- From Hero to Host
- From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking
- "Listening, mentoring, storytelling"
- "HO’OPONOPONO"
- "Talk Deeply, Be Happy?"
- Collective Mind-map
- Books and Websites
- The art of Hosting Story
- The Art of Chaordic Leadership
- The Art of Powerful Questions
- Conversational Leadership: Thinking together for a change
By Deborah Frieze & Meg Wheatley
Something extraordinary is happening in Columbus, Ohio. Leaders in some of America’s largest institutions—healthcare, academia, government—are giving up take-charge, heroic leadership, and choosing instead to engage members of their community. They’re using their positional power and authority to act as “hosts,” calling together people from all parts of the system to work together to solve seemingly intractable problems. In this mid-size, Middle America city—a mirror of the U.S.’s mix of race, income, immigrants, neighborhoods and problems—citizens are rethinking how to solve hunger long-term, how to deal with homelessness, how to transform healthcare from sickness to wellness, and much, much more.
Here, in this absolutely ordinary city, citizens are discovering their capacity to engage together to create a healthier, more resilient community. This is a story of how small, local efforts move laterally through a network of relationships to emerge as large-scale change. Read More
Article: From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking
by Russell Ackoff 11/93
Systems Thinking in Action Conference
Abstract
Why all of a sudden is everybody interested in systems? Why, all of a sudden, has quality become a big thing? Why, all of a sudden, organisational learning, or process reengineering? Why? I mean, these things have been around for a long time. There have always been consumers with expectations. Why didn’t we worry about quality before? There have always been systems. Why?
Well, all of our explanations rest on certain assumptions that we make, because explanations are simply deductions from theories or sets of assumptions, and every theory rests on a more general theory. And the most general theory of all that each of us has is a theory of reality, a concept of the nature of the world, which is referred to as our world view, or as the Germans referred to it with a beautiful word, Weltanschauung, our concept of the nature of reality. Read More..
Article: "Listening, mentoring, storytelling" by Shawn Callahan
I'm sitting in a cafe thinking about what makes a great listener. I can see a few. They're leaning forward, nodding, smiling, asking questions. You can tell they want to be there and that they care about the person they are listening to. They're not glancing at their watch, their phones and there're no computer screens to distract them. They take turns telling their stories and sharing their thoughts but when they're listening they're engrossed in what the other person is saying and they're not interrupting. It's impossible for me to say for sure but I'm imagining that when they're listening they're not working out the next thing they're going to say to impress their friend, to knock down their argument, to win the point. It's a natural flow, improvisation style.
Most of us know how to listen but why does it seem to evaporate in the workplace? Read More...
Article: "HO’OPONOPONO" by Joe Vitale
Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate’s chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person’s illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved.
When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane? Read More...
Article: "Talk Deeply, Be Happy?" by Roni Caryn Rabin
Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject. Read More...
Article: Collective Mind Map
Collective Mind
This process is adapted and inspired by
technology developed by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff.
“A mind map is a
other items linked to and arranged radially
word or idea.
classify ideas, and as an aid in
A Collective Mind
A collective mind
overview of issues and opportunities relevant to a particular subject or
challenge. The mind
a “burning” question, e.g.
as a team are facing now?
The mind-map can be done either on a large sheet of paper or
electronically, with a mind
List: Books and Websites
Suggested Books and Websites
Many resources are available—books, articles, websites, blogs, communities. We have included links to websites in the relevant section of this workbook.
As starting points or hubs for more extensive lists of resources, we suggest:
www.artofhosting.org (co-created by many art of hosting stewards) ArtofHostingTV.net provides videos about several AoH topics:
Article: The Art of Hosting Story
The Art of Hosting Story
The first generation of whole-systems practitioners broke new ground by “getting the whole system in the room” in previously unheard of numbers to participate in creating their own answers. Methodologies emerged that could support the creation of containers where diverse perspectives could lead to new collective intelligence.
Article: The Art of Chaordic Leadership
The Art of Chaordic Leadership
(Copyright © 2000 by Dee Hock)
There was a time a few years back when for one brief moment the
essence of leadership was crystal clear to me. Strangely, it was after
leaving Visa and moving to a small, isolated ranch for a life of study
and contemplation, raising a few cattle. I was attending to chores in
the barn, comfortable and secure from the wind howling about the
eaves and the roar of torrential rain on the tin roof. Through the din, I
became aware of the faint, persistent bellowing of one of the cows.
Awareness gradually rose that the bellowing was unusual.
Flashlight in hand, I plunged into the storm and worked my way across
the pasture in the direction of the sound. On the far side, in the circle
of light from the flash, I could make out Eunice, the huge, one-horned
mother cow. Sheltered in the corral to await the imminent birth of her
calf, she had somehow gotten out and sought a private place to give
birth -- unfortunately, on the brink of a steep bank fifteen feet above a
flooded creek which raged through a ravine choked with poison oak
and wild blackberry vines.
Article: The Art of Powerful Questions
When was the last time you sat through a meeting
and said to yourself,“This is a complete waste of
time!”? Was it yesterday, or even just a few hours ago?
Why did that gathering feel so tedious? Perhaps it’s
because the leaders posed the wrong questions at the
start of the session.Or,worse yet,maybe they didn’t ask
any engaging questions, and as a result, the meeting
consisted of boring reports-outs or other forms of oneway
communication that failed to
engage people’s interest or curiosity.
The usefulness of the knowledge
we acquire and the effectiveness of the
actions we take depend on the quality
of the questions we ask. Questions
open the door to dialogue and discovery.
They are an invitation to creativity
and breakthrough thinking. Questions
can lead to movement and action on
key issues; by generating creative
insights, they can ignite change.
Consider the possibility that everything
we know today about our world
emerged because people were curious.They formulated
a question or series of questions about something
that sparked their interest or deeply concerned them,
which lead them to learn something new.Many Nobel
laureates describe the “Eureka!” moment of their discovery
as when the “right” question finally revealed
itself—even if it took them considerable time to come
up with the final answers. For example, Einstein’s theory
of relativity resulted from a question that he had
wondered about when still a teenager:“What would
the universe look like if I were riding on the end of a
light beam at the speed of light?”
Ebook: Conversational Leadership: Thinking Together for a Change
Please feel free to read this article by following this link. Read more...