Essays ...

Listen to the story as you follow along ...   With a beautiful hippie wife and two little flower children we took the Muskeg Special, a train full of stories, to Churchill, Manitoba in the fall of 1969.  It was the quintessential late sixties...

Listen to the story as you read along ... An old story goes that a young man tentively knocked on the door of the beloved American poet Robert Frost.  The great man invited him in and poured him a cup of tea.  After more formal...

Seed potatoes … lessons in gratitude Listen the the story as you read along ... They would spend the winter in my grandparent’s root cellar and in my parent’s dirt floor basement.  They were the fall harvest of potatoes. You...

Listen to this story ... The audio is available the text is … Coming Soon!

Listen to the story as you read along ... I used to be a teacher, a principal and even a superintendent in the world of education.  For a portion of my career, my work was with First Nations communities.  I still feel that my...

When was the last time you put your whole system in one room … from the receptionist to the biggest corner office?  If you do this at least three times a year and you have just done one virtually, skip this part.  If you haven’t done this in a while you may be in system deficit.

For years, I have pondered the dilemma of toxic bureaucracy and how it continues to choke institutions of public service, business and community service …

I grew up in a small business family. In such times small business was a pretty good deal. You could pick your business, pick your city or town, buy a small storefront or commercial property and spend the next forty years working your assets off …

Much too often, these days I find myself drinking my coffee in the morning and yelling at the radio.

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob when he came to speak at a Northwest Leadership Academy meeting. I became inspired by his idea of creating charters when working with a group of people. I chose to create a charter for school’s Student’s Against Drinking and Driving scholarship application.

Let me explain … Those who have known me for a while know that the three things I have often say I could do without are … meetings, committees and workshops.

It was almost twenty-five years ago that I had a fortuitous dinner with a guest speaker from California. Etienne Wenger would have as great an impact on my thinking then as Peter Senge did a few years before that.

Deep in the coalmines of yesterday, the miners would carry a canary in a cage. The ecosystem in a coal mine could become toxic at any time and a canary that stopped singing was essentially a music artist that was telling you that your environment was not healthy.

The first is that slow, incremental change in some process, policy or product that comes with an understanding that what we are doing here is actually working very well, thank you very much.

As we continue to study the fine arts and practices of leadership, engagement and systems thinking, we know that a really great story often helps us in our understanding of sometimes difficult and complex ideas.

I grew up in a culture where competition was considered to be the perfect cultural crucible for both the development of high quality products and the eventual material and market success of such.

A question I like to ask in my storytelling seminars asks, is it possible to change a big narrative…a big story.” Can we change a story that many of us have accepted as “the way it is” for a long time?

Recently our local city council had an epiphany. For readers not familiar with my city, Calgary Alberta, we have, what is considered a very thoughtful and progressive city council led by a gentleman who has been described, by vote, as the best mayor in the world in 2014 … Mayor Naheed Nenshi.

In 2005 a group of 20 people gathered at the Lake Okanagan Resort outside of Kelowna for 4 days. They were the first group of many to be invited to the Leading Learning Organizations (LLO) sessions to learn the curriculum of leadership and engagement tools and techniques developed and delivered by Bob Chartier. The group represented a broad spectrum of the diverse business of our Ministry.

Strategic Planning has been with us for some time now. The good is that having a plan is probably still a better idea than not having a plan. The bad is that such matters are often still done out of a sense of compliance and is still seen as a high cost“ product created in part by inside “outsiders” and outside “insiders.”