One of the key skills in deliberative dialogue is figuring out what we are, together. This is often called “co-sensing” or “feeling into the collective field.” There are many ways to talk about but the practice is on the one hand tricky and subtle, and on the other, blazingly obvious. In general, in North America and especially among groups of people that are actively engaged in questions about co-sening the collective field, a speech pattern I have notcied goes something like this: I feel that we need to… My thoughts are that we should… I just throw this out there …
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From my friend Roq Garreau: “Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be …
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I was in a conversation this morning with people who work in a big systemic field: early childhood education. It is one of those fields that is rife with research telling us what all the problems are. We have more information than we could ever use about childhood obesity, drug addiction, abuse, longitudinal studies on literacy and employment, links between diet and capacity, intergenerational issues of dependence and parenting…this list goes on. We know everything about every problem but one. The one problem we don’t know about is how to solve all of these problems. My suspicion – and this …
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For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns. Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing …
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Rare that I completely reproduce a full post from someone else’s blog, but Doug Germann did a masterful job today of capturing the terror of dialogue: There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might …