I've just returned to Ohio from Guelph, a small city (sometimes called "The Royal City") just outside Toronto in Canada. If you've never heard of it, you're not alone, although that also means you don't know about "Guelphiness" or that it is both an agricultural and an innovation hub.
...Have you ever been asked what you felt is missing in the world? How did you respond?
While I've talked, written and worked a lot with story, there's a powerful flipside of the coin that very few people seem to be paying attention to. Story is a powerful tool, a human superpower, the secret...
Interested in the real reason leaders don't use participatory practice with their people?
Just before I left for Sweden at the end of May to co-host an in-house Art of Host training, I interviewed my friend and long-time CEO Phil Cass. I wanted to know both how he had come to participatory...
One of the great joys of my work is the opportunity to peek behind the scenes in organisations and teams to help them find their courageous stories and host them to life.
I spent all last week in Malmö, Sweden alongside a team hosting a team into being through what we called "The Art of...
If you've been keeping track of the news, things have been challenging for Britons recently. And yesterday the twist in their storyline struck at the heart of the nation, as the monarch who had seen nearly a century and held her role for 70 years passed on.
Now the country -- and the monarchy...
Here I am at the airport again. It feels both tiring and wonderful. Tiring because I still need to build up my resilience for being around other people and wonderful because I'm off into some new adventures and I'll be performing one of the roles I love best -- StoryCatcher!
Every time you...
If you listen more deeply to the conversations around you, what are the themes you're hearing? Yesterday I was in conversation with David Hutchens, who told me he's been thinking a lot about the conversations he's been part of and how he's beginning to muse on love as a leadership capacity.
I...
Today I was listening to Henri Lipmanowicsz and Keith McCandless tell part of the origin story of Liberating Structures. Henri made a compelling point that concepts are all very well and good, but for change to come, people need structures. So many people are not poor leaders by choice, but...
Yesterday in THE STORY DOJO Frédérique te Dorsthorst introduced us to the power of archetypes. She reminded us that archetypes are part of our evolutionary past and we communicate with and through them every time we tell a story. The more you know about how they work, the more...
This is my rewrite of a series of blogposts from 2017, formulated into a chapter for a new book being published in 2019. It comes in three parts, covering six perspectives I’m working with on the power of stories and what colleagues David Hutchens, David Drake and I call “The...