In the Art of Hosting community over the past two years a group of practitioners have developed a tool called the Collective Story Harvest. I’ve used it several times and it’s a powerful and useful way to rapidly learn from the stories in the room. Today comes news frim Mary Alice Arthur, one of the developers, about recent developments with the methodology. I’m reporting in from the road again, this time from the airport in Chicago. I’ve had many opportunities to catch stories along the journey and this time, I’m here to report in on what’s been happening with the …
SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig. We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how …
Working with a client tonight who is beginning a process of trying to find some questions for moving forward. The client is a group of churches who are exploring how they might collaborate to undertake their joint mission together. There are a number of factors at play, and the environment they are working in is diverse. Tonight, with a few short hours, we’ll do a little story gathering. We’ll begin by exploring an uncontextualized Cynefin framework and then invite small anecdote circles to form around the question of “What are the challenges and role of our Churches in this …
A great quote from a post by Mark Simon: The more power you have, the more people will lis ten respectfully to your story. Consequently, listening to some one’s story is a way of empowering them, of validat ing their intrinsic worth as a human being. ~ Kay Pra nis A very important principle for design work.
Yesterday I had a chance to grab lunch with Dave Pollard in our local coffee shop on Bowen Island. One of the things we talked about was the supremacy of analysis in the world and why that is a problem when it comes to operating in complex domains. I have been intentionally working a lot lately with Dave Snowdon et. al.’s Cynefin framework to support decision making in various domains. It is immensely helpful in making sense of the messy reality of context and exercises like anecdote circles and butterfly stamping are very powerful, portable and low tech processes. Cynefin …