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.
Responding to an inquiry about the copyright of materials on my site, I wrote back: Everything original on my website is for free, non-commerical use with attribution. Of course there are things I link to that have different copyright schemes, but in general I only link to resources that are also freely shared. You should of course acknowledge those sources distinctly (sometimes people say “I found this on Chris Corrigan’s website” but what they really found was a link to another source. That’s not fair to the original authors). Formally, it’s a Creative Commons, non-commerical, attribution license. Practically, it means …
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 …
I am preparing some questions tonight for an exercise I am running, and I rediscovered this elegant and simple process for constructing questions that elicit stories, courtesy of the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. Build the question. People remember events when they can picture an image reminding them of a specific situation. Combine this idea with the suggestion of adding emotion and you have the two building blocks to create good questions. First start with an image-building phrase: “Think about…” “Imagine…” “If…” “Consider…” For example, ”Think about a time when you were given advice by your manager.” Add an additional …
Researchers working on communication with dolphins came up with this list of 20 questions to ask our ceteacean cousins should we every be able to conduct a conversation with them: What name does your species call itself? What is the social structure of your pod? Of your general species? What species of Cetaceans are able to communicate with each other? Why do entire pods strand themselves? Are there environmental changes are that concerning to cetaceans? What are the most important things that we can do to help you? Do you have some way of preserving your knowledge, such as an …