Weekend Warriors

It is only a few weeks in and it is still a small group but it is a loyal and dedicated group and that represents the birthing of a community within a community.  Often we seek to create change in the world without creating change where we stand. 

The meaning of local is being lost in a sea of the emerging political.  It seems we spend more time tuned into what the media is saying about Trump, then finding our places where our sayings are a part of a group dynamic.

The Saturday extension of our Monday college campus club is still emerging and deliberately not meant to be a direct replication of the Monday meeting.  The opportunity is to operate under a system of order (Monday meeting) entwined with a system of chaos (Saturday).  The corporate machine rolls out on Monday and the newer emergent landscape develops Saturday. 

Formula is not what Ralph C. Smedley created when he put together Toastmasters over 90 years ago, instead his three books show how he created structure and an orderly environment, but then enriched that structure with creativity and humanity.  In his time Toastmasters like other institutions was men only, but times have changed and the last 40 years has brought change.

The interesting thing for me is that the orderly and structured Monday meeting has attracted largely a male majority, but the majority of new members showing up on what is an emergent form of development are women.  Maybe that is symbolic of the original structure that Smedley created or more realistically, I am reading a bit too much into the present tea leaves.

Even though our club is restricted to students, alumni, staff and faculty of Sheridan College, the whole thing proves how fractal human beings are, even at the smallest group level, there is a lot of diversity to be discovered from interacting with new group members who have been attracted by the Saturday offering. 

For sure the Saturday program might not be to the liking of students who feel comfortable in command and control, and for them certainty is their beacon of hope and light.  Over the coming months, I have the opportunity to tighten up my own communication and utilize both emergent member voice and my adaptive self-organizing spirit to foster an offline learning lab.

The Next Generation portion of the new HMC banner is not simply the next generation of members at our club (both Monday and Saturday) but the next generation of human being, who is seeking an relationship with the digitally and economically empowered world as it is today.  For me it is time to tighten up my own communication and begin shifting away from streams of consciousness.  There is great clarity in the idea of less is more.

The clip used above from the movie Bruce Almighty is a scene picture that i absolutely relate to, because I am apt to write freely and at length.  I don't consider this as writing but as thinking  out virtually-loud.  There is both cathartic value in that but also contradiction.  I look forward over the coming months, especially the months of summer when college is closed, but we will still be open and the challenges of finding continuous learners with a shared spirit of personal development and growth.