I don’t know how I missed this hash tag: #shitfacilitatorssay but I plead guilty to some of these. And if you have ever worked in front of a group, I’ll bet you do too!
Here at the Art of Hosting in Chicago working with 70 people fromthe restorative justice field and the early childhood education world. Inspired by a design from Tenneson Woolf and an invitation from Teresa Posakony, my new friend Anamaria Accove and I hosted a lovely exploration of the Cynefin framework using movement and physical embodiment to help people understand the difference between the domains. The exercise went this way:
We taped the framwork on the floor, which is the standard way I teach it. Before we talked about it at all, we invited the group to divide into four groups and follow our instructions.
The first exercise was a simple challenge: to arrange the group by height. There were different ways this was accomplished but everyone settled on a linear shape with the tallest at one end and the shortest at the other.
The second exercise was for people to arrange themselves by age and year of birth. A complicated problem for sure, and there was a variety of good solutions that emerged. Of course in order to do this you need a little analysis, both of the data and a good model fro representing it. But having arranged themselves, each selection was accurate and useful.
In the third exercise we asked people to arrange themselves by place of origin. This wasn’t a particularly complex task, but it did result in an experience of emergence. Again it required conversation, story telling and some meaning making (like, from my mother’s womb? From my hometown? From the place I left this morning?). What emerged were several interesting ways of representing the data, but we honed in on one of the two maps. By asking one or two people where they originated from we were able to predict where the rest of group was from with startling accuracy. What emerged was a map of the United States that came with its own information and data.
For the fourth exercise we asked people to arrange themselves like five year old children at a birthday party right after the cake had been eaten. Utter chaos.
Finally we posed a question from the realm of disorder. We asked the group to arrange themselves by temperature. “What?” This really helped to show that disorder was not the same as chaos. Disorder invites us to lean in and figure out what is going on before we see if this is a simple or complex task. In that sense it is the opposite of chaos, in that disorder itself is a container. This is such an important domain to understand and to understand especially how we default to assuming how to solve problems without first defining the scope of what we are looking at.
After running this exercise we taught the Cynefin framework but naming the domains, explaining the cause and effect relationships and explaining the decision making schemes for each domain. Many people reported that they understood it at a deeper and more practical level and especially in the domain of disorder which gets a short shrift in the wider world. Folks that were familiar with the framework but who had not groked the concept of disorder got it this time! That is partly down to me learning how to teach it better as well, by characterizing the disorder domain as one that present problems that stop us in our tracks and force us to say “WTF?” WTF has now been translated by the group in this context as “Where’s the Family?” which is actually a pretty good strategy for dealing with disorder!
Last year in Slovenia, a group of Art of Hosting practitioners gatherd for a week at a well loved 17th century manor to be together. I suppose you could call it a “conference” but we all called it a “Learning Village.” And it was a learning village. The agenda we set was for a five day Open Space gathering. there was music and local wine drinking and a learning journey on the land, and the teenagers cleaned out an old stone chapel that hadn’t been dusted for 300 years. We talked about our work, did tai chi and aikido, played football and made art. Our kids fell in love and broke up!
It was a village, and there was tons of learning. And no action plans, no next steps, no commitments, no necessary reports. A few months later there was a harvest document lovingly stewarded by a few people. This is all appropriate and good.
And sometimes, there are gatherings where next steps and action plans are important and necessary and are the reason why we are gathering. But always? No.
I have begun to notice that when I see conference agendas with “next steps and action plans” attached to them (and especially attached to the end of the last day when everyone is tired and most people have left), I become sad. Actually and emotionally a little sad. i think it is because doing this unconsciously reduces the pure experience of being together and intenstly learning into something “productive” in order to justify doing it.
So please, think really carefully about whether or not you gathering needs action steps, especially if you are planning a conference where the purpose is for people to simply be together learning and connecting. That alone is significant action. Do we really need to justify it any further?
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 like to see is a link on each card to the underlying pattern. I think the patterns in this project are very important because they are the source of the card titles, images and desciptions and although the level of detail varies at the moment in teh pattern language, this information is very important. Having access to it on the app would be a huge resource.
Download the apps for yourself, or get a copy of the deck itself, a beautiful tactile design tool for group process facilitation.