From Nancy White, a brilliant video of Tom Sparough juggling cigar boxes and talking about courage. And from Jon Husband, with whom I had a lovely conversation today related to my 30 day learning journey, an mp3 from Ben Zander about possibility.
The situation in Zimbabwe being what it is, it’s often hard to see beyond the headlines and the punditry that tells how how we should feel. But of course, in this connected world, we live in a field of relationships that descends deep into every story on our planet.
I have friends in Zimbabwe, and from that network of hosts and courageous leaders comes this email:
Standing in Silence under a New Moon
Sunday 6th April 20087 days ago we voted for change in our country.
Against the legal imperative to call an election foul within 48 hours of final polling
and to publish the numbers within 6 days,
and in the face of SADAC and international observers approval of our voting process,
ZanuPF is now demanding a recount.What possible reason can there be for this delay
other than a refusal to accept the deafening call
for the old man to leave.The threats violence have once again begun
Yesterday white farms were attacked by ZanuPF youths in Masvingo
Journalists have been arrested at the airportWe are weary and battle scarred
fearful and courageous
carrying the shadows of pain and intimidation on our souls
we have spoken,
done all we can by peaceful means
still held in the dark unknowing.We live with the politics of fear
Learning to hold the ground
I’m learning to hold ground too, with them from afar.
Jack Martin Leith on how to do rapid innovation using Open Space Technology:
We hear a lot of talk these days about Open Innovation (American academic Henry Chesbrough wrote the book), but not very much about Open Space Innovation. I’m not talking about new developments in the field of Open Space Technology – I’ll leave that for another day – but rather using Open Space Technology to accelerate the process of new product development and other forms of innovation.Jeffrey Hyman and I did just that for a global food manufacturer a few years ago, and it worked so well that we seriously considered forming a company to commercialise the process. Fate had other plans for us, and Jeffrey became the founder and chairman of the Food & Drink Innovation Network. Now that the statute of limitations is no longer in force, I am able to show you the mirrors, hidden levers and trapdoor so that you can work the magic for yourself.
What follows from there is a very cool post detailing the whole process. A must read.
Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock have further developed their facilitation learning offerings and now offer a three tier learning program towards facilitation mastery. You can find out more at Myriam’s blog: Co-Creative Power: Masterful Facilitation Institute:Becoming An Inspired Facilitator.
I like these two women a lot, and have worked with both of them. It’s cool to see them diving deeper and deeper into crafting amazing learning opportunities to share what they have discovered on their own journeys to mastery.
An important post, observation and question from George Por: How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?
For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot”
Part of the challenge of working with shift in systems is finding the time to create the containers in which this trust and appreciation can flow. It takes time, and it’s not always time that is seen as productive time. Most people that are paying me to facilitate a meeting for them have definite outcomes that they want to see. Often they want more than can be acheived in the short period of time they assign (how many conferences are scheduled for three days but everyone leaves at lunch on day three?) Building trust and appreciation is real work and it requires a real committment of time.
The cost of this came clear in work with a recent client. We are working on something which could result in a major public policy shift in a contentious field with many diverse and irreconcilable stakeholders. What they are discovering is the closer they get to implementing the policy changes they are working on, the more people retreat into old and unhelpful patterns. What is absolutely needed in this context is a retreat of all of the major stakeholders to create a container to build trust and appreciation. Without a collaborative process, the initiative they have designed will fail.
And yet, such a retreat is so far from their usual practice that it seems like they can’t see it at all. For me, I see clearly what needs to happen, but there is only so much I can SAY, only so much I can TELL them. In my work with them we tried to create some conversational process but I felt we fell short in creating any kind of relationship that can hold the complexity of what they are trying to do.
So this is the scope of my challenge. I’m now wondering if I should even take on these kinds of facilitation gigs. I’m not sure that the reification of old patterns in cases like this actually helps, and in fact it may well hinder efforts to move to the shift everyone wants.