A long time ago I was an introverted person and over the years that has completely changed. If you know me, you’ll know I love talking to others, being around people and engaging in meaningful social interaction. I still love my solitude but I love hanging anround in my local coffee shop and pub more. As a process designer, creating good meeting and learning spaces for introverts has long been a blind spot for me. Facilitators by definition bring people together. If we are extroverted, the processes we design can often contain an overwhelming amount of social interaction for …
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Working with a group of leaders this week all of whom are engaged in bringing their full selves to complex problems largely in the community, family and social services sector. Tonight we are co-initiating our work together and I led them through this exercise which was inspired by my friend and colleague Roq Garreau of Centrespoke Consulting:. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half so that you have a little book with four pages. On the front of the little book write your leadership challenge, something that you are called into doing, something that occupies much of …
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Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Tim Merry, Caitlin Frost and I are just returning from a gathering of experienced Art of Hosting practitioners from around the world. One of the threads in our gathering was and exploration of how the practice of hosting and harvest conversations in the world can be applied to working with groups in ever increasing scale and influence. This is the core inquiry of our new Beyond the Basics offering.. Being skillful facilitators of dialogue is obviously not enough to make shifts in systems, although dialogue is a powerful place for people in a system to start to …
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Good spot from Johnnie Moore on the power dynamics of safety in groups. Hint: it comes from attending to rank, not cohesiveness: Nancy Dixon writes about the conditions that favour good quality conversations in organisations. She uses the term psychological safety to describe the conditions that allow people to take risks in conversations. She distinguishes that safety from cohesiveness (for which it could be mistaken). The latter may feel safe but really sets everyone up for groupthink. The safety Nancy talks about allows challenging things to be said. The essential precondition for that kind of safety is largely to do …
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I’m coming back from Hahopa with simplicity ringing in my ears. I think the mantra is “put something in your hands.” At Hahopa we cooked together, wove cedar together, trained with swords together, played lahal and sang songs. We DID a lot. And in our doing we could reflect on our being. And from our being we can create a view of what else we might do. I spend a lot of time helping people plan things. But I am noticing that people want plans that promise a great future, but are afriad to start doing things. Heading …