Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.
Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto: Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, …
|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 …
From our Art of Hosting gathering that concluded here on Bowen Island today comes a great line from my friend Christie Diamond: “Conversation begins before it starts, continues after it ends and doesn’t always involve words.” Brilliant, because once you understand THAT, you embark on the path of mastery. Update: Dave Pollard has posted a nice harvest of his learning at our gathering.
I was working with a group yesterday that was making a number of small decisions as they worked their way through an agenda. The meeting was semi-formal and my role as facilitator was mostly to hold space and draw attention to process where appropriate. I let the group talk, asked questions from time to time and noted the decisions that they had made. As I was observing this group working, I noticed something interesting about their process. Frequent readers will know that I use the diamond of participation often as a map to organize and design meeting processes. …