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Foreign Currency

How many types of currency are in your wallet at the moment? One? None?! I have three, because I’m travelling, and will likely have four a few days from now. I’m constantly doing price conversions in my head and wondering which currency is listed on menus and price tags.

Currency is how we express value.

What currencies are most highly valued in your work? In traditional for-profit businesses, the answer is usually money — maybe revenue or profitability or growth rates. Increasingly, you may also be adding social or planetary benefits to that equation. Continue reading “Foreign Currency”

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How Decisions are Really Made

In the city where I live, there have long been calls for the creation of fenced, leash-free dog areas. I’ve been involved in facilitating a few of the meetings about them — over years, not months. The community engagement that went into planning these dog parks was extensive, and support for the initiative was robust.

The first one was installed last year, with at least one more about to be constructed. And now the local Council has voted to remove the one and cancel the rest, pending further study.

Why? Because some of the neighbours who live close to the new dog park are very unhappy.

So what happened? Continue reading “How Decisions are Really Made”

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Physician, Heal Thyself

I am currently participating in board meetings of the International Association of Facilitators, in my new role as Regional Director for Canada. Seventeen of us have gathered for three days in Kuala Lumpur.

We’re right in the thick of things, but two insights I’ve gained so far:

  1. Even a bunch of facilitators can struggle with getting stuck in the weeds, and it happens predictably in the early afternoon. (But that’s a post for another day!)
  2. It is both hard and good for me to be a participant sometimes.

Continue reading “Physician, Heal Thyself”

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Looking Harder

What we do see depends mainly on what we look for.
… In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.

~Sir John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In (1892)

It’s well known that we see what we’re looking for. (This idea always makes me think of the “selective attention test” and the invisible gorilla.

But it is also true that when we believe something is there to be found, we look harder. Continue reading “Looking Harder”

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Working the Way You Want

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about choosing a Big Word for your year. Mine for 2019 was brave.

Looking back, I can cite examples of brave work choices (such as launching my leadership book club Wiser by Choice and releasing my first book, Nimble). Some events this year called for me to be braver than I wanted to have to be. At other times I wish my braver self had shown up. As with my word of 2018 (strong), I’ll keep working on it.

Heading into a new year and decade, my word is elevate.

Continue reading “Working the Way You Want”
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