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 …
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
Over many years I have been using the chaordic stepping stones as the basis for all work I do with clients. This is a tool that I first heard of in the Art of Hosting community in about 2004. It was originally based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock developed to design organizations that took advantage of both order and chaos. It has been useful and rich and created all kinds of outcomes that would not have been possible other wise.
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech is best known for his statements of possibility and the energy with which he concluded his remarks. It is a compelling call to purpose, to a world in which the future is only currently imagined. It provided a generative image of what is possible, if not what is attainable, and it did what a good purpose does: it helped take the place of a charismatic leader. Internalized, that purpose drives the movement.