My friend Viv McWaters sends this note from Australia:
“I’m just back from three days at the Port Fairy Folk Festival where I immersed myself in great music and bands and came away with lots of thoughts about how facilitators can learn a lot from musicians.
The stand out performer was Harry Manx – a Canadian Blues/folk performer who combines traditional blues, amazing slide guitar, mohan veena, mandolin and harmonica and vocals with traditional Indian music. He says on the CD notes “Mantras for Madmen”: ‘When the silence between the notes says as much as the notes themselves, like the gap between the breaths, it’s all good. The way I see it, Blues is like the earth and Indian music is like the heavens. What I do is find the balance between the two.”
I’d be happy if I could facilitate half as well as he performs – seamlessly collaborating with his harmonica player and percussionist; connecting with the audience; reading the mood; improvising when a guitar string breaks; changing the pace; being silent; and making everyone feel privileged to be alive and here, now. That’s what I aspire to be able to do when I facilitate.”
Yup, me too. Here’s Harry, a fellow Gulf Islander, hailing from Salt Spring Island to the south of us here.
mp3: Harry Manx – Song for William
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On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC).
I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged so deeply that we experience emergence. I wanted people to experience what it feels like to work from their strengths and have something appear about youth engagement that no one person brought into the room with them. And I had 2.5 hours.
I began where I always begin, telling the story of the quadrants, and mapping the four open space practices in some detail (link opens a .pdf). Instead of filling in my own practices, I asked people what their practices were and we filled in the map together. This is important, because people truly do know how to do opening, inviting, holding and grounding. It’s just a matter of turning their attention to how they do it.
After that, we moved into an opening practice, with a bit of an Appreciative Inquiry experience. I invited people to pair up and interview one another on the question of “Tell me a story or two of a time when you felt deeply engaged by others. What might we learn from that about engagement in general?” People spent a very short time interviewing – 10 minutes each – and then they returned to the circle.
Next I gave them a taste of The World Cafe and we moved into fours to process some of this learning. The question for the first 20 minute round was “What can we learn from these reflections about deeply engaging youth.” After the first round was over, the groups mixed up and continued exploring the question. At the end of the second 20 minutes, I asked them to remain in their spots and turn their collective minds to discerning “What ideas want to hatch now?” The third round was quieter and more deliberate.
Finally we reconvened in a circle and I invited reflections about where we were at after spending this time thinking through this work. We got a number of ideas, including thoughts about deep listening, about approaching youth where they are, both physically and emotionally and about showing up completely authentically in engagement and with curiosity about where the process might lead. There were also a number of “aha’s” about detaching from outcomes.
In just over an hour and a half, using nothing but the resources and stories of the people in the room we did experience a little bit of emergence and a I think everyone got some good ideas out of the session. If we had had more time, I would have then worked with the most interesting ideas (as determined by the group) and perhaps split people up into little design teams to figure out how these principles might work in a grounded engagement process. Then we could have melded these conversations together into some tools and approaches that might be useful.
I think the biggest learning for people was just how fast learning can take place when you are engaged in deep conversation about stuff that matters. And how the most important person in that kind of process is not the facilitator or the teacher, but the experts you are surrounded by, and the stories and experiences of your own life, seen in a new light.
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As I have been updating my website and moving things around I have finally gotten to re-organizing the Open Space Resources page. The page now contains resources on the nuts and bolts of of Open Space and deeper learning organized by practice area. There are also links to articles, books, stories and internet resources to support practice and learning about Open Space.
I’ll continue to update the page (having it in a wiki makes that a LOT easier) and I’ll be adding a lot more stories of my own. I’m also looking at giving that page it’s own RSS feed soe folks can track changes. Feel free to stop by and use what you can.
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I missed seeing him play, but have loved his music since first hearing it. He was a blues player and a griot and a link to a deep source.
mp3: Ali Farka Toure – Allah Uya
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My buddy Jon Husband today blogged a fascinating piece by danah boyd on why and how youth are using MySpace. Her conclusion…
Youth are not creating digital publics to scare parents – they are doing so because they need youth space, a place to gather and see and be seen by peers. Publics are critical to the coming-of-age narrative because they provide the framework for building cultural knowledge. Restricting youth to controlled spaces typically results in rebellion and the destruction of trust. Of course, for a parent, letting go and allowing youth to navigate risks is terrifying. Unfortunately, it’s necessary for youth to mature.
Youth are in constant need of spaces, both physical and virtual, and it is the practice of western societies to generally deny them those spaces for reasons of trust and control. I’m interested in how youth are creating space despite the efforts of adults to prevent them for having it.
I’ve written before about the Aboriginal youth I know who are a part of Building Our Legacy Together, a network dedicated to staying connected, supporting each other’s work for bringing a new community-based youth leadership voice to Aboriginal communities in BC. These guys are meeting online all the time, mostly using MSN and other forums and through various websites and message boards.
Any one working with youth networks needs to know how these modes work and needs to find ways of supporting and participating with them.