We have spent the last ~2 months in Edmonton, Alberta – what I like to think of as Canada’s Portland – hunting for a house while staying in Airbnbs. An exhausting process, but we’ve managed to find something, and now we simply have to wait until early August to move in. So now, for the past few weeks we have been travelling across British Columbia, visiting friends and family along the way: first camping in Radium Hot Springs, then staying in Revelstoke, and now the southern Okanagan Valley. Next we head to Vancouver then Victoria, before we move back in early August to Edmonton. It’s a busy month ahead with lots of movement and work! In mid-July I’ll be co-facilitating a strategic planning session with Nakia Winfield, and the end of July, with my Greaterthan peer Lyssa Adkins, I’ll be co-facilitating a company retreat in Wisconsin for one week. Phew! Once August comes I’ll take a well-deserved break (my first since last Christmas 😵💫). You’ll also hear from me more and more as I prepare to co-host another cohort of Liberating Structures Studio with Susan Basterfield, as well as another cohort of Lead Together with Susan and Lyssa Adkins – both in September.
I’m going to stop deleting these Now updates, so here’s the last one below (I’ll see if I can dig up older ones one day).
(July 2024)
Mar 2024
After we got back from Europe late last October, we’ve been in lovely Montreal, exploring all the city has to offer. Aside from the amazing food, cafe, festival, event, etc. scene of Montreal, we’ve also met new friends and collaborators: from co-facilitating a local LS user group with Vienna Blum, to connecting with B. Lorraine Smith on sustainability and transition, nerding out on facilitation structures with Astrid Pruitt, to meetings with Percolab friends Sam Slade and Paul Messer, to just plain old dinner parties and walks with old friends Erica Holt and Phoebe Friesen, to learning how to make maple syrup from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi at the 3ecologies 100-acre maple forest, 3-hours north of Montreal. And this April, we head west – to Alberta and BC – to see old friends and family.
Heather, a perennial multipotentialite as all, is deepening her artistic practice almost every day, ‘nerding out’ with Stefan and others on the theory and practice of group process, sociology, complexity science, media and communications, etc. and facilitating home-school learning with our two children, 9 and 12 years old. Stefan is (finally) writing theory, ideas, etc. and designing distributive structures – you can follow the ongoing output on the newsletter, and notebook. He’s also working to release Anyone Can Facilitate in late April or early May – a short self-led course he hopes will help folks assemble – and doing accompaniment ‘consulting’ projects with Greaterthan, and biz dev to expand more of the same.
Working Together is now primarily our workshop and studio space, where Stefan focuses his energy on assembling all the research and practise that he’s been doing for the past 20+ years into resources for our fellow participatory leaders out there. Applied microsociology, complexity theory, group process, emergence, the overarching mystery of things… you know, all that. 😉 And Heather helps with packaging!