After not posting here for a long time, I’m getting busy in a new more public way. Here is my invitation:

Next Steps for Our Masterclass!

After 18 months of exploration in what we have called a masterclass we are refining what we will be doing. For the balance of 2023 Chauncey, Laurie, Susie, Peter, and the gang are shifting the game.

Our first meeting will be NEXT Wednesday, February 1st, from 1-2:30pm Pacific Time. Follow the instructions below to register. A zoom link will be available after you register.

We are going to call this adventure,

“The Salon (Conversations with Chauncey Bell and Friends).” 

And, there will be no fee for participation. What we will put into preparing and leading regular monthly meetings will be our gift to the community. We will “make our living” from consulting relationships with organizations and individuals, some of whom may emerge from our gatherings. 

Register to participate in The Salon at https://www.skool.com/altwork

As you register, you may notice other people in our “altWork” group who are currently strangers to you. We will be convening a larger community in collaboration with Chauncey’s long-time partner Saqib Rasool, and he and others will be bringing participants to our conversations.

The Heart of the Matter

For the last half year we have been asking the question, What should you and I be doing together for the sake of the health and well-being of ourselves and those with whom we share the planet for the future that is arriving? We have found this to be a bloody good question. 

It looks to us that the world has entered a new, tumultuous era which, over time, will replace the industrial era that we were all born into and have grown up in. The background narratives of the industrial era (which help us make sense of our world) are collapsing, some quickly and obviously, and others more slowly and subtly. As human beings who care about each other and our worlds, we are confronting many massive changes bringing themselves to our attention. 

In this moment, we ask what are the most critical skills for us to enrich and develop? Our answer is: skills and sensibilities that support us in developing trusting relationships with each other. We need to get a lot better at having conversations and building relationships. Opening up the origin of the word: “con” = together; “versation” = we emerge changed from our encounters with each other. In the words of the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, our challenge is to get much better at “talking to strangers.” As the rate of change in the world accelerates, we will not have the time or leisure to wait for our old ways of getting to know each other as we build the relationships in which we construct our worlds. 

Our conversations in The Salon will be about this. We will bring wonderful guests to our meetings, and learn together how to set up the space of conversations so that we all may learn and enrich our relationships to these ends. 

Here is our plan for The Salon:

1. We will meet on zoom from 1-2:30pm Pacific Time on the first Wednesday of every month – including NEXT Wednesday the 1st of February, 2023. 
2. This timing will make it possible for friends in Australia, New Zealand, and even China to join us, as well as friends in Europe.
3. Each meeting will be 1 hour and 15 minutes of designed conversation, followed by 15 minutes of our traditional “office hours.” 

Finally, who will be the “us” as we gather to explore topics that are important to us? 

One of our most important ambitions as we enter 2023 is to expand the community in which we have been talking. Eliminating the “price of participation” is specifically to help make our conversation available to more people.

So, please help us with this ambition. Invite those friends with whom you share concerns and those who you find yourself not always agreeing with. Invite your adult children, along with young relatives and young friends to join us in these conversations. Let us see if we can extend the range of ages with whom we are talking. Millennials (age 25-38), Boomers (age 55-73), and Gen X (age 39-54) now make up the largest proportions of the U.S. population.

Again, register to participate in The Salon at: http://www.skool.com/altwork

1. Click on the link above, or enter “skool.com/altwork” in a browser window.
2. You will be prompted to upload a picture, provide  a brief bio about who you are, and respond to a few short signup questions. 
3. Once you register, Saqib’s team will confirm your membership within 24 hours.
4. On our altWork site notice (1) the picture of you in the top right of the screen. Click there to adjust your profile. (2) Click on “Members” at the top and you will find brief profiles for all the members. (3) Click on “Community;” we invite you  to write a brief introduction of yourself. (4) Click on “Calendar” and you will find on the first Wednesday of every month: The Salon at 1pm Pacific Time along with a Zoom Link to join us in the monthly meeting and an invitation to put that into your calendars. 

The world is quivering, and we in it.  

What kind of history shall we make? What grand mischief? 

In this moment of scintillating uncertainty, we are called more than ever to build new ways of being and working together. Such a moment calls for a companion — a pocket guide — as we embrace the challenges of adjusting and transforming our worlds. 

Dancing in the World is a pocket guide for you. This first of twelve volumes of my essays on listening and design is a treatise, a chronicle of adventure, and an invitation to join the bold work of designing new practices. The time is now. 

To join the adventure, opt-in here: http://harvester.academy

I will keep you informed about our progress in delivering this first volume of essays! We expect publication by early November!

Thank you for paying attention.

I recently read an article by Scott Burns which I highly recommend. I classify it as a thorough yet succinct exploration of the human experience especially as we are experiencing it today. Burns delves into the dichotomy of risks we embrace and those we evade. I hope you all enjoy the read.

Love

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/personal-finance/2020/06/20/scott-burns-how-do-we-assess-risk-when-we-cant-see-it/

Dear ones,

Thank you to all who have had me in your prayers and thoughts this past week or so since I had an “anterior total hip replacement”. The team led by my surgeon and anesthesiologist did their work masterfully. I was the third hip replacement by this team on 18 May, the first day after the corona virus shutdown was lifted for elective surgeries here in Seattle.
In a marvel of modern allopathic medicine and medical technology, they mounted me on a human-sized “spit” that allowed them to manipulate the leg and thigh bone as they cut off the old damaged top, added and aligned new titanium, glass, and polyurethane components, and then stitched me back together. The whole procedure took about an hour from lights out to when I began chattering and asking questions in the theatre after they were done. No anaesthesia. A spinal block, and none of the druggy after-effects. Here is a picture of the spit on which they “roasted” me:

Missing from the picture are the operating theatre, perhaps 50 feet in diameter, the x-ray machinery integrated with the spit that allowed them to measure and make sure that old and new components were aligned properly and of the right dimensions, and the half-dozen or so physicians, nurses, and medical assistants who made the whole thing work. After the surgery they took me into recovery where over the next several hours my torso, chest-down, regained the capacity to communicate with my brain that had been interrupted by the spinal block. Later that day I took my first walk with the new hip. I spent the night in the hospital, was returned home the following morning and helped up 14 stairs to the second floor of our home. Since then I have been down and up those stairs pretty much every day, and Shirah has been attending to my care day by day.

By far the most interesting thing to me about what is happening right now in my life is the ebb and flow of moods through me. Getting ready for the surgery I thought that the “up” (very positive, all-but-giddy) mood I felt as the date approached might have been fueled by three things. First, I have been very proud of the way that Shirah and I have been spending time together as partners of nearly 40 years, enjoying each others’ company for the most part, listening and taking care of each others’ concerns, and generally navigating the corona virus time with kindness, care, and positive moods. Second, I guessed that my body was anticipating the coming era in which once again I would be able to take long leisurely walks, missing from my life for many years now. Third, I am terribly excited about the upcoming publication of some of the essays I have written over the last 40+ years, in which a team of colleagues and friends are helping me. (Lastly, of course, the fact that I knew that any encounter with a hospital is life-threatening, and so may invite a kind of lunatic emotion at encountering the possibility of dying.)

I woke from the surgery in a mood for which I don’t have adequate characterizing words or phrases. To speak of it with an analogy, think of your first experience as a parent with a new human being coming into the world. Like the cornucopia — the horn of plenty — the mood announced the opening of a whole new experience of life. A transformative mood, albeit that word today has for too long strained to carry more weight than it ought to be responsible for. The mood was not accompanied by sublime music or beautiful vistas, although I was experiencing waking dreams that were vivid. Rather, I felt more like a teenager, full of life and good questions, surrounded by adults pleased to be in my presence and happy to talk to me. I told them that in my work I am concerned with making sense of the way teams of people doing tight coordination with each other speak and listen to each other. In that background, I was fascinated by their work with each other.

The path of healing from the vast indignities of the replacement of the biological hip structures is not simple, free of pain, or straightforward. The night before last I think I began withdrawal from the opioids I was taking to address the pain, and the withdrawal (if it was that) produced a mood of intense panic, claustrophobia, terror, anything but a blessed mood. That night I got only two hours’ sleep, none of it deep or restful, and that all by itself invited a further kind of panic, because nothing is more critical for my health at this moment is my sleep. I have switched over completely from opioids to acetaminophen and pray that it will be enough to stave off the pain.

Meanwhile, I am guessing that this surgery will turn out to have been a transitional moment in my life, alongside the events of my marriages, births of my children, meeting the critical mentors of my life, my stroke of a year ago, and so forth. My intuition is that it may mark a transition from a life in which I have been a mostly private person, working intensely and intimately with smallish highly technical teams taking on large challenges, to a more public phase of my life. I don’t have more than that at this moment, except to notice that this is a moment in which so many things in life are changing rapidly as a consequence of our collective incompetence for navigating in and adjusting our behaviors for coordinating in the world in which the tiny corona virus beastie is busy hunting us. 
I send to each of you my love and appreciation, my affection for you and my gratitude for having you in this world with me.

Chauncey

I got an email from Joe today: “I’m personally asking you, Chauncey:”

He said to me, “It could not be more clear that Donald Trump is unfit to be our president. Right now, our country is in the midst of a public health emergency that has profoundly impacted how we live our lives today and what things will look like in the future. This crisis has illuminated how important the next 201 days are for our country. Our health, our safety, and our economy are on the line, and this president simply isn’t up to the task….”

…blah, blah, blah, plus a request for money. So I replied:

Bloomberg March 20, 2020: US Strategic Stockpile Deliveries Delayed; Face Masks Run Short, Showing Snags in U.S. Medical Stockpile

N95 masks are critically important for doctors, nurses, and medical professionals in the line of fire all over the world with the coronavirus pandemic. Under the best of circumstances, we will not have anywhere near enough of them. A vast number of N95 masks that could be decontaminated are effectively hiding in plain sight.

Around the middle of March, my colleague Dana Conklin noticed something strange. She discovered that three respected hospitals in the US had developed protocols for decontamination of N95 masks. She then discovered that the protocols were not widely disseminated. She contacted friends at six major hospitals across the country. None of the six had any idea that the masks could be decontaminated. Five of the six were already out of or rationing N95 masks.

Realizing that the people who should be wearing N95 masks did not have them available, Dana forwarded links for the protocols developed by three hospitals for N95 decontamination to several hundred hospitals in the US and put up a website (click here for Dana’s website) that included links to the protocols. (Dana is a finance professional; this mask situation is not her line of work. She noticed the word was not getting out about decontaminating masks. She watched the deaths of doctors and nurses in Italy and committed that she would not simply stand by and watch it happen here.)

On March 30, a consortium of 60 academics and researchers put up a website that promised to research the same three methods and to publish scientifically valid reports about the efficacy of the methods that had been developed. (N95decon.org) So far these researchers and academics have avoided speaking directly on their website about the actual protocols that hospitals have been using, citing their concerns for releasing scientifically imperfect information or for appearing to endorse one protocol over another. On their website they cite pros and cons of the three protocols, important issues with the protocols, and have referenced their existence, but have not actually published the protocols as used by the hospitals using them. The house is on fire. While there are risks that the protocols could be imperfect (and certainly they will be found to be so), they offer far better protection than no masks at all, and the N95 masks have proven to be critical PPE for this virus. Dana got the protocols from the hospitals that are using them and put them on her website, but she does not have nearly as large an audience as should be hearing about these protocols.

Using these decontamination protocols would effectively increase the number of N95 masks. The hospitals using them estimate that they have 10-20 times more usable masks than without the protocols. Further, knowing that there are ways to decontaminate masks means, ‘don’t throw out your old masks; hold them for decontamination.’

 This is critically important to medical professionals all over the world. Can you help by forwarding this and Dana’s website with (click here for Dana’s website) the protocols to friends and colleagues who are medical professionals?

After six years of absence, I’m coming back to blogging. I’ll explain my absence in more detail later. To hit a few high points, my wife was desperately ill and is recovering well, I was blinded by a surgical accident and a brilliant retinal surgeon brought my eyesight back, and this last year I had a neurological incident from which I am recovering. And, after a year of preparing a new venture, I found that I had to cancel it just a month ago.

I invite you to follow me as I return to a new version of my traditional work as a provocateur, designer, and collaborator with teams as they build new practices in enterprises. I’m starting by offering a series of workshops, starting in Seattle on the 13th and 14th of November.

Go to Harvester Academy to see more about the workshops and the new direction.

I will be gathering executives, managers, consultants, and coaches interested in learning more about designing and building new practices in established enterprises. In the workshops I’ll lay out the practices involved, show how they work, and invite the participants to work with me and others in my network to build new capabilities in their own and client enterprises.

If it makes sense to you, please register in the workshop. If you have questions or comments, the website is a good place to talk to me about that. I will appreciate your comments, and I ask that you pass this announcement on to people in your own network who you think would or should be interested in what I am offering.

As those of you who have worked with me in the past know, the path to building new worlds starts with diagnoses of current messes, which lead to projects to create new practices, that in turn shift the way that people think, talk, listen, act, and work together.

I’ll be limiting enrollment in the first workshop to 20 people. That probably means that the Seattle workshop will fill pretty quickly.

If you are reading this in other parts of the world, I will be defining dates for workshops in the UK, Latin America, Australia, and Canada in the near future. I will lead the initial workshops myself, but will be convening them in collaboration with other people who are in the business of guiding and preparing many different kinds of enterprises as they develop new practices. You can let me know now if you are interested in attending (or helping convene) another workshop. Some people from other parts of the world will be coming to Seattle to get started as soon as possible.

I am not aiming to build a workshop-delivery business. Rather I am looking to start working in a more networked fashion than I have in the past. I will be collaborating with people who are managing projects with their own clients in their locales, supported by me and my team, and by others in my network.

These workshops will be the point of entry to a rich international networked program of learning, collaboration, and the execution of projects and programs for bringing value in existing businesses and organizations.

I am deeply interested in what you have to say about what you see here, and what you think about what I am preparing to do.

All my best to you,

Chauncey

 

I’ve been bad. Busy with work with clients and friends on projects I like, I have not paid attention to my blog. But there is more. When I started blogging, and subtitled my blog “Exploring social, commercial, and technological innovation,” I promised myself to stay away from political commentary.

To put the point baldly, I was (and remain) deeply dissatisfied with the political discourse in this country, and in the West. Good people vilifying each other in whining, complaining voices, like contending junkyard dogs do not give us room to learn or grow. (I don’t have enough experience with the discourse in the East to have an opinion there, but I suspect I wouldn’t like it there either.) I thought that anything I might say would be wood on the fire, merely adding to an already bad situation.

Recently, however, I concluded that if I begin to comment on the difficult situation of the country and what might be done about it, and explore the question of how to prepare our children to act in and take responsibility for the world that we are leaving them, then I might be able say some things that would be acceptable to me.

So this is the first next posting on my blog, headed in much the same direction as before, but with some  new opportunities, and explorations.

Sometime in the next weeks I will have an important announcement for those who have followed the work that I and my colleagues of many years have done in designing new practices, .

So stay tuned.

At my wife Shirah’s request I wrote a review yesterday of John L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, an important book that Fernando Flores introduced me to many years ago. Take a look and tell me what you think.

My greetings and best wishes to you,

Chauncey 

Russell Bishop and I have followed each others’ work for decades, but only recently did Ron Kaufman introduce us. I recommend to your attention his new book, Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work. His website is here, and his bio at the Huffington Post is here.

I first encountered the word “work” in the way that Russell addresses and plays with it in his book when my father gave it as his excuse for not being available to play with me when I was a child. He said, “I’m sorry, son, but I have to work.”

That caught my attention. What was this mysterious thing that was taking my father away from me? “Work” has been interesting to me ever since, at first as an enemy of my relationship with my father, and later as a central issue in all of our lives.

In the middle of this era of vilifying theory and worshiping practice*, it is inevitable that this book must be positioned as a book about practice and emphatically not about theory, but really I think that positioning hides some of the most important things that the book is about.

Russell is a wise and experienced man who has started several companies that have made huge contributions to very large numbers of people. He is also an editor and regular blogger at the widely-read Huffington Post. He knows well the substance of the old and oft-quoted adage, ‘…to practice without theory is to sail an uncharted sea; to work with theory without practice is not to set sail at all.’

In his book, to make it a happy one for a modern reader, Russell puts the practice in the foreground and the theory in the background and the spaces between the words.

A better way of talking about this book, at least for me, might go something like the following.

In Workarounds that Work, Russell models – in his way of speaking, in the way he reveals himself, in the examples he brings, and in his recommendations – a way of being that revels in the challenge and joy of work, and does not flinch nor whine about the myriad roadblocks that inevitably confront anyone trying to do anything serious in life. He is a joyful warrior in the middle of the mess of modern working life. Russell shows clearly the power of humility, gratitude, an indomitable spirit, a commitment to find alternatives and not remain stuck in ruts, and the soft underbellies of the enemies we face in everyday working life.

I often say that the fifth of my story about five great generators of waste in our modern working world – the interpretation that we are doomed to a kind of indentured servitude called ‘work’ – is the nastiest and most destructive. ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ – the announcement that we toil away five days of every week just waiting for a brief respite of freedom and meaning each weekend – is our declaration that we consider 5/7ths of our lives wasted. A tragedy.

Russell’s book is an antidote to work as toil, and full of good things.

*(My aside: Vilifying bad theory is may sometimes be worthwhile, and can be satisfying, and the fields of management and leadership are particularly full of bad theory.)

 

Testimony from a far-sighted, deeply insightful cool head:

Lawrence Lessig: Rhode Island’s David Segal’s Call for a Constitutional Convention.

Proud father sharing beautiful work by my son Stefan, photos by his friend and collaborator Ethan Allen.

I think it is spectacular work.

There are four dresses shown. Look at them all.

My Son Stefan’s Designs: Anime Venus – Butterfly Gown.

My friend Fran Quittel has the background, the discipline, and the diligence to do the homework about what it will take to be responsible for your money in the world that is coming to us. By “be responsible” I am talking about the basics – finding out about the rules of the road at your local financial institution. What can you count on your bank (or credit card issuer, or insurance company, or …) to tell you, and what do you need to plan to dig to find out. The situation is getting hairier and hairier.

What do you need to do to exercise minimal, prudent vigilance over your money? Rest assured that you cannot trust today’s financial institutions, as a general rule, to exercise good judgment in your behalf, to act on intentions that are built around your concerns, or, to put it succinctly, to treat you as a customer. The bad joke of the recent election – capitalism for the masses, socialism for the financial elites – describes our current situation, not one that is in our past.

Read Fran’s essay in a recent issue of the California Progress Report, here.

It is SNOWING in Seattle this Friday evening, as we are headed out to walk to the home of some friends for dinner. April 18th. Goodness.