This is what happens when you travel the world with a question: you find teachings in all kinds of unexpected places. There’s a spoiler in here, if you haven’t seen the movie.
Last night my family all enjoyed a night in Vancouver, dinner and a movie. We went to see Bridge to Terabithia, which is a pretty good film about two pre-teen outcasts, Jess and Leslie, who find meaning in each other’s imagination. Together they ease each other into opening minds and hearts to create a fantasy world, and it’s neve clear whether or not the world is becoming real as the movie unfolds. Towards the end of the film Leslie dies – a strange enough occurrance in a children’s movie – and Jess is left alone with the fantasy world he created with his friend.
It’s a strong film with many themes, but as I’ve been carrying around the questions of what it means to harvest in the world, I found it interesting that the movie resonated for me on that level.
One way to think about harvesting is to see it as putting imaginations to use to create meaning in one world so that another world may come into being. In social change efforts, harvesting is most powerful not when it simply documents the shift from one state to another, but when the harvest itself becomes the catalyst for the coming into being of the new world.
In Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie is a storyteller whose words can invoke physical realities. Jess is a talented visual artist who draws the worlds he sees. Together they create their new world, tentatively at first, but later with so much energy that they inhabit it with wild abandon. In the end, after Leslie dies, Jess shares this world with his little sister, who is introduced to the world by crossing a bridge that Jess has built over the creek in which Leslie has died. When they reach the other side, Jess’s sister utters “Terabithia!” and her ability to see and live in the world begins immediately. Her own profound imaginary engagement with Terabithia is a testament to the power of what Jess and Leslie harvested from their creation and experience of the world. It ‘s fascinating to look at the film from this angle, at how the power of Leslie’s imagination, and Jess’s harvest of it literally creates a bridge for Jess’s sister to cross so that she may be fully invited into Terabithia.
I’m quite interested how a multimedia, multimodal harvest of meaning from an experience can facilitate and sustain new levels of consciousness and awareness. In this film, the continuation of the world requires a harvest that envelopes Jess’s sister so that she immediately opens to the power of her own imagination. It’s what every good meeting should be about.
A nice post at Anecdote outling some simple rules for knowledge management which could make for a nice way to think about organizing harvesting efforts in large scale processes:
A simple tip last night from the actKM discussion list contributed by Ivan Webb who provides a ‘strategic job description’”
”that will change the culture of most organisations and leads naturally to knowledge management being embedded in the organisation’s activity. It is everyone’s job to:
- know what is happening
- work with others to improve what is happening
- make it easier for the next person to do their work well
I like the simplicity of these statements and the guidance for behaviour they provide. In some situations they might contribute to improved knowledge sharing behavours. They are also interesting because we know that little things can make a big difference.
I can use this right away.
Harvest is alive. A new voice to me, that of Stuart Scott, talks about the limitations of the metaphor and what harvesting could really be: read Bringing In the Sheaves.
Victoria BC
I love a space with a brick wall in a space. Tonight at Ferris’ Oyster Bar with a couple of friends for dinner, I kept noticing how that wall lended its presence to the space, as I enjoyed a beautiful and tasty rice bowl of vegetarian potstickers and deep friend tofu. I was noticing all day how details do more than they seem capacble of doing. The stillness permeating the inner harbour as the water stayed flat for a second day in a row, the signs on the busses that say “Sorry…I’m out of service.” Something about that “Sorry…I’m” part that makes the whole downtown core a little more friendly as the post-rush hour busses deadhead back to the bus garage.
We were locked deeply in design conversations today, and we went through six design tools from the Art of Hosting, all of which I taught and we discussed as I harvested them all on this diagram.
The tools that are elucidated here include the following:
Attention to the details of design led us into an incredibly deep conversation about the work we were doing, working at a whole different level. The quality of attention flowing from the presence lingering from good design…
[tags]ferris’ oyster bar, victoria, design[/tags]
Picture a field in which someone has planted wheat.
We imagine the harvest from that field to look lkike a farmer using equipment to cut down the wheat, thresh it, and seperate the seeds from the stalks.
Now imagine a geologist a biologist and a painter harvesting from the same field. The geologist picks through the rocks and soil gathering data about the land itself. The biologist might collect insects and worms, bits of plants and organic matter. The painter sees the patterns in the landscape and chooses a pallete and a perspective for work of art.
They all harvest differently from the field, and the results of their work go to different places and are put to different uses. But they all have a few things in common; they have a purpose for being in the field and a set of questions about that purpose, they have a pre-determined place to use the results of the harvest, and they have specific tools to use in doing their work.
What’s useful to note is that, despite the field being the same, the tools and results are specific to the purpose and the inquiry.
It is like this when we meet. There is much we can do, but a well thought through inquiry helps us to sift all that we might learn in the meeting to that which serves our purpose. When we can design questions that open up our curiosity, think through how we might use the results of our work and use the tools appropriate to the task, we can go deeper into our tasks and acheive emergent, innovative and better quality results.
So just try this for the next meeting you are a part of. Give some time before hand to create a little inquiry: “What am I curious about in this meeting?” Think in advance how the results of that inquiry will help you work better, and decide on at least one way in which you will use what you have learned. See if that doesn’t create just a little more engagement and createa little more momentum for the results.
Photo by Hector