Bringing minutes to life

“At this point there was a terrible cow manure smell that came across the lake.”

I came across this sentence as I was reading through the minutes of an annual general meeting that I attended some time back. It appears as its own paragraph, in the middle of the document, in italics.

Taking the revolution forward

My friend Vanessa recently sent me a spirited reflection on her experience of the people’s assembly that has been taking place in the streets of Athens, Greece over the last 25 days. She describes how the larger vision for direct democracy and healthy communities wasn’t simply a slogan to be shouted

Dancing with Zenith Cleaners

I was reading through the Zenith Cleaners blog recently and came across a reflection written by our friend Tolu Ilesanmi titled Invitation to the dance. In it he describes the kind of reciprocal relationship he works hard to create with his staff, clients and suppliers.

When our first instinct is to run away . . .

I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”

Conscious technology

Just thought I’d preface this post with a note about my general relationship with technology. In short, I don’t like to be around it. I find computer monitors mind numbing. Keyboards send sharp pains up my right arm. I spent many years resisting pressures to buy a cell phone. True, I did organize my entire […]

More adventures with Jonathan

Last year, we wrote a blog post highlighting the work of Jonathan Glencross. Jonathan’s approach to environmental advocacy has helped spark some dramatic sustainability initiatives at McGill University. We thought you’d enjoy listening to a TedxTalk that he gave a few months ago to an audience of 700

From the archives: “Growth at St. George’s”

The other day Tana and I went to talk to Megan Webster who teaches at St. George’s, a school in Montreal that seems quite steeped in this idea of expressive change. Megan describes it as a place where teachers, staff, and students are all deeply engaged in their own learning and where people pay profound and appreciative attention to each other.

“Interviewing” Gandhi

Many of us are familiar with the phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world,” so much so that it has become a bit of a cliché. I’ve been wondering for a while now what else Gandhi said that relates to expressive social change, a concept that is at the heart of […]

Beyond emotion

For a variety of reasons, many people react hesitantly at first to the idea of inscaping and experiential structuring. One of the things they worry about is that inscaping will turn into emotional indulgence.

Distributed voice

I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for […]