In life, there are puzzles and mysteries — things that can be understood, analyzed, solved, and controlled … and those that intrinsically can only be appreciated, explored, shared, and lived. Living systems (like relationships, organizations, networks, and communities) are often more on the mystery end of the continuum.

As Ngarinyin elder David Mowaljarlai puts it: What’s important is beyond all understanding - that’s the first thing you must understand.

Cleveland, like its sister cities of similar size and challenges around the country, is said to have a self-esteem issue. However anyone attending the last couple Connections Series events might consider otherwise. There is a critical mass of people who are daily practitioners of appreciative inquiry relative to the business, arts, spiritual, social, and ethnic communities woven into our dynamic fabric. These people spend time seeking out and collaborating with others inside and outside this community who represent all the things Cleveland is “striving” to be — creative, entrepreneurial, family-focused, collaborative, and connected.

If anything, this group needs to keep growing, thank you it already is growing, and needs to outvolume those whose only experience of this vibrant dimension of the community is between ads on screens or pulp. Some of us are quite busy not having a self-esteem problem about the City; we are busy connecting and co-evolving with people we admire and appreciate and look forward to those who wake up to join us.

NPR this afternoon reported on the flurry of emails among “low level” NASA engineers about disaster scenarios a few days prior the the Columbia event. According to the report, the emails never surfaced beyond the mid manager level.

The story resonates with the notion that honest conversations are more likely and possible in the informal organization, and how when the head of the formal organization is disconnected from the heart of its informal organization, preventable crises are the rule of the day and unplannable innovations go unsupported and unfulfilled.

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

Wistawa Szymborska, Poems New And Collected

Open space technology continues to be a robust media and metaphor acknowledging the notion that all organizations are self-organizing systems. Whether we’re talking about the scale of personal relationships, teams, organizations, networks, or communities, after all the planning and directing and measuring we do, good things emerge from the freedom people have in their connectivity.

Organizations that understand this spend their time making sure people are liberated and connected enough, formally and — most importantly — informally. They experientially trust in the wisdom of life’s intrinsic nature to self-organize. They look, feel, and work quite differently than their counterpart organizations that haven’t a clue that living systems create organization from freedom in connectivity.

Whether our agendas focus on world peace or renewal in communities of living and work, dialogue is the prime conversational media large and subtle enough to achieve these agendas. Here is perhaps one of the best brief distinctions between dialogue and debate I’ve come across.

Chatting with my buddy Bill Lawrence after the Opera last night about honesty as a core quality of leadership. From his years of experience as hospital exec and mentor, he suggests that seeing the whole picture without the distortion of agendas or egos is paramount to leadership effectiveness. That honesty is at the heart of trustworthiness and passion.

I’m not sure that honesty– with self and others — is a skill that can be taught in MBA school. What is clear is that leaders who are honest find that being reality-centered is more effective than being agenda or ego centered.

Stopped in at a well attended gathering last night of people from the business, tech, and arts communities here. Great mix of suits, piercings, and hair that used to be a bit more spiky a few dot coms ago. The common denominators: palpable enthusiasm and energy and people making seamless introductions into accidental conversations. This is what life is about.

Talking with my friend Margo about expectations in relationships got me thinking about the nature of harmony in relationships. Harmony is the social equity on which communities and societies are built. Harmony is at the heart of collaboration on every scale of life.

My experience is that harmony is more possible when I approach relationships with curiosity more than with expectations. Curiosity, aside from being the universal antidote to suffering-inducing expectations, is the only space large enough for us to see the Infinite in each other.

Had the privilege of talking to octogenarian Ernest Withers last night after his presentation downtown. He’s perhaps the most celebrated Black photographer who documented the Civil Rights movement, the birth of Memphis music giants, and Black Baseball in America. There was a small exhibit of some of his work and it was breathtaking.

I asked him, reflecting on the 6 million prints he accumulated over the past 60 years, about his approach to the craft he still plies. He says his choice of shots were always based on three questions: 1) Is it true?, 2) Does it hurt?, and 3) What good can it do?