A special dialogue with leadership educator, facilitator and Juno-nominated pianist Michael Jones, inspired by his forthcoming book:
June’s Unify Toronto Dialogue hosted leadership educator, facilitator and Juno-nominated pianist Michael Jones, inspired by his forthcoming book: The Soul of Place: Reimagining Leadership through Arts, Nature, and Community. The book is expected shortly, and will be available in August’s Design with Dialogue as Michael returns to OCADU with a second session for the book launch proper. In the meantime, his brief brief article titled Recovering the Soul of Place: Reflections on Place-Based Leadership is available here.
Michael’s approach to placemaking is radically different than the current trend in urban planning and city-building. His book and view is a platform for community leadership grounded in the essential humanity of understanding place, nature, and creativity.
We are shifting from the industrial age and the age of information and technology to the age of biology. We are now asking, “how do we create spaces for life?” “How do we align our thinking with how nature thinks?” He asks us to create places as living systems inspired by biology and interconnection.
We explored the four patterns in Michael’s book that underlie the soul of place
Michael’s approach to placemaking is radically different than the current trend in urban planning and city-building. His book and view is a platform for community leadership grounded in the essential humanity of understanding place, nature, and creativity.
We are shifting from the industrial age and the age of information and technology to the age of biology. We are now asking, “how do we create spaces for life?” “How do we align our thinking with how nature thinks?” He asks us to create places as living systems inspired by biology and interconnection.
We explored the four patterns in Michael’s book that underlie the soul of place
- Homecoming – Where is home and how do we find our way there?
- Belonging – How can the connective tissue of life-giving relationships align us with the essence of nature and how nature works, connects, and thinks?
- Regenerativity - What does it mean to make the invisible visible, to contribute to the conscious evolution of life?
- Carnival - How can we gather together on the square or in the commons, bringing together diverse energies, democratic spirit and upturning the old for the new?
"By looking at place not only as something to return to but also something to grow out from –orienting us to the future and not only the past; and by realizing that a place is not an object or a thing, but a power and a presence, we can partner with place in a way that is itself deeply transformative, opening our hearts to the experience of beauty, aliveness and possibility."
- Michael Jones, "Recovering the Soul of Place"
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About special guest Michael Jones:
Michael is a leadership educator, dialogue facilitator, writer and Juno-nominated pianist/composer. His most recent book, The Soul of Place, is the third in a series on Re-imagining Leadership. Others in the series includeArtful Leadership and the award-winning Creating an Imaginative Life. Michael has also been a thought leader with the MIT Dialogue Project and Dialogos and other prominent leading edge universities and centres. He has co-chaired several place-based initiatives and spoken on the leader's emerging role as placemaker in a variety of forums including The Authentic Leadership in Action Conferences (ALIA), The Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and many others. As a pianist/composer Michael has composed and recorded fifteen CD's of his original piano compositions and performed as a solo pianist across North America as well as Korea and Japan. He has been integrating his music in his leadership and dialogue work for over twenty years. See www.pianoscapes.com to learn more about Michael and his work.
| June 30, 2014 6:30-9:00 p.m. OCAD University Avenue. 100 McCaul Street (Dundas & University), Lambert Lounge |
Watch Michael's TEDx Talk on "Who will play your music? The art of leading imaginatively":
"Who am I really? When do I feel most present and alive? What am I uniquely called to do? Where is home? What is my relationship to beauty? How do I let go? What is my inspiration? How can I best serve the common good?
"In a time of uncertainty and sudden change, leaders will need new questions, ones that help to develop qualities of being that are more organic, creative and whole. It signals a time when leaders will need to develop a capacity for experiencing and understanding a new and more subtle intelligence, a way of knowing that is not a separate mental function, but rather the source of an imaginative response to our world. As a kind of sense organ, this intelligence reaches out and makes tentative contact with wholeness, that is, things of an order larger than we can see directly, making visible that which is hidden, so as to begin to draw into awareness that which cannot yet be heard or seen."
- From the book description of Michael Jones' earlier book, "Artful Leadership."
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