Nancy White has posted a very nice “white paper” (pun intended!) on what she is calling “triangulating learning.” Essentially she gives a clear picture of how to reach outside of your organizational boundaries to put social connections to work to increase creativity, collect inspiration and ground-truth ideas:
Triangulating learning through external support from individuals, communities and networks can provide significant, low or no cost support to innovators and learners within institutions. This triangulation requires networking skills and a willingness to learn in public – even possibly loose part of all credit for one’s work. The rewards, however, are increased learning, practical experience and ultimately the ability to change not just one’s self, but one’s organization.
via Full Circle Associates » Need Your Feedback on my Triangulating Thinking.
Those of us freelancers that have blogged for a long time are certainly familiar with this idea, but Nancy provides some very practical notes about getting started especially for people who work within organizational constraints.
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Here a ning, there a ning. This week, a post about all the ning sites I belong to:
- Open Space World.
- World Cafe Community
- Presencing Institute
- Applied Improvisation Network
- Bowen Island Ourselves (our local citizenship ning)
- Authentic Leadership in Action Institute
These are just the major and most active ones. Interesting to see how ning has tipped and how fluent people are becoming with it. Reminds me of wikis. I understand the issues with closed source code and one company controlling all of these sites, but ning certainly has cracked a useful, focused, social networking tool.
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Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows:
First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.
1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjournAnd all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.
Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space. the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling. We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover. In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations. We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come. Our process ran like this:
- Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
- Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
- Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes. Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
- Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
- In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
- People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas. I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications). Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps. Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
- Groups met and then reported back. Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).
Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.
These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.
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Johnnie Moore posts a touching analysis of what drives bullying bosses in organizations. Some recent research concludes that a perceived sense of incompetence can cause people to lash out against others.
This has been my experience. Our culture demands answers, expertise and bold confidence in making decisions. Most people are trained starting in pre-school that these traits are in the domain of the individual and that your success depends on them.
What is missing is training in asking questions, seeking help and acting from clarity. In schools, these practices are forbidden in exam rooms, where students are evaluated on their progress. You are not allowed to ask questions, to ask for help, or borrow other’s ideas. All of that is considered “cheating.”
The stress that comes from needing to perform as a solo act can be huge and the resulting manifestation of this stress can be toxic. I have worked with and under both kinds of leaders and once worked with one leader who started collaborative and curious and evolved into a frightened bully. It seems to me that these individuals that suffered did so alone, with the thought that as a leader, they should somehow carry the load by themselves.
In a world in which nothing is certain, and answers are elusive, these expectations will always result in stress. I can find it in myself, when I step into new work, at a new level, how my anxiety rises. This is why, when I am doing something new, I almost always work with friends.
My take away from this piece is that relationship and work are equally important. To sacrifice relationship[ building for “outcomes” is to not only jeopardize the sustainability of good work, but to create a climate in which good work is unlikely to ever get done.
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Coming back from a lovely Art of Hosting at Tamagawa near Nanaimo. Lots bubblig out of that one, and so here;s the first little harvest. Our hosting team (the excellent David Stevenson, Colleen stevenson, Paula Beltgens, Diana Smith, Caitlin Frost, Nancy McPhee, Teresa Posakony and Tenneson Woolf) checked in together around this question: What would it take to be ambushed by joy this weekend? This question sprang from a notion of joy as an operating principle; What if noticing joy was a basic agreement about how we will work together?
From that came this snippet of a poem that was made from some of the responses:
From the grief of all alone, we build connection to the other
and from need,
surprising forms become clear.
As we spiral inwards, condemned to intimacy
a joyful ambush of fear warms us
to each other giving us names into which we can live,
hosting a self that knows the myriad of ways
joy surprises.