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 people who know her well to lovingly listen to the core question with which she is wrestling. Over the course of the two and a half hours we were together, there was an amazing peeling away of layers that occurred as we asked questions and watched for what either brought our friend to life or weighed her down. By the end of the evening, she was excitedly looking at very real and enlivening opportunities in what she had previously perceived as being frivolous or “once I win the lottery” kinds of scenarios.
via Clarity Through Community « Interaction Institute for Social Change Blog.
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In this video piano soloist Maria Joao Pires is confronted with a nasty situation. As the conductor begins the piece of music they are to play, she discovers that it is not the piece she prepared. She has left her music at home Imagine that.
Undaunted, she engages in a short conversation with the conductor who encourages her to play it any way – she played it last season, she knows the piece well.
Pires digs ddep – you can see it in her face – and conjures up Mozart’s D minor concerto form the depths of her mastery.
There have been times when I am working with a group, when a similar feeling has overcome me. For whatever reason – the invitation was wrong, the situaion had changed, people were expecting something different – everything I had prepared was wrong for the moment. In such moments the only thing that saves you is an ability to improvise, to draw on your experience and to attend to the present needs of the group. This is what I strive to be able to do. This is why practice is so important.
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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 it! We could have studied ‘best practices for establishing an innovation culture’, or we could have thoroughly analysed successful innovations of the past for ‘good practices’ and for discovering cause-effect relationships between new ideas and successful outcomes. But we didn’t. And they were ok with it once I explained to them why innovation and ‘best practices’ or ‘analytics’ don’t go well together, using the Cynefin framework. In short, I argued that innovation – the activity they wanted to engage in – has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system: cause and effect are not linked in a linear way, many agents are interconnected and interacting, etc.
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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.
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A colleague emailed today and asked me this question: “which tool do you use when you have to analyse the content of your harvest with groups?”
My answer was that it depends on so much. Which means there is no one rule or tool but rather a principle. The principle would be this: “Participatory process, participatory harvest, simple process, simple harvest” The primary tool I use in complex decision making domains is diversity.
A story. Once, working with the harvest of a a series of 4 world cafes that had about 100 people in each, I ended up with 400 index cards, each containing a single insight which we later transcribed. It would be folly for me to work with a taxonomy of my own design, so I invited eight people to help me make sense of the work. We all read the 18 peages of raw data and noticed what spoke to us. From there we created a conversation that drew forth those insights and organized them into patterns. The final result was a report to the 400 people that had gathered that was rich and diverse and as complex as the group itself without being overly complicated to implement.
So it depends. If you use the Cynefin framework, which I have been studying and using a lot lately, you will see that different domains of action require different harvesting and sense making tools. So be careful, use what is appropriate and try to never have a place where one point of view dominates the meaning making if you are indeed operating the realms of complexity, chaos or disorder..