Touring with the band

While watching this excellent trio of talented Quebecois musicians known as Genticorum I was musing the nature of collaboration. Each of these musicians is no doubt talented in his own right, yet together they can do so much more. I saw this time and again over the last few days watching various bands perform. I saw them looking out for each other, building on each other’s strengths, creating something together than they couldn’t do alone. It reminded me of the challenge of working alone – of looking for others to collaborate with and the fun, energy and creativity that can emerge; the difficulty of explaining that to clients; and the expectations that, of course, musicians collaborate, but facilitators don’t need to. This facilitator prefers to be a band member rather than a solo performer.

Crumbs!

With shared interests in facilitation and open space, and a passion for improv, conversation, and exploring ideas, it was really only a matter of time before Johnnie Moore and I developed a workshop that brings all of that together in some way.  It’s called Crumbs! and you can read about it here on Matt Moore’s (no relation) web site.

Matt has invited us to Sydney to offer Crumbs! on May 13.

It’s about the tyrannies that oppress us and limit our capacity to be creative and innovative.

These tyrannies are the Tyranny of the Explicit, or the fear of not knowing; the Tyranny of Excellence, or the fear of not being good enough; and the Tyranny of Effort, or the fear of failure.

It’s going to be fun to explore these with Johnnie, and even more fun to explore how to bust them. We’d love you to come and play.

How might we design a conference?

I’ve been reading Tim Brown’s Change by Design and I’m surprised at how much the principles in the book about design thinking resonate around what Johnnie Moore, Chris Corrigan, Anne Pattillo, Geoff Brown and I have been doing for a national conference on evaluating behaviour change.

In collaboration with the conference organisers and hosts we’ve created a design team to bring some edgy thinking and practices to the delivery of what could have been yet another predictable conference. We’re thinking this conference will be anything but predictable.

Tim says “design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols”. And while design thinking has mostly been applied to objects and their functionality, more and more the principles have been applied to services and experiences.

He also explains some other principles of design thinking:

• building on one another’s good ideas
• direct engagement with people
• genuine reciprocity of interests
• investigative learning
• exploring questions around ‘how might we…’?
• the challenge and excitement of applying design thinking to problems that matter
• finding ways to encourage individuals to move towards more sustainable behaviours

So it seems that a conference that explores complexity and the art of evaluation within a context of behaviour change for sustainability just calls out for design thinking.

Geoff Brown does a great job in this slideshow of describing some of the key principles that underpin this Show Me The Change conference.

The heart of connection

When we find, and stay in touch with, people whose ideas and conversations align and challenge, who are generous and willing to share not only their insights, but also their fears and anxieties, questions and musings, whether we’ve met or not, this is the heart of connection. And it’s worth nurturing.

Post Script: Checking out a few of my favourite blogs this windy and rainy Sunday evening, I stumbled onto Hugh MacLeod’s latest post where he says:

The work people do is all driven by different things- money, ambition, intellect, sex, whatever. The work I do, and the work for a lot of people who read my blog and buy my cartoons, seems to be largely driven by the need to “connect”.

We like doing stuff that connects with people. We’re “Connectors”.

Spooky. I don’t think I read Hugh’s post before I wrote my own. Not today anyway. Maybe I read it yesterday, and just like Keith Sawyer writes in his book Group Genius, most ideas build upon others, are generated incrementally rather than as a blast of creative insight. Maybe this is an example. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence!

Possibility

Maybe it’s the time of the year – long days, warm evenings, sitting about with a bottle of wine, chatting with good friends. End of the year, beginning of a new one. Is it any wonder that ideas abound? That anything seems possible?

I was listening to Sir Ken Robinson on the radio today. He was asked about ‘lucky’ people – what makes some people lucky? He said it’s about seeing opportunities, rather than barriers. Whatever makes us lucky, I feel incredibly lucky – to be living right now, to be able to work in different countries and with amazing people, to have really good friends just around the corner and on the other side of the planet, to be able to use skype to pretty much talk to anyone, anywhere, any time, to have people who love me and support me, to live in a beautiful part of the world, to make enough money to be satisfied and not so much that I’m obsessed, and to have opportunities to take advantage of all that.

So I want to thank you for the part you’ve played, and to wish you a Happy Christmas or joyful holidays or just a relaxing break. And I’m looking forward to a lot more conversations, new and enduring relationships, and everything that flows from that.

A great meeting? Oxymoron?

I took part in a great meeting today. True!

And I’m not good at meetings. Usually. They drain my energy, leaving me feeling as though I’ve lost something. Just between you and me, I struggle to be ‘good’ at meetings. I have even been known to exhibit all the behaviours I most dislike in workshop participants (and maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this).

This meeting left me feeling energised.

So what made it different?

1. We threw away the agenda and had a series of questions to generate discussion.

2. We huddled (instead of making ‘camp’ – thanks to David Robinson for this description). Making ‘camp’ means that you select a seat and spread your stuff to claim your space. In this meeting, I invited (well, no, that’s not true, I just made it an instruction) to leave all of our books and ’stuff’ behind and sit as a tighter group up one end of one of those terrible long board tables.

3. We kept a record of our discussion using flip chart paper in the centre of the table (not up on the wall that would have created a further disconnect) making mind maps. Oh, and I also played with my new toy – the LiveScribe pen that records the conversations. Makes it easy to go back to later.

4. We invited another in who wasn’t in the room, using skype and a Mac laptop with a multi-directional screen so that his face (enlarged to fill the whole screen) was visible to all participants. Not only was he not in the room, he was on another continent and in a very different time zone, but was still an integral part of the meeting. The lap top was on the table, not projected onto a screen so that we could maintain the intimacy that encourages open discussion.

5. We kept to time. We agreed on a one hour discussion, then a break and then further discussion, until 15 minutes were left to quickly discuss some ‘business’ and we finished on time. Incidently, I discovered that the LiveScribe pen facilitates this by providing a discreet way of keeping track of how long we’d been talking.

Lots of lessons here for everyday meetings. Thankfully I don’t have to do this every day, and for those that you do, maybe some ideas to make them more, well, bearable?

A dilemma

Keith Sawyer has an interesting post about collaboration and learning. He concludes with this statement: “So many of our most important learning experiences happen when we are in groups with others, and this is why understanding collaboration is central to the study of learning.”

And therein lies the dilemma for those of us who work alone or in home-based businesses: how do we find opportunities to collaborate and therefore learn from others and enhance our own learning and creativity?

While skype and some of the social networking tools can help, nothing beats actually being together, f2f, in the same space, drinking coffee, tossing about ideas, sharing stuff and generally having wide-ranging discussions.

That’s why Moby in Torquay is my alternative office, where I’m always happy to meet up with others and chat.

On writing a manifesto

Today Anne Pattillo and I wrote a manifesto about Facilitating With Confidence. It was a useful way to tease out our thinking and to surface the arguments that underpin what we do. It was also a great exercise in collaborative writing. Here’s how we did it.

We started by capturing key thoughts – in any order. Statements about the world as we experience it and what we believe.

We then put a bit of structure around these thoughts:

• What we are arguing
• Supporting information; why it matters? Why you should care?
• Our response: what does it mean to facilitate with confidence?
• What difference it will make in the world
• Our challenge to you

We then worked on our arguments. Using the classic journalists’ tool of the inverted pyramid, we ranked our arguments so as each subsequent one built on, or supported the previous one. An if you only read the first argument, then you would have ‘got it’.

Our final edit came not in our draft writing, but as we created the look of the manifesto. We used Apple’s Keynote to design the layout. The reasons will be the subject of another post one day. As we designed each page, we refined our language and the emphasis. It was creative, exciting work and we are very pleased with the outcome. The next step is to make a slideshow.

We’ve submitted a proposal to Change This and will let you know if our proposal is accepted. If so, we’ll be asking you to vote on us writing the full manifesto (even though we’ve already done that, we’ll be keeping it to ourselves for the time being).

I found it a useful process for becoming clear about what I stand for, and for explaining what’s important. More useful, even, than doing a vision and mission, or, heaven forbid, strategic planning!

Rebooting

Last year, Anne Pattillo and I started up a new business together – Facilitating With Confidence. We’d tried our hands at facilitation training before and became frustrated when people learnt enough to ask us to come and do the tricky gigs, but didn’t have enough confidence to have a go themselves, even though we knew they were capable. Hence the name.

We’re passionate about building facilitation capacity in organisations and communities. So this weekend we’re having an Annual General Meeting! After all, it’s our responsibility as Directors of the company to have an AGM, surely!

So it might include some wining and dining as well. Have to keep our strength and spirits up while plotting, I mean planning, the NEXT BIG THING.

Let us know if you have any requests or ideas.

Me too!

Nancy White has a great post about how she uses social media. Here’s a summary with some of my favourite choconancy comments in italics.

• online community

“Eminds” was where I learned that online relationships can be real, how they get real, and  how they break and fail.

• online learning together

But regardless of the technology, how we use it always matters.

• communities of practice and learning

…social media has changed what it means to “be together.” It has changed our experience and understanding of being part of a group, a community or a network. It has created a massive multiplier of the options we now have to be with other people.

• global networks and knowledge sharing

When the door to connection is open, watch who walks through and follow them, not those who stand at the doorway and naysay!

Social media offers us incredible intellectual capital opportunities to link up the best and often most diverse minds to address a problem or opportunity.

• weaving across silos

Social media keep networks, their content and activities knitted together.

• (drawing) pictures
• blogging and doing business

The second great value blogging gave me was a place to “think out loud” with my network, to offer half-baked ideas and solicit help to finish baking them. It is the easy-bake oven of learning. Write, hit post, and you are in the learning lab.

• writing a book
• liberating my inner geek

Particularly as a woman of 51 years of age, this enormous software playground has given me a way to bend stereotypes of middle aged white women and technology. I look proudly at my mom who at 79 is rediscovering high school friends on Facebook and enhancing volunteerism through web tools.

Nancy concludes with the patterns she’s noticed:

• learning
• getting work done
• finding and connecting with people
• getting stuff
• exploring and pushing my boundaries

She says: “My practices have been radically changed and shaped – yes, even transformed – by social software.”

And I’m going to conclude by breaking one of the rules of social media. I’m not as far into my social media journey as Nancy, (and someone is sure to remind me that I still haven’t written that book) but nonetheless, ME TOO!