Friday Coffee

Thank you to all of you who joined me since we first began together in March 2020! What a community we have built. Last year I was inspired by Seth Godin’s words to gather around productive generosity (instead of panic) and weave something generous for the community. These calls are about the intentional design choices we can make to invite high quality of presence, leadership, and skillfully engage complexity with our online groups.

Highlights from our Friday Coffees 2020-2023

  • Creating Human Connections in the virtual meeting space. We explored the technical moves and intentional design that help foster a high quality of presence ❤️ and engagement in your virtual meetings and sessions.

  • Naming the paradigms that have been disrupted and burned up 🔥 by doing so much of our work remotely and online. We focused on the “back-loop” of the ecocycle, and the ideas and habits that were stuck rigidity that are loosening up and ready for transformation.  

  • Explore how we can  foster resilience 🌳 and  lead in ways that infuse hope, confidence and optimism in our organizations. We looked at lessons from ecological resilience and explored the Nine Emerging and Connected Organizational and Leadership Principles. ♾️

  • Making sense of the ever renewing system we are in. These articles, podcasts, and videos have helping me assemble my thoughts and is all headlined by this invite from Joanna Macy to see our “present chaos as seedbed for the future.” 🍁

  • Strategy: Essential to turn our intentions and hopes into reality. Strategy helps us examine the interplay between our everyday actions and our biggest ambitions. So, then, how do we strategize while not oversimplifying the complex realities? Guided by a combination of structures called “Knotworking”, we looked at adrienne maree brown’s work Emergent Strategy and Brenda Zimmerman’s ideas from Edgeware

  • In response to dire climate news, we dig into some of key features of systems theory and complexity science. How do we facilitate to face complexity and wade into large systems transformation with the right tools, energy, and grace? This PAPER was the main resource. : “Complicated and Complex Systems: What Would Successful Reform Of Medicare Look Like?” By Sholom Glouberman, Ph.D. Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care & Brenda Zimmerman, Ph.D. York University → https://bit.ly/3AaMPC4

  • Change: People like me are frequently asked to do "change management" work 🔨, and yet my systems and complexity ♾️ instincts struggle to make sense of the whole idea of *managing* change in organizations. Especially with Brenda Zimmerman whispering in our ears, "go for multiple actions and the fringes, and let direction arise". 🦋

  • Leadership and Chaos: Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science  explores non linearity and self organizing and teaches that.
    * Relationships are what matters–even at the subatomic level
    * Life is a vast web of interconnections where cooperation and participation are required
    * Chaos and change are the only route to transformation

  • As always, we did this work by utilizing and learning Liberating Structures.