I am here in the Morton Arboretum in Chicago where we are at the end of the first day of an Art of Hosting with our friends in the Illinois community of practice. We have just been harvesting out of a World Cafe that was held on the question of “What time it is in the world?” We used a design I have been using with teams and communities that are needing to do deep sensing. We went for three rounds on the same question and had the hosts at each table go and deeper into the conversations that were …
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Back in Monticello, Minnesota on the banks of the Mississippi River where we are running the third residential learning session in collaborative leadership for a cohort of groups working to improve health in their communities. The river is high here, and the channel is full. Downstream, in the rest of the United States, the Mississippi is challenging communities and families who are in a fierce struggle to learn how to live with the river’s whims, with the river’s power and its overwhelming desire to renew the floodplains that stretch away from the main channel. Sitting by the river yesterday it …
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A lovely description of what happens when the magic of conversation flows. This past weekend I had the opportunity to be part of a Quaker-style “clearness committee” with a few twists thrown in. I have done a few similar sessions in the past, though it has been a while, and once again it proved to be a remarkable experience. The impetus for the session was a friend who, acknowledging that she is at a crossroads in her life and career, reached out for help with discernment. My wife, Emily, and I suggested convening a small group of …
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Nice post on using the Cynefin framework to design an ideas generation workshop: At a workshop I facilitated last week – the challenge was helping a team to generate new ideas for innovating their business – I used Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework to great effect. This was a smart crowd, who were willing to go along with our approach on helping them see new directions through a process of emergent discovery – but they wanted to understand why we were following this approach. For the many cerebral folks in this crowd, I explained the Cynefin framework – and they got …
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News from Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea about upcoming PeerSpirit Circle trainings, including a new advanced course. This may be some of the finest learning you will ever do with respect to learning about and working with groups: The PeerSpirit Circle Practicum gathers small groups of people at retreat centers for four-and-a-half days of intensive, experiential learning that blends council time with significant skill development. via PeerSpirit : Circle Training, Circle Process, Circle Practicum.