Agility & Learning Beyond Borders

Het Einde van de Wereld. Misschien denk je: dit staat voor de deur. Maar het einde van de Wereld waar ik het vandaag over heb begon op een onvergetelijke 6 januari 1991 - en het duurde tot 24 juni 2001, de dag van het einde van het Einde van de Wereld. Tussen deze twee memorabele data heb ik tien jaar lang voor de Vlaamse radio gewerkt, vanuit India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, en nog een hele rits andere plaatsen waar ik in die jaren rondhing. Het legendarische Einde van de Wereld was elke zondagavond te horen op Radio 1, ik denk drie uur lang, met een bonte verzameling lezers, verhalenvertellers en schrijvers, samengebracht door de excentrieke maar charismatische Dree Peremans. Dree was zelf grootgebracht in de folktraditie. Op de radio maakte hij spraakmakende programma’s en begeesterde hij Patagonia-liefhebbers. Weinigen in het publiek waren er zich bewust van hoe ver dat ging, en tegen welke schenen we trapten. Eigenlijk deden we grotendeels waar we zelf zin in hadden. En er was altijd het geruis van de zee en het gefluit van vogels in het bos op de achtergrond. Heel af en toe gingen we live, ergens te velde in een cafe of een cultureel centrum. Dat waren feestelijke avonden, opgeluisterd door Dirk van Esbroeck, Wannes van de Velde, Kris De Bruyne en ander schoon volk. Na Betty Mellaerts en Jan Vanlangendonck ging de presentatie over naar Friedl' Lesage, en dan naar Kristien Amerijckx en Elke Vandersypen. We maakten er feesten van: Kor Van Istendael, Alida Neslo, Ralph Rabie (Joannes Kerkorrel), Sharda Ganga, Walter Ertvelt, Mark Vandemoortele, Patrick De Rynck, Jo Van Driessche, Wim Claus, en nog zovele anderen. Ik schrik als ik al die namen schrijf en ik me realiseer hoeveel er van dit jolige groepje al zijn overgestoken naar het echte einde van hun eigen wereld. Maar geen gezeur. Op 17 november kan je het nog één keer live meemaken, met stemmen van vroeger, verhalen van nu, en muziek uit je dromen. Heerlijk en erg geapprecieerd, Elke Vandersypen! Uiteraard doe ik ook weer mee. Wat ik ga vertellen weet ik nog niet. Maar ik woon tegenwoordig in Singapore: dus het zal weer een verhaal uit het verre Azie zijn. Dit project is een productie van de Fondacion Patagonista, PAMUDOKU – het PAtagondisch MUseum voor DOlende KUnsten, en GEMEENSCHAPSCENTRUM DE MARKTEN, Brussel. Van 14 november tot 15 december 2024 kan je daar expo’s, installaties, voorstellingen, concerten, workshops, animaties en live radio meemaken in en rond het gemeenschapscentrum. #storytelling #radio #heteindevandewereld #verhalenvertellen #community #fondacionpatagonista #pamudoku #brussel #cultuur

I used not to be too worried about certifications. Better qualification and no cert than certification but no quality. Also in the culture and generation that I grew up it all mattered less. Of great importance was earning at least one but preferably two or three Master degrees. Only a select few of us would go on and get a doctorate, after which that was it. A doctorate used to be the qualification of a researcher - and unless one stayed on in academia and one devoted their life to actual methodological research, it made little sense to keep using the title - and I dare say, the "honoris causa" has always been more of a political issue than anything else. The certification industry was virtually non-existant, then. Because yes, it truly is this: an industry, where one spends loads of money to buy a certain badge, which generally says very little or close to nothing about one's true qualities and qualifications. Unless one chooses programs and delivery facilitators or teachers with due diligence and care. I had formidable teachers teaching me Sanskrit, Tokharian dialects, and Pali. There is not a day I do not feel blessed to have been in their gurushishyaparamparā (teacher-student lineage). In the world of Scrum, getting a first level Scrum Master or Product Owner certification is all too easy. In most cases, spend some money and sit in for a day or two and it's done. We are very fortunate that this changes with levels 2 ("advanced") and 3 ("professional"). In my case, both these certs have come hard-earned one after the other, with many years of intense practice, study, reflection, community service, and many hundreds of hours of analysis, writing, sharing, mentoring, and teaching. And I have had the enormous pleasure of having crossed lifepaths with Tobias Mayer, the best imaginable Scrum advocate, teacher, mentor, and friend. Even the first level cert program, Tobias manages to transform into a piece of art. Then, imagine staying the whole curriculum. From where in my case the paramparā now seems to lead to LeSS. LeSS is large-scale Scrum as practiced and taught by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman and others. LeSS makes a lot of sense and #LeSSworks. I am doing baby steps, one at a time. I am not ready yet for certs in this field. But perhaps you are? One of my baby steps is voluneering for the community at the #LeSSconference in Singapore, Nov 4, where you can meet up with me and a whole razmataz of much more proficient practitioners and gifted speakers and teachers. If you are anywhere in SE Asia, surely you'll bless us with your participation? Register here: https://lnkd.in/ggziXV6E LeSS Singapore, LeSS.works, Odd-e #LeSSSG #LeSSconference2024 #Singapore #Scrum #LargeScaleScrum Michaela Broeckx 🌿, Salman Mohd Sultan, Stanly Lau, Ivan Zimine, PhD, Ziqing Lau [image: working with large groups in Jakarta, 2023]

We are #PeopleBeforePatients We are people impacted by a health issue, professionals and wellness enthusiasts actualizing a new vision for what we can become when health care is deeply humanized. We are re-imagining how health and care co-exist in better balance. We call that experience Human Care. We bring good things to life. Get to know us. https://lnkd.in/ghenNzxA

After a fantastic week spent with facilitation work and friends old and new in Hong Kong, there can hardly be a better way to come home to Singapore than crossing roads and having brunch with Mark McKergow and Jenny Clarke, the warm and inspiring initiators, space creators, and hosts of both the Solutions Focused Coaching and Host Leadership communities worldwide and here in Asia in particular. My long-lasting interest and involvement with both practices are of course no secret to anyone who is or has been praticipating in any of my programs. My particular take on leading or facilitating communities as a host, rests on a wide foundation of practices, from buddhist monastic principles to Ashok's Decade of Good Governance, Rabindranath Tagore, Batesonian philosophy, Yoshi Oida, Scrum mastery, Agile coaching, and common-sense social constructivism in modern OD and organizational design and development. And there: what tops it all is sharing a sense of being each other's easy guests and having meaningful conversations with Mark and Jenny and Michaela Broeckx 🌿 on a Saturday morning at Tiong Bahru, Singapore. Jérôme Bourgeon, Ruben Canlas Jr., Brent Byron Q., Baijesh Ramesh, Nora Bateson, Ludovic Curtil, Sam Chia 谢惠森 #solutionsfocus #hostleadership #kishotenketsu #resourcefulexformation

Bang in the middle of my student years, the most formative period in our lifetime, was when Thích Nhất Hạnh, monk, peace activist, author, poet, and teacher, appeared in the news. I already was a Batesonian by then, a student of Gregory Bateson, and it struck me early on how the teachings of Thay (as we affectively used to call the monk) and those of Bateson so snugly fitted into one another. Said Thay: If we think about the Earth as just the environment around us, we experience ourselves and the Earth as separate identities. Instead, we need to recognize that the planet and the people on it are ultimately one and the same. And even beyond: When we look at the Earth, we see that she is a formation made up of non-Earth elements. The sun, stars, the whole universe. Certain elements, such as carbon, silicon, and iron, formed long ago in the heart of far-off supernovas. Distant stars contribute light to our existence. It cannot be said that we are. In fact, we inter-are. I inter-am. You inter-are. In this tradition I see the Warm Data Lab movement initiated by The International Bateson Institute and Nora Bateson. Warm Data are contextual and relational information about complex systems. Warm data involve transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system, as well as interwoven complex systems. Warm Data Labs are group processes, which illustrate interdependency and generate understandings of systemic patterns for people with no previous exposure to systems theory. Warm Data Labs enable new societal responses to complex challenges. Earlier this year I joined Hayaa' Network and Maimunah Mosli in an extensive Lab Host program in Singapore - in the company of my friends Brent Byron Q., Ludovic Curtil, Khai Seng Hong, Yen Kai Lye, and many others who have become "warm data friends" just as much. Last week, I joined Brent and Ludo at the beautiful Banyan Workspace with Charlotte Lafitte, in Hong Kong, where we hosted an in-person Warm Data Lab on the question of "care" in a changing world. It was a most memorable gathering. My gratitude goes to everyone who so gracefully participated. [photos by charlottelafitte and flaleman, 2024] #warmdata #warmdatalab #batesonian #stories #storytelling #community #hongkong

After practice and books and more practice, and after that, after finding out natural patterns of collaboration that occur when we are still young and children and free and not yet contaminated by growing-up pressures of goals and targets and strategic individualism and competitive thoughts and behaviors, after all that and more practice, the first to really-really "teach" me Scrum and it made so much sense was Tobias Mayer. I owe Tobias a lot. Which is a strange thing to say among friends, where friendship is a holistic sensorial scape in which togetherness exceeds the boundaries of "owing," an emotion more transactional than friendship would tolerate. Tobias is with whom I gradually merged my educational and facilitatory experiences and techniques, cleaning my act altogether, and finding peace in being different and non-conventional. Nowadays in my practice LeSS is more, and the learning cycle continues to spin. Whoever was ever around when Bas Vodde, the co-creator of Large-Scale Scrum, turned his wheel of case stories, will agree about them stories being enticing and inspirational. If Scrum works for teams, then LeSS works at a larger scale. Weird almost like a three-body problem: a young Team Lead came to me for consult the other week and shared a large-scale list of complaints and stuff in their team collaboration that doesn't work and literally to every single one of his stories I instinctively thought that Scrum is the answer. Then I said so and he said no we are doing that already and I asked tell me more and he said we are doing Jira and it sucks. Isn't it time then to set this straight and dive in again and do much, much better? I am volunteering at the LeSS Conference Singapore, Nov 4. Craig Larman is speaking and many more. Who joins me there? Register here: https://lnkd.in/gS2FhKRk) #LeSS #LeSSSG #LeSSworks #Scrum #largescalescrum #conference #singapore Agile Singapore, LeSS Singapore [picture: El maestro que prometió el mar (2023), education innovator Antoni Benaiges with students in front of his school in Bañuelos de Bureba]

To all my friends and colleagues and connections in Hong Kong, and whoever happens to be around, in the evening of September 24 I will be doing an in-person Warm Data Lab, initiated by and in the company of friends and fellow Batesonian Institute Certified Warm Data Lab Hosts Ludovic Curtil and Brent Byron Q. - at the beautiful Banyan Workspace. Join us? - The more, the merrier! #warmdatalab #gregorybateson #batesonian #community #stories #storytelling Nora Bateson, April Yip, Kundhavi Balachandran, Cherry Wong, Clement S. Y. Ng, Matchy Ma, Chloe Chan, Payal Biswas, Cynthia Lau, Neelam Harjani, Phyllis Cheung, Fermi Wong, Amin Tse, Charlotte Lafitte, Kai Khiun Liew, Kyle Kwong, Ruben Canlas Jr., Felix Wai, Oscar Venhuis, ...

Semantics! Words! Languages! Babel! ... There is a lot of confusion around - in our circle of practice, when it comes to the words #ability, #capability, and #capacity. And I am saying nothing about even fuzzier concepts like aptitude, faculty, or proficiency. In an attempt to clear my act this week I have tried yet once more to address this and when for the umpteenth time I found no clear answers and I discovered that everyone in their daily practice is using all of those words seemingly randomly, I have taken refuge in a wishing well of languages and translations, my preferred hide-out, where I can linger long hours living on nothing but my street savoir-faire. But there. Taking refuge turns out to be useless: merely a resting place from where to find that the dire straits where I find myself in, just lures me into more dead-ends and gloomy alleyways leading nowhere. Take Google Translate for instance and go for a translation in French, and you will find that "ability" translates as capacité, "capability" translates as capacité, and "capacity" translates as capacité as well. Go the other way, and the French capabilité comes out neatly as "capability," while, strangely enough, the French capacité is rendered in English as "ability." Stupefying, yes? Richer languages offer more nuances. Dutch is an example, where "ability" comes up as vaardigheid (literally the fact of being sea-worthy, the Dutch have always been a sailing lot), "capability" as vermogen (a word I understand as "assets"), and capacity as capaciteit. Type those three very different Dutch words into Google translate and look for their shape in French, and what you get, again, is capacité, capacité, capacité. Yet other languages are almost beyond human comprehension. The Sanskrit Online dictionary, to name just one, renders "capability" as yogyatā, shakti, kshamatā, samarthatā, adhikāra, parivrarhiman, shakyatva, dākshya, and siddhi – each with their own specific nuances. Likewise, a search for "capacity" delivers 51 lines of Sanskrit results, while "ability," according to the same source, can be expressed in 48 ways. Are you lost in the forest? Yes? No worries, you might find me just there, because I am too. Unless you are proficient in Sanskrit, which I am guessing none of us really-really is, it feels to me that in life and at work we must take good care to use a good choice of words and refrain from getting caught by endless semantics. This is why almost by nature I am doubtful of people who speak Big Truths in Simple Words, with a seemingly enviable Self-Confidence that makes me shrug. I'd rather be hesitant, thank you. Or take the following sentence as a demo: While she has the "ability" to write and she possesses the "faculty" to do so, she needs to develop the required writing skills to make her "capable" of writing a dissertation displaying her "capacity" to make a valid point about #semantics. [image: flaleman, Common Ground, Singapore 2023]

If you are a Scrum practitioner, you will remember the shock that went through the community when, online, in the tipping point year of 2020, Sutherland and Schwaeber broke ice with a new version of The Scrum Guide, and announced the ominous replacement of "servant leadership" with "true leadership." Most of us had never been unfavourable to the concept of servant leadership. Since my student years, first at boarding school in a benedictine abbey and later reading Sanskrit and Pali at university, essentials of servant leadership had been a foundational part of my upbringing and my stance in life: Even Ashok's pillar edicts spoke of leadership in terms of dedicated service to the community, and from there the road to Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Vinoba Bhave, Tanthai Periyar, and more, had been short. And there was Robert Greenleaf of course - and The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership - which took its inspiration from Herman Hesse's Siddharta and Journey to the East - all equally among the "books of life" on my library shelves and in my backpack. Why would Sutherland and Schwaeber abandon a long and beautiful leadership tradition in favour of the elusive "true leadership"? What did it mean? In the attached piece (a non-paywalled link) I volunteer to trace what happened over time, and how the concept of hosting has gradually been taking over the space where "service" thrived before. You will read of my natural sympathy for The Art of Hosting, the well-known, open-source, global facilitation movement - after which I present my take on Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey's Host Leadership, now a decade old, a take partly informed by my personal history with buddhism, much of my work in communities and corporates, many years of teaching leadership as a diligent practice of service and hosting, and other adventures in the world of organizational development. Could it be, that "true leadership" is "host leadership"? #od #agility #facilitation #leadership #team #community #theartofhosting #hostleadership

People Need People is a Warm Data Lab-based project coordinated by Nora Bateson and the International Bateson Institute. Our mission is to support communities to recognize and attend to the interdependence of their well-being and to produce collaborative systemic responses to local and global needs. People need people for the tough times ahead. Hope lies in the possibility that people can and will rise to the occasion of helping one another. The People Need People Project addresses the nature of community in a new form, creating conversations that reach beyond the polarization, fracture, and silos. Now is the time to allow for the connective tissue of our societies to form in new ways. New relational patterns beget new structures from the richness of new shared connections. Warm Data Labs support people to lean into each other in times of need. The present post is meant as an invitation for all to join an online People Need People session on Tuesday August 27, 7:00-9:30 PM (Hong Kong, Singapore) - facilitated by my friends and able Warm Data Lab Facilitators Ludovic Curtil and Brent Byron Q., and myself. Join here: https://lnkd.in/gHdahXSZ #peopleneedpeople #warmdatalabs #batesonian #systemicdesign #communitydesign #communities #online Hayaa' Network, Maimunah Mosli, Khai Seng Hong, Shiao-yin Kuik, NAV QIRTI, cheaw hwei low, Victor Loke, Michaela Broeckx, Salman Mohd Sultan, Ground-Up Initiative (GUI) 聚友爱, Paul Hutton, Darwin Sy Antipolo, April Yip, Dikky Takiyudin, Kundhavi Balachandran, Kurnia Safitri, Sujatha Rao, Rebecca Liony, Alfina Damayanti, Amina Evangelista Swanepoel, Firdaus H.R, Tanvi Mehta, Julien Cayla, N. Aidawardhani, Allan Hendra, Cherry Wong, Siti Hadiyati, Randy Mellaerts, Tobias Mayer, 🌟Mandy 🌞 Sunner, Stephanie Fehr, Nisha Joshi, Natasha Baisiwala, Charles-Louis de Maere, ... [photos taken during an in-person Warm Data Lab Host week earlier this year at Tampines, Singapore]