Bridging the Chasm Between Us and Them
by Mark Gerzon
"Because 'leadership' is steadily becoming a polycultural phenomenon, bridging has become a necessity. It used to be that leaders in foreign policy or international trade had to think globally, but not the rest of us. Today, local leaders are increasingly global leaders."
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Government as System, Government as Service

From Accountability to Adaptability, by Eric Young
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, accountability regimes abhor the sucking noise of a complex problem where predictions are spurious, control mechanisms are loose, and stopping points are impossible to determine."

Search for Meaning in Public Service
by Alex Pattakos
"It is easy to fall prey to the notion that government employees are lazy, that they couldn't cut the mustard in the private sector, or that they are dishonest, unethical, on the take, and so on. Within these constraints, it becomes the responsibility of public servants themselves to find the source of their intrinsic motivation, in order to avoid the pitfall of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy."

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Welcome to the World Cafe
The World Cafe is a simple but powerful format for hosting dialogue and surfacing collective intelligence. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, co-founders of this methodology, brought the World Cafe to the Institute's first summer program, and it has been used and adapted in that context ever since. Many Summer Program participants have also taken the World Cafe into their own settings.

Cafe to Go
This guide provides an overview of the principles used in designing World Café conversations, along with tips for creating powerful questions and setting up your meeting space, with a list of all the supplies you will need on hand to support your gathering.
How to Host a Book:
Conversation with Juanita Brown and Jane Brunette, by Dinah Wakeford
"We are listening in such a way that the larger meaning of the work of the World Café becomes visible. We are listening together for patterns and insights, and harvesting and sharing what we have been discovering. The book-hosting process, just like the Café itself, involves deeply and carefully listening to the multiplicity of contributors. "
Peace Cafe, by Claudia Chender with Juanita Brown
In the period leading up to the Iraq war, law school students at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, were debating the merits of the war in an online dicussion forum. The postings quickly became sharp and divisive. Claudia decided to host a Café.
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Making Meaning Through Language
by Frances Baldwin
"The language we use to frame our interventions is probably as essential as the strategy of the intervention."

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Reflections

Unlearning: The Art of Letting Go, by Toke Paludan Møller
"I was invited into a great dance, and I accepted. The shift had already happened."

Thoughts on Change and Integrity, by Cynthia Kneen
"The person you are at the beginning of your journey isn't the one you are at the end. Your confusion becomes wisdom. Your fear becomes courage. Your vision becomes pragmatic. The alchemy is personal."

Journeying as a Systems Thinker, by Masud Sheikh
"We all need ways to crystallize and express our systemic insights, and different approaches are appropriate to different thinking and learning styles."

  Spaces
Top spaces bring out our arrogance,
Bottom spaces our dependency.
In Middle spaces we lose our selves,
And Customer spaces evoke our righteousness.
In spaces of shared responsibility
we become territorial;
In spaces of common danger
we mobilize in holy war;
In spaces that separate us
we fall into a soul-shriveling I-ness.
So master the space,
and master your self within the space;
Choose a space of common venture
in which each of us is committed to the other
And all are reaching beyond our selves
to leave our imprints on the world.

—Barry Oshry
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Stories & Updates

Being Change at School: A Conversation with Micah Fierstein, by Lyn Hartley "At the 2002 Summer Program, Micah led a seminar on "Schools that Learn," which was attended by a team of 11 teachers and administrators from the Beaufort County School District in South Carolina. As a follow-up, Micah was invited to help transport the learning back home. That project has grown to be a system-wide change initiative directly involving 400 school personnel. In this issue, Lyn Hartley interviews Micah to learn about the inspiration behind Micah's work. In a future issue, we will hear more about the school district's learning journey.

Coming Soon: The Agape Global Village Project
In the last issue of Fieldnotes you read a letter from Sibusisiwe Mlambo, a young woman in South Africa who described the plight of child vicitims of the AIDS epidemic in her area. In response to her request for assistance, a Nova Scotian businesswoman has undertaken to create a North American fundraising effort to assist the Agape Child Care Centre. The project — the Agape Global Village — will launch in a month or so. If you would like to find out how you can help, and be notified when the launch takes place, please email Bernardine Wood at bern@embra.com.

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Shambhala Insights
Fear and Fearlessness, by Chögyam Trungpa
"In order to experience fearlessness, it is necessary to experience fear. The essence of cowardice is not acknowledging the reality of fear."

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Summer Program Updates

Invitation to sponsor a participant in the inter-generational dialogue, June 11-12. As you heard in the March issue of Fieldnotes, an inspired group of past summer program participants and faculty has initiated a dialogue that will convene before the core program, to explore cross-generational ways of thinking and acting for a common future. This group will include people across a diversity of age and perspective who are seeking new models of knowledge-sharing between sectors and across generations. Please consider contributing towards a sponsorship fund that will help some of the younger and more elder members of this group come to Halifax in June. We are also looking for air-mile donations to help with travel, especially for two individuals who are coming from Africa and India (approx. 80,000 air miles each). To make a donation or request more details, contact Claudia Chender, cchender@hotmail.com, or Barbara Zielinski, barbaraz@shambhalainstitute.org. Thank you!

Module full. The module led by Margaret Wheatley with Geoff Crinean, "Radical Leadership," is now full. New registrants indicating this module as their first choice will be placed on a wait list.

Since this is the last issue of Fieldnotes before the Summer Program, subsequent updates will be sent to registrants by email. Also, an online conversation space will soon be made available, for pre-program networking and information sharing. If you are coming to the Summer Program, we look forward to seeing you in Halifax. If not, watch for a special issue of Fieldnotes featuring program highlights, to be published some time during the summer.


April 2004, No. 5
. see all issues .

One of the secrets behind the Summer Program...
 is about community. It's about the extraordinary people who come together in a spirit of learning and engagement, without artifice. People who really care about the work they do and the world they live in. Who see what's possible and who want to engage their deepest resources and insights to make it happen. When people come together with that kind of intention and integrity, it creates a certain magic. We call it "ordinary magic." It is both ordinary and profound, and it is what sustains us in our work. That's why so many people come back, year after year, and why they say there's really nothing else like this, anywhere. If this resonates for you, please don't hesitate to join us.


Fieldnotes is
taking a break
This is the last issue of Fieldnotes for this cycle. We've had fun! Watch for a special issue of Fieldnotes this summer, featuring highlights from the Summer Program. We will resume regular publication in the fall. Heartfelt thanks go to everyone who contributed their time, energy, words, and fearless inspiration to launch this fledgling project. We hope you agree it's been a rich harvest of an abundant field.

. . . . . . . . . .

"So much has been given to me that I have no time to ponder over that which has been denied."

—Helen Keller
(as offered by Jim Lord)

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To subscribe to Fieldnotes: go to http://www.shambhalainstitute.org/world/contact.html

Why Fieldnotes? This newsletter arose from the inspiration to make visible what is now invisible — the rich field of connection, dialogue, and activity that is arising around the Institute's Authentic Leadership programs. This field now extends far beyond the programs themselves, in both time and place. This newsletter also provides a forum for people who are pioneering the emerging field of what could be called "authentic" or "transformative" leadership. It is published bimonthly, September through April, at the beginning of each month.

We'd like to hear from you. The editorial team invites your feedback, letters, and submissions. We are especially interested to hear how you have been applying your learning and insights in your own field of work. The submission deadline for each issue is the 15th of the previous month. We reserve the right to edit for clarity and space. Please include your daytime contact information. We look forward to hearing from you.

Editorial Team: Susan Szpakowski, Lyn Hartley, Masud Sheikh, Dinah Wakeford & Barbara Zielinski.

Appreciations. Many thanks to our volunteer editors, and to Barbara Bash for her beautiful masthead calligraphy. Fieldnotes is a publication of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is published September through May, at the beginning of each month. The views expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect those of the Shambhala Institute.