Globe & Mail: A Little More (Civil) Conversation
Word’s getting around. Canada’s paper of record, the Globe & Mail, ran a wonderful piece about Conversation Week today by Fiona Morrow, who attended a conversation this Tuesday at a cafe in Vancouver. Morrow writes:
The question chosen for discussion is “What kind of leadership does the world need now?” We pass around a smooth grey stone (the “talking piece”) to indicate whose turn it is to speak.
Kate Dugas, community manager for ChangeEverything.ca, struggles with the concept of leadership. “My parents were both journalists and leadership became a scary word - it was all about political backstabbing bastards.” Host Laura MacKay talks about her work in “backcasting” at the Natural Step Canada, a Canadian non-profit, a process by which you work backward from the desirable future to create a sustainable plan in which to achieve it. In those terms, she suggests, we are all leaders. Community development planner Lama Mugabo is a Rwandan who has lived in Canada for almost three decades. “I think of [Nelson] Mandela and how he talked about leading from behind,” he says.