Notes from …

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?