Victoria BC
I love a space with a brick wall in a space. Tonight at Ferris’ Oyster Bar with a couple of friends for dinner, I kept noticing how that wall lended its presence to the space, as I enjoyed a beautiful and tasty rice bowl of vegetarian potstickers and deep friend tofu. I was noticing all day how details do more than they seem capacble of doing. The stillness permeating the inner harbour as the water stayed flat for a second day in a row, the signs on the busses that say “Sorry…I’m out of service.” Something about that “Sorry…I’m” part that makes the whole downtown core a little more friendly as the post-rush hour busses deadhead back to the bus garage.
We were locked deeply in design conversations today, and we went through six design tools from the Art of Hosting, all of which I taught and we discussed as I harvested them all on this diagram.
The tools that are elucidated here include the following:
Attention to the details of design led us into an incredibly deep conversation about the work we were doing, working at a whole different level. The quality of attention flowing from the presence lingering from good design…
[tags]ferris’ oyster bar, victoria, design[/tags]
Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately. When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest. Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.
I have made all of these notes at my flickr site. When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page. Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along. Click on the photos to view the notes.
Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle:
Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning. This was based on a conversation I had with George:
From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration:
That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance:
Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording. Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest:
I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question: What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?
Why is this important? I think it matters that harvest, good harvest, moves organizations and communities forward, links leadership and action to conversation and makes the best use of the wisdom that is gathered from meetings. If you have ever wondered about meetings that seem not to go anywhere, this inquiry into harvesting, sensemaking and iterative action holds the key to avoiding those kinds of situations. It’s not enough just to have good process and a good facilitator – the results of the work must also be alive in the organization. That’s where we are going with this.
Please consider joining myself, Toke Moeller, Sera Thompson, Tim Merry, Vanessa Reid and Stephani McCallum and Richard Delaney from the Canadian Institute for Public Engagement as we host an Art of Hosting training in the Gatineau Hills just north of Ottawa, Ont. We will be there March 5-8 exploring design, facilitation and harvesting from conversations that matter.
You can find the full invitation at the Art Of Hosting website.
Harvesting is up in a big way for me.
Monica Nissen and I captured the results of our conversation on harvest within the Open Space at the Art of Hosting near Boulder and we made this map. If you click on the picture above, you will be taken to the photo page where there are annotations on the map. You can also add comments here or there as to what it sparks in you.
An a-ha on harvesting
In my inquiries about harvesting, I have been searching for ways to make harvest the simplest possible thing. In the Art of Hosting community we often look for what we lovingly call “hobbit tools” – the core essential tools that you can bring with you anywhere. A few of us are in the process of developing hobbit tools around harvest.
A few days ago in a conversation with a client, I stumbled upon one of these hobbit tools of harvesting: have somewhere to take the harvest.
The conversation we were talking about was about a conference we are doing in February. The conference marks the tenth anniversary of the release of the final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In the 10 years since the report was released, very little of the Commission’s recommendations were acted upon. The federal government released a response to the report in 1999 called “Gathering Strength” which offered an apology to residential school victims and a promise to work in a new partnership with Aboriginal peoples. To some extent this has happened, but largely the report has been gathering dust.
And so my client is convening a conference which will look at the report and what it might take to get it moving again especially in the resources sector. Her initial vision for the conference was to produce a set of proceedings that would be used by others to kick start the implementation of the Royal Commission report.
I challenged her to do more than that – indeed to do more that the Royal Commission itself did- and to find a way to bring the conference proceedings to life. So we began to craft a strategy for the harvest of this event.
The plan now is to harvest the results of the conference as both a record of the event and as an inquiry itself. We can share the report but we will also craft a series of the questions – the questions we are left with after three days of deliberations – and these questions will be put to five different and specific forums. My client now is spend the next couple of months talking to influential gatherings, organizations and forums to find five places that will commit to co-inquiring with her on the conference proceedings during 2007. Our conference report will therefore not gather dust but will live in the discussions that follow on, as we seed ideas into the field of Aboriginal – government relations. This plan will be shared with the conference delegates in pre-conference note that will hopefully give them confidence that the conference will have an impact.
So the simple hobbit tool is this: guarantee that your results will not gather dust, and challenge yourself and your participants to keep it alive.