Merlin Mann points to a nice piece on the fragmentation of attention:
A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.
Recently I facilitated a meeting in which there were so many BlackBerries, I felt like making a pie. Some people had BlackBerries AND cell phones, and both were on.
What struck me was actually how the fragmentation of the room’s attention led to strange behaviour, like having BlackBerry users reminding me that time was tight and we needed to concentrate.
At one point, the most senior person in the group was caught off guard when one of his reports asked him a question that was very useful to the group learning about a good tool for fostering collaboration and communication. I turned to look at him, spoke his name and he looked up at me with a blank look on his face, like the kid in class that was caught reading a note when he should have been answering the math question. I asked him if he would share his experience and he paused and looked embarrassed and finally said “I’m sorry, I was on my BlackBerry.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at him and laughed and said “You are SOOO busted!” That cracked the group up, but the diversion cost the group a learning moment about the tool that never got fully dealt with. The group punished him by putting him in charge of a small piece of the implementation of the decision.
This is shockingly common, and it’s made significantly worse by having the most senior people in the meeting checking out. In the above story, the thought crossed my mind to say that someone could just email him the question and then could speak the answer when he emailed back, but that would have been even more rude.
The deeper worry with this kind of attention splitting is that it prevents a group from ever entering the kind of deep and reflective space that is required to do serious work. If a meeting starts getting complicated, and groany and difficult learning is taking place, good process requires that people stay with the thread and help contribute to an emergent solution. If you are able to check out when you are uncomfortable, or your attention turns to the more shiny task, it makes emergent dialogue nearly impossible. I would rather people exercised the law of two feet and took their presence physically elsewhere rather than leave the impression that they were available to the group conversation. It bugs me too, because I can see a tremendous upside to connectivity in meetings. Participants are able to retrieve information or catch outside experts in real time and bring fresh thinking to hard problems. But I don’t like have that kind of connectivity in the room because I’ve never seen it used responsibly.
It’s really a question of respect and embodied leadership:Be the communication and leadership model you want others to be. How do others deal with this?
My friend Toke Moeller and I are running an Art of Hosting training this week with 12 Aboriginal youth here in British Columbia. We are having a marvelous time so far with one day behind us and two ahead. There have been some good insights as we head deeper into the essences and practicesof hosting conversations that matter. Today we spent time in a natural circle of trees in Cathedral Grove near Port Alberni, which is a pokect of nearyl 1000 year old douglas-fir and cedar on the Cameron River. These old ones make good teachers, especially when we bring them questions about confronting our fears.
I had one or two insights myself today about the essence of effective conversation. Both arose in an appreciative conversation with Toke. For me, a powerful one was that effective conversation creates in the spaces in which true offerings of the heart can be made. The results of the best conversations include having the participants in that conversation able to give gifts of their time, attention and commitment to the result. All good action arises as a result of this kind of free, heart-based offering.
And we also noticed that good conversations contain the seeds of stories which are repeated for years afterwards. It is, in fact, nearly impossible to know these seeds untila later time, when we pull them out of a bag and tell them as stories. But for sure, an effective conversation is one that conceives these seeds that later brith in the momentof telling. Who is to know what any of these seeds will become?
What can you add to this list?
My friend Viv McWaters sends this note from Australia:
“I’m just back from three days at the Port Fairy Folk Festival where I immersed myself in great music and bands and came away with lots of thoughts about how facilitators can learn a lot from musicians.
The stand out performer was Harry Manx – a Canadian Blues/folk performer who combines traditional blues, amazing slide guitar, mohan veena, mandolin and harmonica and vocals with traditional Indian music. He says on the CD notes “Mantras for Madmen”: ‘When the silence between the notes says as much as the notes themselves, like the gap between the breaths, it’s all good. The way I see it, Blues is like the earth and Indian music is like the heavens. What I do is find the balance between the two.”
I’d be happy if I could facilitate half as well as he performs – seamlessly collaborating with his harmonica player and percussionist; connecting with the audience; reading the mood; improvising when a guitar string breaks; changing the pace; being silent; and making everyone feel privileged to be alive and here, now. That’s what I aspire to be able to do when I facilitate.”
Yup, me too. Here’s Harry, a fellow Gulf Islander, hailing from Salt Spring Island to the south of us here.
On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC).
I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged so deeply that we experience emergence. I wanted people to experience what it feels like to work from their strengths and have something appear about youth engagement that no one person brought into the room with them. And I had 2.5 hours.
I began where I always begin, telling the story of the quadrants, and mapping the four open space practices in some detail (link opens a .pdf). Instead of filling in my own practices, I asked people what their practices were and we filled in the map together. This is important, because people truly do know how to do opening, inviting, holding and grounding. It’s just a matter of turning their attention to how they do it.
After that, we moved into an opening practice, with a bit of an Appreciative Inquiry experience. I invited people to pair up and interview one another on the question of “Tell me a story or two of a time when you felt deeply engaged by others. What might we learn from that about engagement in general?” People spent a very short time interviewing – 10 minutes each – and then they returned to the circle.
Next I gave them a taste of The World Cafe and we moved into fours to process some of this learning. The question for the first 20 minute round was “What can we learn from these reflections about deeply engaging youth.” After the first round was over, the groups mixed up and continued exploring the question. At the end of the second 20 minutes, I asked them to remain in their spots and turn their collective minds to discerning “What ideas want to hatch now?” The third round was quieter and more deliberate.
Finally we reconvened in a circle and I invited reflections about where we were at after spending this time thinking through this work. We got a number of ideas, including thoughts about deep listening, about approaching youth where they are, both physically and emotionally and about showing up completely authentically in engagement and with curiosity about where the process might lead. There were also a number of “aha’s” about detaching from outcomes.
In just over an hour and a half, using nothing but the resources and stories of the people in the room we did experience a little bit of emergence and a I think everyone got some good ideas out of the session. If we had had more time, I would have then worked with the most interesting ideas (as determined by the group) and perhaps split people up into little design teams to figure out how these principles might work in a grounded engagement process. Then we could have melded these conversations together into some tools and approaches that might be useful.
I think the biggest learning for people was just how fast learning can take place when you are engaged in deep conversation about stuff that matters. And how the most important person in that kind of process is not the facilitator or the teacher, but the experts you are surrounded by, and the stories and experiences of your own life, seen in a new light.
As I have been updating my website and moving things around I have finally gotten to re-organizing the Open Space Resources page. The page now contains resources on the nuts and bolts of of Open Space and deeper learning organized by practice area. There are also links to articles, books, stories and internet resources to support practice and learning about Open Space.
I’ll continue to update the page (having it in a wiki makes that a LOT easier) and I’ll be adding a lot more stories of my own. I’m also looking at giving that page it’s own RSS feed soe folks can track changes. Feel free to stop by and use what you can.