My friend Peggy Holman is about to write a short series of posts on how to manage the tension between hearing from luminaries and hosting participation in gatherings that aim to: Make the most of the knowledge and experience of the people in the room; Support participants to make great connections; Bring the wisdom of luminaries – respected, deep thinkers – on whatever subject drew people together; and Deepen collective understanding of a complex topic. Peggy notes that: A common design challenge with such gatherings is to work the tension between hearing from luminaries and engaging participants. When the mix …
A couple of days ago I was invited by Transition US to discuss the Cynefin framework and what it means to work with complexity in a one hour teleconference. The recording of that call is now available if you’d like to listen in.
The Groups Works pattern lamnguage deck is now available for the iOS mobile platform. You can download the app here: Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Or you can also run an Infinite Canvas on your iPad as well. Learn more here. The Group Works Deck team has released these apps as a protoyping exercise and wants feedback on how people are using them. My initial assessment is that the do a terrific job of reproducing the deck with the added benefit of have related patterns hyperlinked within the cards themselves. What I’d …
It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly: Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture. Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility. The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it. Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous. Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they …
This afternoon, Toke Moeller and I are hosting a little session on Art of Hosting basics at a gathering for emerging indigenous leaders. We decided this afternoon to bring real design challenges into the room and we improvised this simple, simple design checklist. In some ways this is the simplest form of the chaordic stepping stones. Here’s how it works. In my experience good participatory meetings result from good design and preparation. In this diagram the meeting itself is the last thing we design. First we design the bookends: Purpose on the one hand and harvest/action on the other hand. …