Connection – yeah!

I really like these two comments by Johnnie Moore.

A great willingness to try stuff – group together with interesting-sounding people around the idea of a challenging-and-fun project. Minimum writing of rules. If it’s fun and works, do more. If it ain’t, form a different group.

And…

Still, I have a feeling that some form of love is what really holds together most of the collaboration in the world. Not the mission statements, goals, agendas, action points and other ephemera of management and consultancy.

How true. If only we could be in organisations how we like to be with our friends. I’ve seen so much time wasted in senseless meetings, being ‘seen’ to be doing the right, or expected, thing – towing the political line. I wonder what’s really stopping us from engaging more with the people who give us life, rather than drain it away? Johnnie’s first quote relates to an insight from his gaming (now what would be the best word to use here? obsession? addiction? hmmm….not sure I know JM well enough to presume that so I’ll go with the safer option of…) interest in WoW (for the uninitiated, including me – that’s World of Warcraft). Insight comes from many unexpected places – along as we’re open to seeing it.

Different Perspectives

On his site about goal-free living Steve Shapiro suggests that ‘expertise is the enemy of creativity – the more you know about a topic, the more difficult it is to look at it with fresh eyes’.

This is one of the reasons I like to try new things – things I have no idea about (apart from the fact that I have the attention span of a gnat and get bored doing the same thing – what’s the opposite of obsessive, I wonder…erratic? OK – I’ll get back to the point now.)

It would be presumptious of me to say this was an intended strategy – more like serendipity, or a pattern I guess, evident by looking back over the ways I’ve done things. It’s how I discovered Playback Theatre and then the Applied Improv Group – a rich, rich source of inspiration, ideas and great people to be with.

TED talks are also great – picking one at random. And so are blogs. And so are some conferences.

And I’m looking for new perspectives on facilitation. Different ways of seeing and knowing. Any ideas?

Radar 14/07/1993 – 18/02/2008

Role of facilitation in reconciliation

Facilitator as group leader; facilitator as organiser; facilitator as strategist; facilitator as innovator; facilitator as guide; facilitator as teacher; facilitator as visionary; facilitator as healer; facilitator as warrior; facilitator as peace maker.

Facilitator as peace maker – now that’s something you don’t hear very often. Maybe we should hear it more. Harrison Owen of Open Space Technology fame describes Open Space as a peace-making process, and Open Space facilitators as engaged in peace-making. That’s not to deny that other forms of facilitation can, and do, contribute to peacemaking. There’s no doubt the world needs more facilitators. There’s no doubt the world needs more peace.

My favourite cartoonist/illustrator

My friend Simon Kneebone lives near Adelaide in South Australia. We met many, many years ago when I was a young publicity officer and I saw one of his drawings on a poster produced by a Down’s Syndrome support group. He has always signed his work SK. I tracked him down and we have been collaborating on work ever since – more than 25 years. Our journey has taken us through such issues as child abuse, adoption and foster care, salinity, landcare, sustainability, participatory evaluation, community advocacy and now facilitation.

Sorry Day – Witnessing History

I can’t let this day pass without comment. As I’m writing this the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is making an apology to Australia’s indigenous peoples for past wrongs. He is saying sorry – at long last. You can read the words here.

My father grew up in Yarrawonga. He was second oldest of five boys. They are all dead now except for the youngest – my uncle Jack. I see Jack each year when he comes to Melbourne to march with the diggers, his mates, on April 25, ANZAC Day. His resemblance to my father is remarkable. Jack can talk under water. He’d talk to a fence post. My father said little, thought a lot. Drank a lot.

A recent newspaper article (I can’t remember who wrote it) spoke of our abysmal lack of awareness of Aboriginal languages (by White Australians). Most if us know no words in any of the many hundreds of Aboriginal languages. Yet we use them every day. Many of our towns, our rivers, our natural landmarks are derived from Aboriganal languages. Yarrawonga is one of those words. It means ‘where the wonga, or cormorant, builds in river gums’.  

My dad told me stories, sometimes, of how the ‘whities’ treated the ‘abos’. He was appalled by these actions, as I have been appalled by the fact that as recently as the early 1970s Government Policy enabled Aboriginal children to be taken from their families, often without the knowledge of those families. In all, 50,000 children were taken.

If you want to see a remarkable story of this aspect of Australian history, watch the 2002 movie Rabbit Proof Fence, directed by Philip Noyce.

My father would have been proud today. I am proud today.

Welcome to Country

At long last Australia’s Federal Parliament opened today with a traditional Welcome to Country by the original owners of the land, represented by Ngambri elder Matilda House-Williams. You can watch a news report of the opening here.

PASSION

I’m enjoying this blog of Stephen Shapiro’s and particularly like this piece about passion.I think it works well with the uses of passion and responsibllity as experienced in Open Space. Don’t think I’ll ever look at the word passion the same again.

Boundaries enhance creativity

I’ve been re-reading Free Play (you can see it over there on the left under Books I’m Reading). In it there’s a chapter on how limits enhance creativity. This was proven to me this week when I worked with a group of people who had to work out how to communicate some significant changes across their organisation.

Drawing on inspiration from two of my other favourite books – Made to Stick and Presentation Zen I got them to hone their core messages, whittling away any extraneous (or noisy) information and then got them to create a presentation with the following guidelines:
– max of 10 minutes to include any questions, discussion and feedback
– they could use ppt or create a presentation using A3 posters, or any other form they liked as long as they stuck to the following rules
– design the presentation on stickies first (ie storyboarding)
– no more than 6 words per slide or poster (ever!)
– no bullet points (no exceptions)
– no graphs or tables
– no fades, spins or other tricky manouvres

The results were amazing. They created and presented engaging and informative and diverse presentations. I think they even surprised themselves. The resulting messages and presentation designs have been posted on an internal social networking site for all to have access to and use.

My reflections:

1. If you believe that people ARE creative, give them the tools to BE creative, then guess what? – they’ll BE CREATIVE.

2. Boundaries matter. So do expectations. It doesn’t hurt to establish and reinforce these.

3. Transitions matter too. It’s useful to have a way of transitioning from the experience back to the real world of work.

Officially a fan of social networking

As of today (for no particular reason) I’m now officially a fan of social networking. When the Applied Improv group moved it’s web presence to ning I started to understand the potential of social networking. Since then I’ve set up four social networking sites of my own using CollectiveX – initially to play around and see how they work, and more recently as a part of my facilitation practice.

For the uninitiated, I think the benefits are:

1. Having all the discussions and other relevant info for a particular group available in the one location. This makes it easy to keep track of discussions around a particular topic or with a particular group without having to dredge through a whole bunch of emails.

2. Opportunity to have links to web sites, videos etc and to upload documents, and have discussion threads that are easy to opt in and out of.

3. Potential for warming up a group to an event, post activity evaluation, and continuing discussions. Enables transitions.

4. An opportunity to build community amongst a diverse group of people who nonetheless share a common interest, for example users of Open Space Technology.

5. I get email alerts of any activity so I don’t have to remember to check all the time to see if anything new is there. And I can manage my settings to get those alerts in a way that suits me.

6. When I log on to CollectiveX it lists all of my sites in a summary bar – makes it really easy to keep track of all my groups.

7. It’s free.

I’m not yet a fan of wiki sites – and the jury is still out on Twitter, but stay tuned.