other discover things they enjoy in common. Or it can be used by people who…

One of the cool things about living on the west coast is that most of the global football that I enjoy watching happens early in the morning, especially on weekends. I can squeeze in a match or two before getting on with my day. Likewise, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the only NHL hockey team I follow, usually play in the afternoon, while I am wrapping up work and preparing dinner.

Just back from teaching participatory leadership to 35 university leaders in Dallas, Texas and arrive home to find this great course outline that Cedric Jamet has put together for his university students. This stuff is insanely useful. A set pot permanent skills that are needed for applications throughout a person's life. ESPECIALLY in the university, where academic leaders are rarely offered any leadership training at all.

Rebecca Solnit puts it starkly: The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes.

My neighbour Don Shafer’s substack is a really good extended exploration of dialogue and democratic participation and today he names an important aspect of the apathy and overwhelm that citizens are feeling. What many of us experience as chaos is better understood as administration. Robert Arnold writes that power hasn’t advanced only through spectacle, but through paperwork, procedure, and pace.

Travelling and working in Arlington, Texas this week. Here are a few things that caught my eye. On reading at random:, Elspeth Wilson notes: Just before Christmas 2019, a friend told me that the less they know about a film, the better. If they see a trailer or read too much about it, it makes them less likely to want to watch the film.

Writing isn’t just a way of communication. It is a way of learning about yourself and learning how to show up, how to speak, how to develop and wrestle with ideas. Learning to write is enabled by good constraints, by a purpose that is not about the artifact but about the process of its creation. Cory Doctorow today talks about learning to write in the university context, where writing is almost always about the artifact and not the process.

It's a gift to read thoughtful takes on that language, concept and practices of being in complexity I never cease to be inspired by folks who write on this stuff. As someone who has to teach and explain this to all kinds of different people in all kinds of contexts, that inspiration matters. Here's Jen Briselli writing on her experience playing hockey:

I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago. Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos.

The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year's Day. A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path.

Phil Rosenthal, being interviewed by Tom Power. Phil Rosenthal, interviewed last year by Tom Power on Q at CBC talking about what it was like when he stepped into running Everybody Loves Raymond. It's great interview, but I love the section that begins at 21 minutes. It was his first job as a show runner, and he learned from other bosses he had worked for.

The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I'm writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the…

A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah's Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry. The word "religion" does a a lot of heavy lifting. But actually finding a way to define it in a way that is useful turns out to be surprisingly tricky. The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose book…