Over the years I’ve noticed a trend in consultative facilitations that goes something like this: a client calls wanting to consult with the community about something. Sometimes this takes the form of a leader wanting to engage employees. The request is usually to design an event where we can hear from people without them being dominated by more powerful voices. At some point the client says something like “we’d like to have our people there as observers or table hosts or mixed in as silent listeners.” Often this looks like elected officials not wanting to dominate citizen meetings, government or …
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double …
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute… Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.” One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide …