I love working with frameworks, of all kinds. Templates, canvases, questions, story spines…all the different kinds of ways of bringing a little form to confusion. As a person who specializes in complex facilitation, using a good framework is the wise application of constraints to a participatory process. It’s hard to get it right – sometimes I offer frameworks that are too tight and don’t allow for any creativity, and sometimes they are too open and don’t help us to focus. But when you are able to offer a group just the right degree of constraint balanced by just the right …
Facilitators are getting inundated with panicky requests to host meetings online. Some of us have the tech know-how to do this, and others don’t. Clients are feeling pressure and urgency to get teams up and running online and folks are hoping the important meeting that they have been working with for months can suddenly go online and get the same kinds of results. Here is some stuff to help you out. Slow down. Just because you are not hosting face to face does not mean you are not hosting. Make sure that you do the due diligence in designing and …
I put a call out on twitter yesterday, inviting topics for blog posts that could be helpful. I’m happy to take requests! Today my friend Trilby Smith, the brilliant Director of Evaluation at the Vancouver Foundation, replied with this: Sense making in real time. Like what are the practices we can use to make sense of what is happening to us as it happens? And how can those of us who work in orgs support our colleagues to do this work?— Trilby Smith (@TrilbySmith) March 17, 2020 The last few days have been full of information. It comes streaming through …
I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice. I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He …
One of my favourite photos of Harrison Owen, courtesy of Peggy Holman This morning I got to play the role of host/interviewer to my mentor Harrison Owen, the guy that accidentally invented Open Space Technology and unknowingly changed my life. It was when I participated in my first Open Space conference in 1995 that I knew I had found the core of my path in work. Truth be told, interviewing Harrison is the easiest job you could ever want. You basically do what you do when running an Open Space meeting: ask the question and get out of the way. …