I’m putting myself out there a bit by posting this personal journal entry. Feedback encouraged.

I’m sitting in line at the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal waiting to go to Bowen Island. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own blind spots. What chronic “mistakes” am I making? How best can I learn these through self inquiry and feedback from others?

One delicate balance that seems relevant is that between asking for help and being confident in ones own leadership. When pursuing major challenges, we need to get people on board as allies, mentors, supporters, partners, customers, etc. So we want to place ourselves in a position appropriately matched to our unique qualities, skills, resources, etc.

It can be hard to see what kind of people you need to compliment and round out your own abilities and knowledge. Once you are clear, you then need to find them and court and inspire them to come into relationship. And then you have to figure out how to work well together!

So it seems that a linear, step-after-step, intentional process of assembling a team may not be a realistic approach. Or perhaps it is significant enough to justify a specialization; like a “relationship broker” or “collaboration match-maker”. I suppose this is what Dan Robles is talking about with the knowledge inventory, but I sense that the most valuable “knowledge” is really wisdom, and may defy categorization.

Upon reflection, I realize that I’m approaching this from the perspective of someone who has an idea, vision, or plan and is seeking to almost persuade others to buy into this vision.

I’ve been relatively conscious not to take too much of a driving leadership role, but in a culture that idolizes and rewards such leadership, it can be difficult to inspire collaborative leadership. Many people expect a leader to drive a project forward, and do the bulk of the heavy lifting. So how does one frame a vision as ostensibly incomplete and thus invite the contributions, extensions and adaptations of others? How can this also be done in such away that respects ones own contributions? These are the burning questions that have attracted me to learn the Art of Hosting.

Using the Hub project as an example, I realize that I probably haven’t been asking the right people for help. I think this is because I’m unsure of what kind of help to ask for first; do we need help clarifying the concept so a clear development path becomes obvious? Or do we need help gathering resources to support an opaque, emergent development path that can uncover the right concept as part of the process? Or do we need someone to just tell us to kill it? Or do we need someone to merge the idea with something else entirely making a unique, more resilient and larger scale project? Or do we just need someone to tell us that we have everything we need and smile and gently push us off the edge?