On my most recent assignment, I was involved in a conflict with a supplier that ultimately broke down into bickering and squabbling. A skilled facilitator was brought in to help us resolve the issue. He started by having us talk about our concerns:

• "I'm concerned that without a better level of support we won't be able to innovate."
• "The amount of time we spend on these back and forth issues is huge and is wildly inefficient."
• "If they do what they're proposing, I can't maintain the security of the system."
• "I don't even feel comfortable with this conversation- why can't they just get along and work together?" 

A key principle from Permaculture is "the problem is the solution," meaning that when we really understand the problem, the solution becomes clear. It also means that solutions are patterns that are not separate from the problem, but that the problem can be seen as a conflict of forces within a particular context. Thus the problem doesn't disappear, but is resolved by the solution. The approach to conflict resolution applied in this case was one of the most creative and positive I've experienced.

A few years ago, a friend and I sat in a Starbucks in Lafayette, CA talking about quality, Deming, systems thinking and the other usual topics. He recommended I start reading Meg Wheatley. When I got back to Rochester, I picked up Finding Our Way, but couldn't get into it. More recently this book jumped off the shelf while I was looking at other leadership books.

I had a lightbulb moment when I read that organizations are made up of living human beings, and therefore work like living systems rather than machine parts. Organizational Development needs to take into account the complexities and understandings of sciences like biology and ecology. This brought together two great strands of my career: my work life in training, learning and systems development are now connected to my passionate hobby work with sustainable living systems and Permaculture (see blog.greenerminds.com for my work on these topics).

A number of participants at the recent STC Spectrum event here in Rochester were moving into XML-based content systems for the first time. I wrote to one of them recently on LinkedIn and described some of the common pitfalls I've run into in past projects. I thought it would be good to share this with a larger audience.

I finally managed to get Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs working on the site. I did some research and found one of the Joomla developers recommending OpenSEF, so I downloaded the component as a ZIP file and uploaded / installed using the Installers-->Components administrator UI. That was straightforward. I'd never been able to get the built-in SEF to work using the Global Configuration UI and discovered that my .htaccess file was empty. I poked around for awhile and finally found where to download the htacces.txt file (which I renamed to .htaccess to get it to function under Apache). This file needs to be in the root directory of my installation.

Someone asked me a fabulous question the other day. “Define change. Why is it so hard to change?” I responded, tongue-in-cheek, that “change is the only constant.” Upon reflection I think there needs to be some expansion of the question. As always, I am drawn back to Bateson’s learning model, which offers some clues.

I was doing some research on Link Management this morning and came across CMS Matrix , which lists no less than 761 CMS entries. And the list doesn’t include high end commercial offerings like IBM FileNet, Day Communique or Hummingbird RedDot. This means there’s a good chance that your neighbor Joe Nextdoor is cooking up a CMS in his garage for commercialization in the next few months.