What would it look like if we used our resources and strengths to contribute to co-creating something of great value? We might look more like a beehive. 

A bee is more than just herself, she is part of a superorganism that will exist and keep thriving even when she is gone. While human beings operate in hierarchies, the bee world could better be called a “heterarchy’, characterized by flexible, interconnected individuals with multiple, intricate relationships. 

Bees work together as a collective consciousness to produce honey. What if we could work in the same way?

There is something both magnetic and mesmerising about a beehive. Life is in motion as bees fly in and out in a constant stream. There is an order you can sense underneath the surface. And, of course, there’s a hum of activity.

A group working well together feels like this, too. When participatory practice underscores the work, people break off in small groups to attend to parts of the agenda. The group moves forward ...

What is the role and importance of intentional practice in a world where we jump so quickly from one thing to another and where theoretical abstract knowledge is often what is most valued?

In this exploration we are inviting different perspectives about how our practices shape" our lives, relationships and society at large. Based on the notion of "What you practice you become" individually and together.

Some of the questions that keep coming up around the notion of practice are:

• What if we started to understand the nature and value of practice?
• What helps us to find a practice and stick to it?
• What is the role of personal practice? What kind of practices are crucial at this point in time of increasing complexity and confusion?
• What is the relationship between our individual and our collective practice?
• How can the individual support/inspire the collective and how can the collective support the individual.
• What are stories and metaphors that can highlight the deeper nature of ...

We just finished a three week exploration into: 

How can we cultivate practices for living regeneratively where we are while learning from others in different places?

 With our mates and friends Maria Scordialos, Vanessa Reid and James Ede. We were accompanied by Ticha Masai who were doing graphic recording and it was truly amazing to see his harvest, especially of the second session, which was about Regeneration in Degeneration diving into What are we learning about the dance of regeneration and degeneration - life and death, growth and decay.

Our starting point for this conversation was the Ecocycle that describes:

• Germination Phase (Re-organisation)
  Germination/exploration: a time of new beginnings and potential, but there is vulnerability as the new may not yet have traction.
• Growth Phase (Exploitation)
  Capacity building: the soil is right for an idea to take off, there is some structure but it is not proven yet, lots of energy for growth and a level of readiness.
• Maturation ...

Defining the Central Garden 

The metaphor of a Central Garden comes from Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Cafe dialogic practice, who describes the courtyard in the middle of her adopted grandmother’s home in Chiapas, Mexico - lush with vivid bougainvillea, vibrant flowers, and verdant trees in big clay pots surrounding a large fountain in the center. You enter the central garden, or jardín central as they call it in Latin America, by going through any one of the multiple arched doorways that surround this open space in the very heart of the home. 

The innovations and practices that we introduced briefly earlier have largely emerged and grown up together in the last few decades; new growth nourished from the same ground of shared values and intentions for co-creating a better world. In our metaphor, these practices are the doorways that lead into the Central Garden, which is the focus of this article. 

This metaphor of a Central Garden works on multiple levels. In this article...

ORIGINAL POST DEECEMBER 3, 2019 BY CHRIS CORRIGAN 
Check out our course on Harvesting and Collective Sense Making that we did with Chris and a series of other practitioners.

Having worked with Chris Corrigan, Amanda Fenton and Ciarran Camman exploring how to bring our hosting practices online for a large organization we had lots of fun and learning. Chris´blog post highlighting the simplicity and slowing down as core reminders, that for me applies for work especially online but certainly also working on site.     - Rowan

Facilitators are getting inundated with panicky requests to host meetings online. Some of us have the tech know-how to do this, and others don’t. Clients are feeling pressure and urgency to get teams up and running online and folks are hoping the important meeting that they have been working with for months can suddenly go online and get the same kinds of results.

Here is some stuff to help you out.

Slow down. Just because you are not hosting face to face does not mean you are not hosting. Make sure that you do the due diligence in designing and hosting the meeting. You will need to talk to your clients and coach them and give a sense...