Sometimes people see that I’m a dialogue practitioner and the assume that I am not a fan of quantitative measurement. I think this has to do with the fact that the dialogue practitioner community has been a kind of antithesis to the “measure and manage” world of empirical scientific management. In any endeavour both qualitative and quantitative measurements are important. The issue isn’t whether or not numbers are to be more trusted than meaning making; the issue is whether we are measuring thing properly. The issue is whether or not we use measurements as targets or gauges. Again, this is …
Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing projects towards the evaluation outcomes, in order to give the best chance of an initiative surviving and continuing to attract resources. One of the things I appreciate about developmental evaluation is its deliberate engagement with emergence. Making sense of emergence however can be a really time consuming affair, and so I’m thinking about how we can use good use of time to use dialogue and collective meaning making to help …
A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods. On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image There are a bunch of us …
Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation. We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship. One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here. This will involve …
When I was up in Whitehorse last week I got to spend time with folks from the Public Service Commission discussing a project that would see us looking at discriminations in the workplace from a complexity angle. Using Cynefin and SenseMaker(tm), we hope to understand the ways in which the landscape of discrimination shifts and changes over time so that the PSC can make wiser decisions about the kinds of initiatives it sculpts. One of the problems with diversity initiatives in the public service (in any large public organization really) is the feeling that they need to be broad based …