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What’s in the central garden?

June 15, 2016 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Evaluation, Facilitation, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy 6 Comments

A few years ago, Juanita Brown shared a very powerful image with me. She talked about how those of us that practice dialogue and facilitation in a deep way have access to various gateways that take us into a “central garden.” All of our pathways invite us into this garden where we come to discover and realize something about the role of dialogue, meaning making and collaboration. It is a set of realizations that lies beneath the practice of methods.

On a call today with my friend Mark McKergow, we were discussing this image  There are a bunch of us – although not a large bunch of us – from different practitioner communities who are always interested in transcending our methods and entering into this conversation.   Alongside Juanita, Mark has also been wondering “where is everybody else, and how come we’re not connecting?”

Today we were discussing the failure of dialogue to have enough presence to provide workable and practical alternatives to everything from public policy decisions (such as the EU referendum in Britain, or the polarization of US society) to the everyday challenges of managing and running large organizations, evaluating, strategizing and controlling outcomes, people and money.  

We know that our field of dialogic practice is massive, well researched and well documented.  We know that leadership literature is filled with the importance of relational and sense making work. We know that that mid-career professionals end up coming to our various workshops to take on skills and ideas that are fundamentally transformative to their work and lives and that they go back to places where “it’s difficult to implement” because other mid-career professionals are wedded to globalized management practices that are good enough for what they are trying to do, within the highly constrained performance frameworks within which they are forced to operate. We even know (thanks to people like Jon Husband) that global organizations like Hay Associates have spent the better part of a century ensuring that these management science constraints are widely deployed and understood. They frame everything, not without utility, but to the exclusion of almost every other way of organizing and being together in human endeavour.

So what is the problem? Are we just lousy storytellers? Are we being deliberately marginalized? Is there something fundamentally flawed about the ability of dialogic practice to actually be of value?  And how do we disrupt the standard set of management tools and the narcissism of our own communities of practice in a way that creates some serious openings for change?

What do you think?

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6 Comments

  1. Nicole McLellan says:
    June 15, 2016 at 6:45 am

    Great article Chris. I am a facilitation novice, but I too am surprised at the lack of value given to facilitators in the workplace (if I understand the question correctly). One idea that comes to mind is that often the host is not participating and therefore, ideally, a person is needed in the workplace that is not directly involved a given project to guide the discussion. I think managers have a hard time justifying this extra role. Maybe we just have to keep exposing those working on complex issues to the benefits of facilitated dialogue and keeping track of the value associated with that. How can we measure that value? Maybe that is the next question. It would be fun to create a scenario where two groups are given the same problem – one group is left up to their own means to come up with a solution and the other receives facilitation… I would be interested in the outcome and reflection. Do you know where this might have been done before?

    1. Chris Corrigan says:
      June 15, 2016 at 6:48 am

      I don’t know of anywhere this has been done. Of course such a test would be so context dependant that it might not have utility beyond specific cases, but me saying so just continues to validate the idea that what we offer is difficult or impossible to measure. I’m sure people have looked at this question. Thanks for sharing your experience!

  2. Michael Chender says:
    June 15, 2016 at 7:32 am

    I think we need more devilish senses of humour that allow us to put aside radical honesty, tell people what they need to hear, be tricky and cunning, strategic, political, and expand our arsenal of tools and willingness to work with power so we are not dependent on suasion alone on our fields of battle. If that is the case we are easily crushable and our fate is determined by the whims of others. I think we do better if we become well-rounded statesmen and stateswomen, people to be reckoned with and able to bring to the situation what it needs at that moment, regardless of our ideological preferences.

  3. Ben Wolfe says:
    June 16, 2016 at 3:37 am

    Great questions, that have me thinking pretty deeply about the hope and momentum (and many day-to-day challenges) of my own closest-to-home work, Peterborough Dialogues, which Peter Pula and I started a year and a half ago…

    I would love to talk to others who are doing dialogic change work that has these factors: deeply place-based, across many conversations, in a community of human scale. (Peterborough is a city of about 80,000, with a county of about as many more.)

    We’re in early days… We’re finding and feeling our way. But I feel like something that matters might be taking hold. It’s a community where ripples moving in different directions cross and recross. We’re starting from relationships and interconnections that are deep (decades-long in some cases) and multidisciplinary.

    I would really like to be in conversation about this.

  4. Mark McKergow says:
    June 16, 2016 at 4:41 am

    Thanks Chris. For me this is a conversation about effectiveness as well as about practice. As you say, many organisations don’t support and even interfere with effective dialogic practices, just at a point where the need for ‘management’ is decreasing. There seems to be a bit of a glass ceiling with a given way of organising which is proving stubborn – not just in facilitation but in therapy, coaching etc too. What happens when we take talk as action – not just from a critical perspective (a la Ralph Stacey), but from a constructive perspective too?

  5. Michael Chender says:
    June 16, 2016 at 9:47 am

    Ben,

    I’d love to have this conversation with you–we are doing something very similar in Nova Scotia through Engage Nova Scotia http://www.engagenovascotia.ca.

    I’m at mchender@eastlink.ca.

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