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Thoughts on group sizes

September 24, 2012 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Design, Facilitation 2 Comments

One of the great pleasures of the weekend I just spent in San Francisco at the Applied Improv Network conference was hanging out with good friends, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton (who is blogging up a storm these days), Viv McWaters and the inimitable Nancy White.  While we were eating lunch one day, Nancy interviewed me on the subject of group sizes for a class she is teaching.  Here is my off the cuff response:

If you want to see more thoughts on group sizes, I wrote a post on this a while back. See this as an invitation to practice and notice. No science was involved in the creation of these ideas!

Dispatch from the northern forest

September 18, 2012 By Travel

 

in northern Minnesota, on a lake near Callaway at a strange place called Maplelag Resort with 25 indigenous nation rebuilders…held in a landscape that is turning red as the maples and the oaks show their colours., and reflecting blue in the northern lakes, water pooled on beds of granite, the oldest skin of mother earth…rocks 3 billion years old at our feet and fall coming in…

Tactic and strategy

September 14, 2012 By Community, Poetry

A poem by Mario Benedetti read in the check in our second day of learning here in Baltimore.

Tactic and Strategy

My tactic is
Looking at you,
Learning how you are,
Loving you as you are,
My tactic is
Talking to you
And listening to you
To build with words
An indestructible bridge
My tactic is
Remaining in your memories
I don’t know how
Nor with which pretext
But remaining with you.

My tactic is
Being frank,
And knowing that you are frank,
And not selling each other
Simulations
So that between us
There is no curtain
Nor abyss.

My strategy is,
However,
Deeper and
Easier,
My strategy is
That one of these days
I don’t know how
Nor with which pretext
You finally
Need me.

[from ‘Poemas de otros’ (1973-1974), translated from the Spanish

Collective story harvesting

September 11, 2012 By Art of Hosting, Stories

In the Art of Hosting community over the past two years a group of practitioners have developed a tool called the Collective Story Harvest. I’ve used it several times and it’s a powerful and useful way to rapidly learn from the stories in the room.

Today comes news frim Mary Alice Arthur, one of the developers, about recent developments with the methodology.

I’m reporting in from the road again, this time from the airport in Chicago. I’ve had many opportunities to catch stories along the journey and this time, I’m here to report in on what’s been happening with the method of Collective Story Harvesting.

We’ve been playing with this method for over two years now, using it in trainings, with clients and in many other gatherings. Attached is the latest version of the document and it now includes:

    A group harvesting one story or set of stories together
    Many stories being harvested simultaneously
    A case study of CSH being used as the key focus for an organisational teambuilding
    Using CSH during a community of practice gathering – all of telling and harvesting stories
    How this method can support and work with other methods

A little “light bedside reading”, we are now weighing in at 19 pages. I have also been collecting all the harvesting arcs I’ve been hearing about to make a database of potential arcs or themes we can all draw on. If you have input to this list, please let me know. There’s a googledoc you can be invited to where your input can be collected.

The next level of CSH is about to happen. For some time now, I’ve had my eyes set on larger systemic stories that can be of benefit to us all. We – a group of dedicated Danes and two adopted Danes 😉 — are about to host a grand experiment as we attempt to harvest the story of Denmark going bankrupt in 1813 because we believe this story holds some keys for both Denmark and the world about how to deal with adversity.

If you’d like to be involved in an ongoing conversation about storytelling and the Art of Hosting, please join me on the Ning:
http://artofhosting.ning.com/forum/topics/storytelling-and-the-art-of-hosting-conversations-that-matter

And for more about the power of story, have a look here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/william_ury.html

Wishing you deep listening for your stories,

Mary Alice

Enjoy

10 years and still going

September 6, 2012 By Practice, Wordpress 13 Comments

Ten years ago on September 6, 2002 I launched this blog with an innocuous little link to an on lie art project ground through Euan Semple.  I called the blog Parking Lot, which is the term facilitators use for a flip chart where we record things that are off topic to the subject at hand, but important enough to come back to.  Since then I have used this space as my open source learning pad, to explore and grow in the field of facilitation, organizational and community development and random other bits and pieces of living.  I’ve had long extended sidelines into poetry and art, music and taekwondo, bits and pieces and threads and buttons that have led somewhere or nowhere, notes that have been quoted, posts that went viral.  I’ve met amazing friends, had fleeting fame and even got into a few fights over the years in this little space.

I have often said that this space is the book I will never write – I learn so fast and change my mind so much that a book is almost too static a format for me.  If you want to see the book that I will never write, head over to “A Collection of Life’s Lessons” which is a occasionally updated meta blog of this site’s greatest hits.  Print all those posts out, make a nice cover and there you have a book.  For free.

So this blog has been a saving grace – a place where I can jot down notes, record great links and sources and leave a legacy for my own reference.  Over the years, twitter and Facebook have become more and more prevalent in my writing life, and this blog has gone through periods of being neglected and avoided.  There are a million links in my twitter feed that are more instantly useful, and I’m trying to get into a rhythm of writing about them a little longer here.

So as the summer falls away and the fall simmers around the corner, join me in raising a glass of whisky and toasting ten years of Parking Lot.  Thanks for being along for some of the journey.