I spent much of the day watching live coverage of the hurricane damage in New Orleans on WDSU. It is absolutely devastating to see the first video of the damage, and to hear the shock in the anchor’s voices as they were trying to describe what they were seeing. Water everywhere, huge fires, scads of structural damage, rooftop rescues, trees down and boats and cars swamped. One whole side of the Hyatt hotel is blasted out with hardly a window left intact. The Superdome roof is peeled and punctured. There are people huddled on the courthouse steps, surrounded by water and unable to move until the power grid is safe and the water somehow gets pumped back UP to sea level. Much of New Orleans appears to be a soup of lake water, oil, electrical wires and mud. It looks like it will be months before the cleanup is finished.
My heartfelt best wishes to any readers in that area. I’m especially thinking of those without the means to have escaped the deluge.
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THis movie puts a great deal in perspective:
“The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2, 2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER�s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth.
Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth � farther than the Moon�s orbit � when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.”
Link via WorldChanging
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I’ve been slowly chewing on William Issacs’ book on Dialogue. I am surprised that I haven’t read it before.
AS well as reading the book, I have been subscribed to the del.icio.us tag on “dialogue.” Today in the aggregator, I found a great summary of the facilitation skills needed in Dialogue. From the paper:
“There are few facilitation skills more important that the ability to keep quiet. When I teach facilitation I always spend a lot of time on this particular facilitator skill. If you are a manager, trainer, or a leader in your field, there is a good reason why: you enjoy it. You enjoy being in front of a group, orchestrating consensus and creating the magic of teamwork. This is probably how you have fun.
The only problem for you is that facilitating a group to Dialogue means: not leading. It takes great discipline to describe the process, lead a discussion on the escape routes and then abdicate your control to the group. But the discipline of keeping your trap shut will pay off. If you let them, they will come up with better ideas than you ever considered. And those ideas will be their ideas. Groups implement their ideas much more readily that your ideas. This is the hidden power of Dialogue. It is the secret to creating ownership (an over-used term). The reason most leaders can�t do it, is because they can�t stay quiet long enough for their group to rise to the occasion. A good facilitator creates a vacuum of leadership perfectly shaped not for one individual, but for the whole group.”
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At OSonOS, my blogless friend Eric Lilius shared with us an insight from Emo Phillips that brought the house down:
I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in the body.
Then I realized who was telling me this.
I can’t tell you how much fun it was to finally meet Eric in person.