I was sitting in my friend’s living room wearing sandals while she had bundled herself in a sweater, coat, and blanket. We were watching a South African gospel concert on DVD. After the customary greetings, I asked her, more informally, “How are you?”

“Actually, I am on leave. Sick leave. They found TB.”   Read more...

Many years ago, my life reached something of a drastic crossroads. My then husband and I had a son who died the day he was born, and we had some life-changing choices to make. The paths that we’d thought were going to be ours, it turned out, weren’t to be ours at all. We decided, in those inexpensive gasoline days, to take a drive. We found the vista of the open sea at the beach near our home relaxing and insightful. Our little red Subaru seemed to know it; she took us right there.   Read more...

My community tourism work takes me through many areas in rural Uganda. I get opportunity to meet and interact with the ordinary people. The majority perceive their villages and homesteads as poor and backward and themselves as without opportunity. The unfortunate trend is for able people moving to towns and cities in search of economic opportunities, leaving behind mostly women and the elderly.

Due to lack of knowledge and exposure, they do not see the potential hidden within their surrounding environment, indigenous knowledge and cultures. All is not lost, though amongst the community there are some who have not given up and are not waiting for government or donors to improve their circumstances. In a bid to survive, they have become innovative.   Read more...

I’m seeing it everywhere on the planet. All sorts of people are catching a bigger vision in all sorts of arenas. The most personal one I’ve had recently was about health insurance.

A friend left her job for better opportunities. Because her last post was in academia, her insurance lasts till the beginning of this school year. She’s spent a lot of this summer getting all her various physical details checked, measured and serviced before her insurance runs out.   Read more...

In my introductory bibliography I wrote about how I was looking forward to what my unknown future had in store for me. I also mentioned T’ai Chi, artwork, and Japanese. But even though this current essay is a bit personal, I feel it is an important addition to what I initially submitted. It gives a more complete picture of who I am. And hopefully, what I am experiencing and learning will be of benefit to others in similar situations.   Read more...

For several years, I presented training programs in problem solving at various corporations. I taught the classical four step problem solving process that has long served the industrial revolution: 1) identify the problem, 2) search for root causes, 3) explore and evaluate possible solutions, and 4) put an action plan in place. My classes always went well and people appreciated learning the process.

Then came an experience that eventually brought me to a whole new mind set on problem solving. I had been doing some manuscript reviews for Berrett-Koehler Publishing, and one of the manuscripts was about Appreciative Inquiry, a change process that approaches problems from a positive perspective rather than from a negative one. At first I felt that AI was ignoring the long history and success of the classic model for problem solving, but slowly I came to see the incredible value in AI.   Read more...

Nowhere I’ve been is more paradoxical than South Africa. Yes, it’s a country of wealth and poverty, a country of freedom and oppression, a country of exuberance and despair. But these extremes exist universally—they characterize nations and local communities and even, you might say, the individual experience. But to me, the contrasts are especially glaring here.

For example, compare these two descriptions of a wedding.   Read more...

This morning's news headlines brought word of a new video of Osama bin Laden that has been posted on the internet. I didn't seek it out nor did I watch it. I didn't need to. The press had done it for me.

What I did instead was conjure up an image of dear Osama--not exactly hard to do--and I prayed with him. He's the general of an armed militia and he and his men need prayer.   Read more...

In Japan, the phenomenon of total self-isolation has become so common that it now has a name: hikikomori. The international media report of an ‘epidemic’ and estimate the number of sufferers - typically men in their twenties - at 1.2 million. That’s 1 per cent of the population! Hikikomori refuse to leave their room, completely disconnect themselves from their environment and usually flee into the digital world, where they are masters of the universe. It seems that in the twenty-first century information overload has become physical reality for some.

Hikikomori could also be described as an extreme variant of what is known in the West as a ‘quarter-life crisis’, where individuals refuse to commit themselves to a specific goal amidst all the possibilities that a globalized world has to offer. We smoke pot and play videogames, Hikikomori play videogames. Quite often, they do so professionally, looking after our avatars while we -Westerners- reluctantly go to work. Japanese possess an honest and enviable attitude to work. They either do the work or they don’t. They either connect with each other by committing themselves to a common goal or they don’t.   Read more...

I've just sent out an email recommending Ode to all of the members of an international group known as Positive Change Corps (www.positivechangecorps.com). Most of the members are organizational development consultants who have additionally made a commitment to bringing Appreciative Inquiry to schools.

As as retired educator and consultant, my mission is to write, blog, and post resources to help people transform our schools into democratic organizations that work for everyone. I'm doing something similar to what Charlie Leadbeater is doing. I'm writing a book on line -- CRISIS IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT: MAKING OUR SCHOOLS WORK FOR EVERYONE (www.squidoo.com/makingourschoolswork) -- where people can critique, contribute, and freely copy. Would welcome reactions/review from you folks at Ode.   Read more...

“21 Solutions to Save the World” in this month’s Foreign Policy intrigued me so much that I bought the issue. Twenty-one of the world’s thinkers were asked what ONE thing they would recommend to change our world for the better.

The first, Garry Kasparov, was a shadowy genius figure in my younger days. He was the world chess champion for twenty years. His suggestion is for a global Magna Carta. He says, “When democracies make nice with dictators, the world’s worst regimes get away with murder.”   Read more...

After 6 weeks, I have restarted my self-coaching process that I had started in the Netherlands. Today, I was looking at persistence in achieving your personal goals. A study once found out that successful people are neither very intelligent nor very creative but very, very, very persistent in putting their goals into action.

Starting off with a self-evaluation (How persistent on a scale between 10 and 1 are you?), I gave myself a 6-7 in persistence. One advice given in the self-coaching document that I know works very well for me is: know and recall the ‘why’ behind your action steps.   Read more...

One of my job's perks is the wisdom and creativity of those who care about the education of children. When I share with others that I am the Headmaster of a 7-12 preparatory school, their interest boils up to the surface and they offer comments, insights and ideas for educating the young in a complex world. Over dinner last week, my radiologist friend spoke with great energy about leadership and how desperately we need to teach it in our schools. My first reaction was to think how overly saturated society has become with that concept until he defined it as "character building." Leadership, he claimed, is helping others become comfortable with themselves. That idea struck me as a possible missing link in the way we teach and nurture our children. Too much of what we do is aimed at information accumulation and honing of skills be they useful or personal. To consider leadership as helping others get comfortable with themselves makes the task of educators a bit more challenging. Suddenly, we need to use intellect and soul. To develop true leaders, we need to look beyond a student's performance. And how interesting it is to me that this definition of leadership has nothing to do with power, authority or "getting to the top." Before one is ready to meet others in any capacity, he or she needs to be at home with the sum total of who they are. It all seems elementary and yet not at all characteristic of our more common, mercenary understanding of leadership.   Read more...

Jackie is quite a remarkable woman. Her life has been one of determination and accomplishments, always in service to others.

Jackie could read at the age of three, so started school at four. (No kindergarten when she was a gifted child.) She excelled in school thanks to her quick mind and her love of reading. She began university at age sixteen, but soon dropped out due to boredom. Life in the “real” world held more challenges, which she craved.   Read more...

I realized I was facing a classic dilemma today …

Should I strive to do great things? Think of things like founding a company that will have an IPO in 5 years, creating a solution for world poverty/world peace/global warming, doing everything to become as attractive as possible for the opposite sex (work out, learn to dance well and how to make intelligent jokes, get a penis enlargement, break my nose and pray that it will grow straight this time, learn how to look really confident, etc),   Read more...

“They’re not saying the iPhone will . . . bring world peace, but that it will do everything else,” Roger Entner, of market-research firm IAG. Apple’s new cell phone debuts June 29. The quote above is from this week’s American edition of Newsweek.

I’ll need to apologize to the technowizards right away—this entry is not at all about the iPhone which did indeed debut this Friday. What intrigues me more is Mr. Entner’s pithy quote which, to my ear, pits “world peace” against “everything else.” This is a big part of the problem of creating world peace. Mr. Entner is not alone in holding world peace away from himself; lots of us do it. I’d venture to say that world peace sometimes feels as far away as the demi-planet Pluto.   Read more...

How do we support communities and organizations to become enablers of ongoing Open Space (OS)?

This question was part of the invitation to Open Space facilitators, practitioners and sponsors who are interested in sharing thoughts, ideas and resources about Open Space Technology (www.openspaceworld.org).   Read more...