Doug has a nice post today: Micro conversations can be a counterpart to micro credit: what if we could encourage people to converse in little groups, to take charge of their lives, jointly, in little snatches, and spread these micro conversations to thousands and thousands? Here is where the pyramids and circles work, because there is an infinite set of permutations and each one is creative (not additive, not multiplicative, not geometric). It is not zero sum, where one gathers at the expense of another: all benefit. Not just individually but in our interwoven whole. Just host a little conversation, …
An a-ha on harvesting In my inquiries about harvesting, I have been searching for ways to make harvest the simplest possible thing. In the Art of Hosting community we often look for what we lovingly call “hobbit tools” – the core essential tools that you can bring with you anywhere. A few of us are in the process of developing hobbit tools around harvest. A few days ago in a conversation with a client, I stumbled upon one of these hobbit tools of harvesting: have somewhere to take the harvest. The conversation we were talking about was about …
More on action systems, but this time from a poet, Anais Nin: And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. That describes shift perfectly…when the status quo becomes more painful than the move. [tags]anais nin, transformation[/tags] Photo by Ernie*
In the last couple of weeks I have been in deep and important conversations about the work of facilitating change in the world. I am just back from another Art of Hosting gathering, this time in Boulder, Colorado and, among the many many things that were on my mind there, the subject of talk and action came up. This was especially a good time to have this conversation as this particular Art of Hosting brought together many deep practitioners of both the Art of Hosting approach to facilitating change and the U-process approach to action and systemic change. …
One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious. In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this: I feel that we need to… My thoughts are that we should… I just throw this out there …