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The Parking Lot soundtrack

March 31, 2005 By Music, Uncategorized One Comment

As a musician one of my favourite things about the web is the way we can trade music on it. I am a music junky and with the rise of file sharing technology, my ears have opened wide at what is out there.

I’ve been toying around with Webjay for a while, which is a way of compiling playlists of music all of which, in my case, is offered free and legally by artists, record labels and others. I have two playlists in the “Little Projects” section to the left, one which is a small collection of Canadian songs and another which is my ever changing top 40 of world music. To those I now add this playlist, the soundtrack of Parking Lot, in which you may find a nice variety of tunes offered somewhat in the spirit of my favourite radio show, Late Junction from BBC Radio Three.

And so I’ll launch this soundtrack with this piece called “Here we Come Around” from Dear Nora.

Learning from how things really are

March 31, 2005 By Uncategorized

I was on a Skype call this morning with my friend Peggy Holman and we were noodling through the agenda for the summit I’m doing in May. Peggy and I are NOT linear conversationalists, and so whenever we talk we get into really delightful eddies and currents that do nothing to enhance our current productivity but which do make us better friends…

At any rate, we got talking about how the emergent process we use, like Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space and so on work well because they are based on how we human beings actually relate to and work with each other when we’re not thinking about it.

This morning I found this article in Worthwhile about JetBlue, another of the WestJet/SouthWest type airlines that seem to have a lock on customer service. Apparently, the CEO David Neelman was inspired by watching the way people were treated in a Brazilian village where he worked in a previous life. Of course this brought to my mind the story of Open Space Technology which Harrison Owen says began when he noticed the way things got done in a Nigerian village where he worked in the 1960s.

In the Worthwhile article, David Batsone asks:

“Why is it so hard to take the wisdom that we gain from our most meaningful personal experiences and translate them into good practice at the workplace? Most of the time we accept that is just the way the world of work operates. As a result, the company culture sputters along with its impersonal systems.

I challenge individuals to think differently. Personal lessons do not have to stay within our private borders. In fact, they are a fountain out of which flows our public creativity.

Neeleman inspires us to bring the best of who we are to the workplace so that we can bring more soul to our company culture.”

It should not be hard. Yesterday I had coffee with Jon Husband and Rene Barsalo of La Soci�t� des arts technologiques. Rene showed me an amazing slide which shows that human experience with technology. It looks at it in terms of generations, noting something like 1700 generations of experience with language before writing was invented. It has been 300 or so generations of writers, even fewer with the printing press and then the rapid fire changes brought on by telegraph, radio, TV, phones, faxes, computers and mobile technology. For well over 2000 generations, humans have evolved communication strategies that are based on synchronous conversation with someone you can see and touch and hear.

We have not yet evolved into homo wirearchus, and until we do, the best of who we are will continue to come from the best of who we have always been: small groups of people figuring stuff out together with conversation and personal contact. Technology can either serve that instinct or get in the way of it, and I believe THAT is the challenge we need to take up, in both the digital world and with the technologies of process and human interaction.

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Linkage

March 30, 2005 By Uncategorized

Everyday I troll a bunch of the blogs to the left and there is so much good stuff that I want to share and log here for later, that I’m just going to start publishing these excerpts, if you don’t mind. I realize that this may be a little redundant, republishing links and quotes without adding anything, but this stuff stands on it’s own, and besides, I might just come back to it at some point. So here you are with the latest batch:


  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Revolution: “The last class I took before I went out on the road was “The History of Southeast Asia”. The books were required reading. They were so dense with information that I wanted to read them again. I do not remember the titles or authors of the books. I just remember that my mind was blown wide open to the world of corporate dominance and man’s war on nature and indigenous people…I read these books while waiting for rides or during the long hours riding across America. I learned a very important lesson about listening, talking and peacemaking. If I were reading something I thought was true and shared it with the trucker and he thought it was untrue, I never challenged him. I asked him to tell me, in the form of a story if possible, what was not true about the reading. In this way I learned to listen to a much more expanded version of reality.” Via Ted Ernst.

  • A great joke on why you don’t mess with Canadian women.

  • The US Premiere of Amelia Cuni & Werner Durand’s “Ashtayama – Song of Hours” at Other Minds 10, 2004. An amazing 58 minute long piece of music: “An audio-visual meditation beautifully pure in its austerity and clarity of purpose. Raga-based Ashtayama embodies an Eastern idea of Time and the power of musical language to illicit emotional response�the �rasa� or essence. Cuni, one of the few Western women to have mastered the classical Indian �dhrupad� style of singing, joins creative forces with electronic composer Werner Durand and lighting and stage designer Uli Sigg in this multi-media phenomenon.”

  • Joseph Cornell on flow learning for kids: “n Western culture, especially, people often confuse knowledge with wisdom, and think that if we learn enough, then we’ll care enough. But knowing what we ought to do, and doing it are two different things. Tanaka Shozo, the pioneering Japanese conservationist, said, “The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.” For love is the greatest stimulant to the will.” Via word gravity.


  • Brian on educating for the unknown: “When I survey the educational landscape, what I see is a system that prepares people for what is already known, or at least, we assume we know it. And all too often, that which is known is of little interest to those who are told to know it. In other words, knowledge is not something that is integral to the individual. Knowledge is also given a static character in the system, and any movements or trends in knowledge are, at best, accommodated by the way of revised curricula and textbooks. This guarantees that a body of knowledge that is already completely removed from its context is also guaranteed to lag. If a body of knowledge is deemed to be controversial, it is either sterilized or abandoned. The level of underlying fear that permeates the education system is staggering.”

  • Dan O’Connor on the psychic cost of choice: “So the next time you find yourself overwhelmed by the dizzying variety of options to marginally enhance your state of mind with some cheap consumer good, it may help to recognize that the real opportunity cost of the choice you’re contemplating is not to be found in the prices of the goods you’re sifting through but in the loss of whatever peace of mind you had before engaging in your costly search.”

First draft of my summit design

March 29, 2005 By Uncategorized

The work continues apace on the design of the community summit on youth suicide. I have completed a sketch of the summit agenda which will bear much more fleshing out, but it has been a terrific challenge trying to work with all the ideas of all my conversational partners at the global water cooler and fit these into a short day.

At any rate, here’s what I’ve got so far (.doc). If you’re still interested in contributing thinking to this, I’m looking for some really good questions (I have a few in mind which I’ll post soon) and also how we might handle building a marketplace into the design phase.

As always, feel free to arrange a Skype call with me to discuss further.

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Improving conferences

March 26, 2005 By Uncategorized

Prompted by posts by Johnnie Moore Ton Zylstra and David Wilcox, I’ve been thinking about how we might improve conferences.

As a facilitator of Open Space Technology and other large group processes, I offer clients ways of radically transforming conferences to make them highly productive. But these meetings require changes in expectations and frames of reference that are sometimes too much for a client to go on. When you are convening an international conference on business and the environment, putting everyone in a circle and placing paper and markers at the centre of the room can sometimes seem too much of a change.

Of course, I would argue that this degree of change is EXACTLY what is required to move to another level of think about complex situations. But I don’t “sell” clients on stuff that they aren’t comfortable with. I’ll discuss with them how to get the most out of what they are willing to do and sometimes those conversations open up new possibilities. In most cases though, with respect to conferences, I’m generally asked to come into a room of a few hundred people sitting at round tables and make something happen.

Traditional conferences with plenary sessions, speakers and power points are a huge missed opportunity in most cases. Conferences are not everyday affairs. In general people convene them because they want something special to happen: sharing information, learning, taking things to a new level. Occasionally a conference is convened with an expressed intent to develop a consensus or make a decision. In almost every case, attention to logistical detail generally ignores attention to process. How do we make the most of the opportunities that any given conference provides us?

For me the answer lies in three things. First it’s important to contextualize each person’s reason for being at a conference. If you can take time to come to a conference prepared with questions and invitations and learning objectives for yourself, you will bring built-in filters to the hoards of information and options provided by most conferences. You will also maximize your learning.

Second, good conferences have easy ways of connecting people. Think about it in terms of a marketplace. If you are in a conference on local economies, and you want to develop a local clothing line, you need to find the local designers, manufacturers distributors and buyers. Without a marketplace (something as simple as a bulletin board, or as complex as an Open Space agenda wall, which structures the entire conference around invitations) you have no way of connecting to others.

Finally, conferences find their power when we can provide opportunities for real and intentional dialogue and conversation. It is a cop-out when conference designers place this critical function at the mercy of coffee breaks, question and answer sessions and “networking events.” For the most part there is very little thought given to connecting passion and responsibility at these events. If you get into a good conversation, it’s more about luck than anything else, and if you are paying $800 to attend a conference, you don’t want your learning based on luck. Serendipity has its place and these unstructured processes are powerful opportunities, but they are made more powerful by being offered with intention.

I stand by Open Space Technology as a conference format in and of itself and I have had amazing experiences seeing that process facilitating change, learning and emergence. Short of that though, and responding to Ton’s idea that maybe we can import Open Space elements into conference setting, I have been toying with the idea of what I am calling “keynote facilitation.”

The keynote facilitator combines the attention and energy of a keynote address with the process care of a facilitator. Instead of giving you great ideas from MY head and experience, as a keynote facilitator I help to set the context for your own learning, and guide process that invites you to turn to those in the room and begin to craft innovation together in collaborative conversation. I have been using World Cafe as a process for doing this recently at a national conference on Aboriginal forestry and a regional gathering on Aboriginal economic development and I believe that it does provide added value for participants who are able to get quickly deeply into the issues and questions they face. The process also helps to develop an emergent sense of what the conference as a whole is thinking about and it provides individuals with an opportunity to reflect on their reasons for attending and to become more intentional about that. With the hour or so assigned to traditional plenary keynote speakers, I can have a conference of people talking to one another, creating connections and seeking out partners.

Supporting that conversation during and after the conference is the challenge, and that is one that my friend Susan Neden in Saskatchewan has taken up with her Conference Quest software which supports conference attendees as learners on a journey, or a quest for a nugget or two of knowledge and innovation that might change everything about how they do business.

And if we offer anything less to people, I think we are wasting the great potential of the conference setting. I’ll be talking with Johnnie and Ton and Susan over the next week or so and I’ll report here what we discover in conversation about what the role of the keynote facilitator could really be. If you have thoughts leave a comment and maybe we can have a quick Skype call about it as well.

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