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Category Archives "Conversation"

Designing nesting thresholds

September 23, 2018 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Conversation, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation 2 Comments

All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds.  When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done.  It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.   Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process.  They participate and co-create.  …

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A couple of musings on democracy

May 18, 2018 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Democracy, Featured

Two links in the feed this morning had me thinking about democracy, participation and local governance. Duncan Green provides a review of the new book How to Rig an Election, by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. There are many ways to hack a democracy, including gerrymandering electoral districts, influencing or straight out hacking of polls, manipulating voter registration and making it difficult to vote. The authors in this new book point out an important truth: Leaders are most likely to try and stay in power when they believe that their presence is essential to maintain political stability; in cases when they …

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Listening is love

May 11, 2018 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Conversation, Featured, Practice

Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work.  Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving. From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words): The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to …

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Safe enough in Open Space

March 19, 2018 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, Uncategorized One Comment

I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety.  What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double …

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Better decision making

December 4, 2017 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Conversation, Emergence, Facilitation, Leadership 4 Comments

At the end of a couple of weeks in Europe and being here in Glasgow during this past week has heightened my sensitivity to how democracy, devoid of deliberation and focused only on numeric results, has been hijacked and rendered ineffective for making complex decisions related to governance of complex issues.  The UK is currently paying the price for a ridiculous decision made in June of 2016 to leave the European Union.  Whatever you think of the merits of Brexit, there can be no denying that the method for doing so has been deeply flawed both in its democratic implementation …

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