Contact me Chris Corrigan
RR#1 E3
Bowen Island, BC
Canada V0N 1G0
+1 604 947 9236
chris@chriscorrigan.com
Harvest Moon on facebook
|
Beautiful.
“A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement – and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.”
- Alan Watts
via whiskey river.
A birth announcement that might interest you. I have been a small part of a project over the past couple of years (along with a few other Art of Hosting stalwarts) to help co-create a pattern language for group process. Over the years we have been working away at discerning, writing and publishing this pattern language. The idea is to capture a limited number of patterns that, if practiced in a group context, bring life to gatherings. After years of work, I think we really have something.
The project has now resulted in it’s first product: a deck of cards that are wickedly fun to play with. Last week, Caitlin Frost, Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf and I used these cards in working with a hosting team to design and hold the core of an Art of Hosting learning event. It was fantastic, and opened us up in so many ways to possibilities and potentials. As a co-creative design tool, these cards are wicked.
So attached is the birth announcement with information about where you can order the deck. I’ll always have them with me so next time we meet, ask me if you can play with them!
The Group Works card deck, the first product of the Group Pattern Language Project, is now out! You canorder copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about our upcoming mobile/phone app version of the deck on our website, groupworksdeck.org .
 Image by Susan Stewart
The deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The developers spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we have ever witnessed.
We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.
The deck consists of 91 full-colour cards (plus a few blanks to add your own patterns), a five-panel explanatory category/legend card, and an accompanying booklet explaining the purpose and history of the project and suggesting uses for the cards in group process work.
Each 3.5″ x 5.5″ card is laid out as follows:
These cards are yours, of course, to use in whatever ways make sense and work for you: in the workplace, in design and preparation of facilitated events, as a learning and teaching tool, for reflecting on how an event went, or just for fun. The website and booklet explain some of the ways they have been used by facilitators and students so far, to give you some ideas to get started with, and we invite users to share their experiences and stories with us.
Image by Ethan Honeywell
For more information on the deck, please visit our website: http://groupworksdeck.org
Just coming off an Art of Hosting with friends Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and Teresa Posakony. Something Tenneson said on our last day as we were hunkering down to do some action planning, has stayed with me. He said something like “it is easy to create actions that go off in a million different directions, but much more sensible to create actions that come from a common centre. There is something about holding that common centre together invites trust so that we can release responsibility to action conveners and known they are initiating works that comes from our common shared purpose.”
People often make the distinction between talk and action, largely in my experience as an objection to the amount of time it takes to be in conversation around complex topics. It seems that with complexity the conversation is endless and can go on forever. And almost by defintion, that is true. That can be a very frustrating experience if you consider the action – reflection process to be a linear one in which we spend time figuring out what we are going to do and then go and do it.
That approach works well in the complicated domain where everything can be known, or enough can be known that we can discern the wisest path forward. But the complex domain contains a number of features which makes that kind of linear thinking folly. First of all there is the prospect of emergence: things will happen as a result of interactions in the system which could never have been predicted and which may radically alter strategy and action. Secondly, actions undertaken in the complex domain cannot have their success or effectiveness guaranteed and therefore complex systems actually benefit from having many actions undertaken, with an ongoing developmental evaluation process as to the efficacy of these actions and the connection to the centre of action is constantly changing.
A lot of the work I do in hosting conversations is about both discerning what is our shared purpose as well as generating action that can come from that shared purpose. And, with the smart clients I have, we repeat that cycle over and over as they continue to operate in a changing and complex world. It creates strategy that represents a fine line between reacting and hedging your bets on some pretty good ideas. Conversation and time and a wicked question helps us to check into and explore a deeper core purpose that can lie at the centre of ideas for action. I have been lately calling this a generative core: an idea at the centre that is so powerful and compelling that it alone can inspire interesting and creative ideas. There is an energy to a generative core that is inviting, and that seems to make people WANT to be in conversation and relationship with it. There is a quality to the questions that lie in the generative core that open ourselves in exciting ways to new possibilities. Good conversation can help to illuminate this core purpose
Action planning from this place means coming up with good ideas and designing what David Snowden and others have called “safe-fail probes” which allows us to begin small. In the Berkana Institute we call this approach “start anywhere and follow it somewhere” indicating that this kind of action creates its own momentum over time and therefore needs to be shaped and carefully watched. Action that arises from agenerative core can be borne in conversation, and should be developmentally evaluated in conversation. Conversation becomes a key tool in designing, evaluating and making meaning of what is going on. And while actions and probes are being designed, tested and implemented, at the same time we have to pay attention to what we are learning about our core purpose, because that is always changing too.
This is not easy to understand, especially in a world where proceeding in an orderly direction from point A to point B is a desirable and seemingly sensible thing to do. But understanding the nature of complexity is important for action planning, because it can actually unleash the kinds of ideas that otherwise seem to never come to the surface. And it can make a community or organization powerfully resilient to shifts and changes that require retooling without stopping. It seems like a long investment of time to be in conversations that slow things down, but I invite slowing down to go fast, because the speed at which activities and ideas can be implemented on the other side of a well centred and well bounded discernment process can be breathtaking.
An incredible trip to Ireland and England with my dad, and yesterday I have returned home. We were in The Burren in Co. Clare for an Art of Hosting and then my dad and I drove to Armagh to see the house his great grandfather was born in. Along the way we met some distant cousins, found the graves of our ancestors and drove through the landscape of our history. Afterwards we went to Engalnd and stayed with friends in Hertfordshire where we lived 30 years ago. Met up with some old school mates, saw Spurs play a dreadful draw at White Hart Lane and caught up with old friends and colleagues.
Today one of our Art of Hosting participants sent this lovely John O’Donohue poem along. O’Donohue was a poet closely associated with The Burren and I read his work on friendship the whole time I was in Clare. This is a good way to come back home, with the memories of a great trip behind me.
Fluent
I would love to live
Like a river flows
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding
That is me at the moment, in the moment.
A plant by the Marriot near the Tampa airport.
A busy and packed trip to Baltimore and Tampa this week prevented much in the way of blogging, but there were several links of note that crossed my attention.
A review of things that caught my eye this week:
You know the ones. 3M, the makers of the greatest facilitation invention ever – the post it note – decided a number of years ago to do for the flipchart what they had done for the scrap of paper: add an adhesive to it.
Now instead of taping flipchart paper up on a wall, all you have to do is peel it from a pad and affix it to a wall. Neat and tidy.
And almost completely useless.
For anyone who does any amount of creative facilitation, the only thing better than a piece of white, clean, plain flipchart paper, is a roll of white clean, flipchart paper. With plain flipchart paper you can do the following:
- Take notes on an easel
- lay it on a table top and make mind maps
- write on the back of it
- tape it in landscape portrait on a wall to make mind maps
- cut it into pieces for Open Space topics
- fold it into huge paper airplanes
- lay it on top of cafe tables for participants to write notes and draw on
- fold it up and easily separate it later
- roll it up, and unroll it again
- tape together several pieces to make a mural.
It’s amazing. You can make it bigger or smaller, tape it any which way you like and write over every part of the surface. And the stuff is pretty cheap, coming in at 50 sheets for about $12 if you buy the pads individually, 24 cents a sheet.
Contrast this to the 3M sticky post-it flipchart. On the surface, these things seem to be the miracle we have all been waiting for. But unless you are using a single sheet and hanging it in a vertical position, and not needing to do anything with it later, these beasts are compromised by all kinds of design flaws:
- You can only hang them one way without using tape.
- You cannot write on the top, because there is a glossy strip there where the adhesive was stuck on the previous sheet.
- You can’t really use the back (at least people don’t).
- you can’t roll or fold them without a mess (and sometimes an impossible sticky tangle, with ripped sheets as a result).
- You can’t place them in a heap without them sticking together, making later sorting out a massive chore.
- You can’t cut them up without first removing the sticky top
- You can’t make them into murals (see glossy strip, above)
- Not useful for cafe table tops, as they stick and you can’t write something and then rotate the sheet.
And on top of that, for all that inconvenience, they will set you back a whopping $42 for only 30 sheets. More than a DOLLAR a sheet.
So, meeting organizers, I know you are trying to be professional and innovative by buying the latest and greatest from 3M (the post-it people after all!) but please take a pass on these pads. Plain white paper wins every single time.
This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. ”We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:
So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
|
Upcoming workshops (click for invitations)
|
