We’re presently living (and working together) in Edmonton, Alberta, where we’ve rooted down through two bitterly cold winters, all the while scheming and dreaming about our upcoming working holiday in Europe this summer. While in Edmonton we’ve been enjoying the wonderfully accessible recreation that this riverside prairie city has to offer. As mentioned, Edmonton gets quite cold from November through February, but the city really embraces it: There’s a ton of infrastructure in place for winter sports within the city limits (cross country ski trails, skating rinks and trails, ski and snowboard hills, snowshoeing spots), and all of it is free or low-cost.
Our formerly home-schooled children have found a community of friends at a very unique school called Caraway, a cooperative, self-managed, democratic school with parents regularly participating as classroom facilitators. This has been an interesting overlap with the work we contribute to at Greaterthan. It’s fascinating to participate in a school run in this more inclusive, emergent, participatory way, and to see how self-management and distributed leadership works in multi-generational settings.
Heather continues to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades (she is, after all, a perennial multipotentialite): rediscovering and dot-connecting her artistic practice on the one hand, and designing and editing digital content for both Working Together and Greaterthan on the other. And on the edges of all that, Heather also manages to find time to nerd out with Stefan on the theory and practice of group process, sociology, complexity science, media and communications, economics, etc. With some fellow participants from our microsociology monthly meetup, we’ve particularly enjoyed the work of Cynthia Kurtz, first doing a deep dive into her book Confluence, and now Stefan is taking her practicum on Participatory Narrative Inquiry.
Stefan has transitioned all his consulting to collaborative networks where he can more easily team up with peers to deliver longer-term org transformation projects. To this end, Stefan is now a partner at Greaterthan where he’s been working on larger, longer-term client projects through GT, as well as a number of internal initiatives, and co-facilitating Liberating Structures Studio with Susan Basterfield. Stefan also supports BASE Associates on some projects, has been collaborating with Tomomi Sasaki and Andrea Darabos on a/sync, and is collaborating with folks in Permaculture Colab from time to time. He looks forward to deepening relationships and projects with others working at the front line of the polycrisis and all the transitions and transformations this entails.
Working Together, formerly a consulting service, is now a workshop where we focus our energy on packaging all the research and practise that we’ve been doing for the past 20+ years into practicable resources for our fellow participatory leaders out there. Applied microsociology, complexity theory, group process, emergence, the overarching mystery of things… you know, all that. 😉 In a nutshell: Working Together Consulting is dead, long live Working Together.
(January 2023)