A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process.
Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric?
Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the doubling of process: feeling that we need a process in order to have a process. The aim is often to make meetings more ‘effective and efficient’, to make maximum use of our precious time together, but perhaps also to render them friction-free and more predictable. For me this is the same kind of instrumentalised thinking that informs AI.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. This is an important challenge to practitioners who find themselves designing interventions. I don't think we need people who are better at their "tools." I think there are other capacities and capabilities practitioners need to develop as they host interventions and work with change. How about you? What do you think?
Two Cynthia Kurtz posts in a row!
Participatory Narrative Inquiry has been a very powerful way to connect my own facilitation, evaluation/research and change work in my practice. We’ve done PNI projects that have lasted from a few days to five years. Narrative capture and sense making creates a grounded and co-owned process for planning, creating change, adjusting strategy or simply understanding a current state. It works with the capacities and capabilities of the people in the organization or community themselves to do the work and so it is a good way to suspect the lure of the intervenor.
Cynthia’s approach to the work is so clear and approachable, which is remarkable for such a wide reaching and deep body of work and practice. Here is a new interview where she talks about using PNI, the challenges that it poses and why – in my opinion – the biggest problems are with the practitioner’s own positioning of themselves. Using PNI in practice I think helps groups to see what they already know and how much they are capable of, AND, if you come to the work honestly, it will make you a better practitioner too.
When you worry that something you care about is going out of fashion, but you have no evidence for such a thing happening, the best course is to make the best argument you can for it as if the decline were happening. And then, if the decline is not happening, your best argument will still be useful.
So I thought: What is my best argument for participation? What would entice a listening-weary, stay-at-home population to leave home and travel to the other earths of the people around them? How about an appeal to enlightened self-interest? Let’s see what I can write along those lines.
— Cynthia Kurtz, Why — and whither — participation.
Cynthia Kurtz has crafted a long and important blog post that brings her usual clarity and approachable manner to the question of why we should be doing more participatory work. Along the way she explores some thoughts about why we AREN'T doing it much right now and what it takes to do more. It's a beautiful post and I encourage you to set aside 20 minutes or so and read it thoughtfully.
I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.