The fabric of community I have a lot I love for my local library here on Bowen Island. Today I'm deeply appreciating the rotating display of works from our local fabric arts guild. The Annex, my office away from home, is adorned with a selection of quilts that change every couple of months or […]

Three interesting links from today’s feed. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/notes-on-gdp-travelling-and-place/

Let’s think about how we fund things. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/how-we-fund-things/

Witnessing the blooming of possibility when Indignenous Nations are in charge. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/lead-from-the-place-of-longest-connection/

Lights in the sky on Haida Gwaii Last night. This morning. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/lights-in-the-sky-on-haida-gwaii/

Long days at “the office” Long days of retreat facilitation. They start early. 6:30 wake up, and a little focused think about how our day is going to go. Breakfast with the group and off to commemorate the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation at the incredible Haida Heritage Centre near […]

Some Haida expressions for rain. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/rain-on-haida-gwaii/

Complexity and uncertainty have been off loaded and shifted down through organizations and communities to teams and people without the capacity to deal with it. I'm interested in how to build that capacity at those levels. How about you? […]

Fall rolls in and I spend the first part of the day watching the Rugby World Cup Final, a crucial set of Northern Super League games and a very Spursy match. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/a-fall-day-full-of-footballs/

I've had trouble understanding the ostrich farm thing. It seemed like whatever the ostrich farm people were doing was absolutely the most righteous thing for them, but it wasn't resonating with me. I was trying to understand it but I felt like I was missing something. And then today I saw that […]

A short list of links to practical tools, insights and practices for working with, hosting, and transforming conflict and polarization. Have a read and leave more in the comments. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/tools-for-working-with-conflict-and-polarization/

Letting go, to get somewhere The hairiest road in British Columbia was built by the citizens of the Bella Coola valley back in the 1950s and it isn't much different today then it was back then. A 1200 meter descent over 18 kilometres on a gravel road with no guardrails and the occasional 1000 […]

A new complexity based risk-management framework from Dave Snowden and a tidy Tottenham win in the League Cup https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/cleaning-up/

When government funders cut back support to nearly unviable levels but ask for more proof that their funding is producing meaningful outcomes, I get angry. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/raging-at-the-audacity-of-austerity/

Reconciliation in Canada is about making two very different legal systems work together on the same land. It is about respect and recognizing Aboriginal title and the rights of Indigenous Nations to exercise their authority. And it's not a new thing […]

I know it doesn't matter, becasue they don't care about any kind of moral context that isn't self-centred, but it's funny watching MAGA people check a single fact. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-1.7636974 No notes. I have no hope that American democracy is redeemable […]

Remembering the early Web, the data we have lost, meaning at work and Midnight, the humpback whale. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/remembering-2/

Football on the last day of summer A day of football yesterday. It started early watching Tottenham play Brighton. Spurs were looking to continue their form but despite having the lions share of possession and the best set of chances, they conceded thwice in the first half, digging themselves […]

How we move and lead in rapidly changing contexts, finding the stability at different scales, and a sublime goal to make your day. https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/finding-stable-places-to-work-in-rapidly-changing-contexts-systems-leadership-and-a-sublime-goal/

"The U.S. ambassador to Canada is expressing frustration over the anti-American sentiment he sees in this country, including from politicians, after U.S. President Donald Trump hit most of the world with tariffs." F*ck him and the horse he rode in on […]

Becoming a channel You know you're getting older when you strain a tendon in your little finger whilst holding a bowl. Ouch. My guitar practice will be about more compact chord voicings for the next few days I think. Sometimes (all the time?) music needs you to be the channel for it, not the […]

Leading and facilitating in a thin time For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my […]

Red skies, AI, and icebreakers A smoky morning here as we have smoke from the huge Bear Gulch fire in Washington swirling around the Salish Sea on a southeasterly flow. Skies are clear above the smoke but this morning’s sun was a marischino cherry rising over the mountains. My friend Kari Boyle […]

Catching up on the football While I was away I didn't get a chance to see Tottenham's 3-0 victory over West Ham, but I was glad to hear of it. After the hiccup against Bournemouth I was worried that we might head back to our trend of diabolical losses bucking a trend of otherwise credible […]

Encountering the most profound belonging Twelve days ago we left Vancouver for a couple of weeks of guided travel in the central coast of British Columbia. This is the region of the coast that is north of Vancouver Island and south of Kitimat. Specifically we were visiting the homelands of the […]

Free mini-books about dialogic practice now available Over the years I've written nearly 3000 entries on my blog ranging from short notes and links to long essays and collections of writing. Of interest to facilitators and dialogue practitioners, I am publishing some of these as mini-books, in […]

Safety, bubbles and resilience Today Dave Snowden has published a significant post outlining his team’s work and thinking about safety: “we must stop trying to write better rules and start building better processes for rapid decision-making in each unique context.” Taking a complexity view on […]

Keeping it human I found myself in Snug Cove today, the village centre of our island, and it was like night and day from this past weekend. As everyone who lives in a place that is overrun by visitors knows, the day after Labour Day is like the dawn of a new era. I knew almost everyone in the […]

What my good facilitator friends are offering these days I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob's life and in […]

Actor Graham Greene has died Graham Greene died yesterday. Greene was a remarkable and iconic Oneida/Canadian actor. He is one of the most recognizable Indigenous actors in our country and a cultural treasure. He became instantly famous for his role in Dances With Wolves for which he was […]

Origin stories and adjacent possibles Alberta populism has deep origins in a group of people who have long harboured a libertarian utopia for Alberta. Danielle Smith is the most recent manifestation of this wave of thought. The Jacobin traces her origin story. My first connection to the […]

Up the Rise A fun night last night at the Vancouver Rise match at Swangard Stadium. Coming into last night’s match against Montreal Roses, the Rise were undefeated in five matches and two points off Montreal for second place. Vancouver started bright but former TSS Rover Tanya Boychuk opened […]

One planet there, this one here, and what one are they on? An astonishing photograph from the Very Large Telescope this week of a planet being born. From the link: At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the […]

Nuance, populism and Pierre Poilievre’s limitations Now that Pierre Poilievre is back in the public eye, it's worth pointing out why his particular brand of populist politics will never make him a good prime minister. There was recently a case in Canada in which a man has been charged with […]

Honouring humans, because it’s important Leave it to the Quakers to pen the greatest and most thoughtful letter of all-time on the process and considerations that lay behind their inclusive washroom policies. Read it and especially read the heartfelt ending, that holds so much the higher […]

What if I wanted this? The older I get the more I realize that as people get older they witness changes and pine for the good old days. It's cliche for a reason, because it seems nearly universal. I get it. Things aren't what they used to be. Younger generations than me (and they are plural at […]

Wow, Grimsby Town! Me in my Grimsby Town shirt in 2016, wearing it in support of the team in advance of their successful playoff promotion back to the Football League that year. Back in 2015 I started an accidental and unlikely friendship with the supporters of Grimsby Town FC. Grimsby is a […]

Slow down and integrate A propos of yesterday's post on strategic planning, Cameron Norman has a nice post today on working with organizations as a consultant engaging in strategic design and helping contracted work land and be integrated within client organizations. My buddy Tenneson is […]

Some interesting notes on emergence in AI, cities and international bridges The Ambassador Bridge is a crucial piece of international infrastructure connecting Canada to the US, between the cities of Windsor and Detroit. I had no idea it was a privately-owned bridge, nor did I understand the […]

Strategic planning is changing, that old saw The folks at Network Weaver are professional kin to me. Almost everything they post on their blog is something that I resonate with. They are about to publish a short series of blog posts about their approach to strategic planning in 2025, and I […]

Where we stand: economy, culture, integration and dying We are entering a period of knuckle-down trade negotiations with our closest trading partner, The United States. This whole year has been a whitewater ride of trying to keep an economy going, while random and arbitrary trade sanctions have […]

Two bros from Verona Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard's plays. For whatever reason I think […]

Busy Saturday: Bowfest and Tottenham The 49th annual Bowfest festival happened today in our village. This annual rite traditionally signifies the ending of summer and the beginning of fall. It's the last of our summer festivals, which includes a May Day celebration, National Indigenous People's […]

How to read, dance and recover Even though this is the season of crickets and blackberries and we have just had our first Pineapple Express of the ecological autumn, the summer heat is t done with us yet. Today gusty winds are chugging down the inlet and they are warm to the face. A hot day is […]

Giving some very precise attention to AI Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti is doing some compelling work, which will probably take a whole day for me to dive into and understand. Here is a presentation about her reflections of a year of working with AI to address the collapse of modernity […]

The pleasure and grief of Orcas Today I learned about "kelping." That's when orcas or humpbacks tangle themselves up in kelp beds because it feels nice. Orcas are more than just a charismatic mega fauna on our coast line. They are a population, and for First Nations, they are kin. For the […]

A spectrum of links from fake to imaginary to very real What is going on? My friend Alison shared this story on Mastodon with this intro “Fake news features about things that didn't happen in places that don't exist written by people who don't exist is pretty much what we expect from AI […]

Lessons from Pasifika philosophy From an article that came through the UN Development Program: a group of development workers spent some time studying Pasifika philosophy at Pasifika Communities University which underlies their approach to human development in the region. Here were some of the […]

Air Canada’s week and why wages matter Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a […]

A farewell to Rob Paterson Rob, from a recent Facebook of his which he captioned "The new me." My friend Rob Paterson is dying. I found out on Facebook today as he shared a remarkable thing that his daughter is doing. Rob was one of those bloggers that you'd meet sometimes in the early 2000s […]