Peggy Holman and I have just spent two days working with some amazing provincial public servants in Victoria, hosting a learning workshop on Appreciative Inquiry. There were many gems over the two days, but I think what stands out for me is the list of learnings that came after this morning. Our participants were given some homework overnight which simply consisted of interviewing someone using appreciative questions. Here are some of the rich insights that came up in the check in this morning: Genuine, appreciative questioning brings us together and fosters connection Being interviewed appreciatively open our awareness of possibility …
|A question to ask always is whether or not your conversation design is breeding possibility or impossibility. Are we asking questions that look at what is possible, that look at overcoming our fears, or are we looking for things that emerge out of fears. And example of the later is when clients ask me to design conversations around proposals or presentations. It seems to happen most commonly with government clients that they want to ask a variation of a question like “What do you notice is wrong with our proposal? What are we missing?” Now it’s not a problem to …
I ran a workshop last week for the Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association of British Columbia. The taske was to to spend a day and a half reviewing the high level vision and direction of the organization and to come up with some streams forward to present to the organization’s membership at the AGM. In thinking about the design of the gathering, I chose to consciously use Theory U to help structure a series of exercises. I proposed a five phase process for the day: Sensing needs and purposes and reviewing the world outside Appreciative Evaluation of the organization’s …
Drawing by ritwkdey I have been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the living systems vs. the mechanical systems worldviews. It’s interesting that there is a clear distinction between these two kinds of systems – a system is alive or it isn’t, at least in this point in time – and yet the way we humans think our way through being in these systems seems to fall on a continuum. My conversation with Myriam Laberge here has pointed this out. I initially wrote a post that put facilitating up against hosting as two words to describe different ways …
From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold. …