“Whenever knowledge connects with knowledge, new combinations spontaneously take place. Ideas spark ideas, which synthesize with each other until more knowledge results. It is completely natural… Sharing knowledge means bringing more people into the conversation.”

~ Verna Allee

Stories

Day 3: Morning Weaving

by | Nov 9, 2007

At the last weaving session of the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference, Tom and Sharon shared some of what they’d heard in conversations throughout this event, including many comments about the loneliness of being isolated in our organizations and how good it is to be here among so many ‘kindreds’

They talked about Van Jones, who was consciously changing the terms of the conversation by inviting groups that don’t usually sit together into a powerful conversation of collaboration that has the potential to change our world.

Van had been beating his head against the system to the point he’d collapsed, and the system didn’t even say “ouch”. This morning Tom was looking out his window (the views in this hotel are stupendous) at the water and the elevated railway and the streets below and suddenly had the realization that he was LOOKING at the system, and that we are creating a system here together. Watching the dawn arise, he noticed that dawn actually begins before there is any light. The light gradually increases, almost imperceptibly, and then the dawn chorus arrives and the vibrant bands of color that announce a new day.

“Who and what are the heralds of the new day in our lives and organizations?” he asks us, “And how can we establish a relationship with them, and the new day that is dawning in our lives and in the world?”

Sharon suggests that maybe the heralds are in our dreams, and shared an urgent communication from a young autistic child who had dreamt about us, and felt that we needed to know about ‘the yellow card’, so he asked her to share his dream with us.

Sharon described the yellow card as an imaginary strip, almost like a gauge – a line with 5 marks on it with which to measure emotions. If one were feeling angry for example, the could stop and look at the strip to determine just how angry they were and what to do about it. For example, if it said ‘1’ you’d know that you were just a little irritated and you could ignore it and walk away. If it said ‘2’, you’d be a little more irritated and probably a bit frustrated, but you could still just walk away and maybe do a couple of wall push-ups. If it said three you were probably pretty angry and would need to breath a lot. If it said ‘4’ you were really mad and would have to take your yellow card and get out of town for a while! If it said ‘5’ you’d know you were really furious and you’d probably need to go get a glass of water!

So we end the weaving with a few questions for conversation in our small groups, “What are the 3-5 images or metaphors or phrases  from this conference experience that will stick with you?” and “What is one thing you’ll do tomorrow to take this image forward in your life?"

Tom and Sharon both remarked on the progressive change of tenor in our collective conversational voice as we’ve moved through the conference. From the excited, slightly ungrounded beginnings to the deepened voice of relationship, of old friends, today.

We’re left with two more questions to take away “How do you make this experience part of “home” for you?” and “How do you imagine home will be different because of your time here?”

* * *

For the next part of the chronological harvest, click here to hear about the last hosted Conversation Space.

Conversation as a Radical Act

by | Nov 9, 2007


(more videos of CARA here)

This wonderful morning break-out session at the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference in Seattle was an all-girl collaboration by Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulies and Nancy White (with me making up a silent fourth with my blog harvesting of the story).

“I grew up with crosses burned on my lawn” Juanita began, “a true child of the revolution with activist parents, but I didn’t call my talk Conversation as a Radical Act for that kind of politically radical reason. It came from a deeper exploration of what the meaning of the word radical means… which is getting down to the real root of the matter.”

Juanita

The morning after the World Café was born in my living room with a
group of intellectuals from around the world exploring intellectual
capital, we came downstairs with our morning coffee wondering “What
happened there?!” We began to tape interviews with each other trying to
find out what it was that had brought out the ‘magic’ we’d each
experienced the night before. At some point I had an ‘aha’ and
connected what had happened there in my living room with the house
meetings I’d experienced in my early work with Chesar Chavez and the
United Farm Workers Movement. We met around tables in the kitchens of
humble farmhouses and our conversation traveled from house to house –
the new meanings that were being created through those conversations
started a social movement, and we had experienced something of that
flavor in our conversation.

My friend Meg Wheatley was an early supporter of my work and she
invited me to host a World Café at a conference that her organization, Berkana Institute, was putting on. While I was there I saw a quote by Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana in a talk by Fritjof Capra:

“We bring forth our worlds through the networks of conversation within which we participate.”

The power of these words struck me a very deep level and I wept as I
realized that the ideas we were exploring in the World Café were backed
by science and other people’s experience. What if we really could bring
forth a world of coherence and life-affirming meaning out of our
conversations?

What if the phrase “What we view determines what we do….” was true,
and we could change the core image of the social systems of which we
are all a part?

Juanita ends her introduction to Conversation as a Radical Act
by asking us to embrace the hypothesis that we could think of our
organizations and as webs of co-evolving conversations and
meaning-making.

* * *

The creative genius of Nancy Magulies stepped forward with an
exercise she said came straight from the 60s – a guided journey where
we imagined ourselves as beings who carry and are surrounded by
brilliantly colored fields of thought conveyed through conversation. An
interaction of colors that mix and swirl and change with our collective
experience of meaning-making, being breathed out into the air through
our voices to ultimately change the way we all see the world around us.

Nancy seeded the group conversation with Let’s assume that this
process is as powerful as we say it is; what one or two things could
you do to take advantage of this power of conversation, this
life-affirming practice?, asking us to write them down on cards.

[I write “Use words and images that are loving and kind, colorful
and beautiful, and connect us with nature” and “imagine each person I
meet is perfect”.]

Then, instead of moving around to another table like we would if we
were in a World Café, our ideas move around instead as we exchange
cards with someone at another table and read them aloud to our
table-mates. The decibel level of conversation in the room goes up a
notch as people share the new perspectives they’ve received from each
other.

* * *

Nancy White appeared and invited us to use the energy in the
room, the unfinished quality that is still buzzing in the space between
us, to share these ideas with the whole.

Here is some of what people said:

  • I noticed the similaritites – even to the color of pen we
    chose, that flowed from one table to another. We all seemed to be
    having the same issues… the languages were different but the ideas were
    the same. My color was orange, for example, and I was addressing the
    people who are on the margins, wanting to invite them into a safe
    conversation. I received a card, also written in orange, saying ‘Invite
    people from my five departments”. Well, I don’t have departments in my
    work, but I too was wanting to use the café to bring in different kinds
    of people
  • This is a relational way of interacting, where we give something of
    ourselves that is not of our ego. Realizing that we are part of a
    larger whole, but not trying to convey a certain outcome.
  • I’m seeing patterns in our attempts to create systems that are
    integrated – it makes me think that we need to be integrated in
    ourselves in order to create businesses that are integrated.
  • Passing the images from one to the next, signals that get brighter as they go forward.
  • Questioning, Connecting, Acting.
  • Finding questions that travel well in the system that you are part of.
  • Ask – and model – were themes that came through for many people.
  • The pattern at our table was not complicated – just the need to talk. The organic open space to talk.
  • Ours patterns were about talking to people differently than we normally do, and talking to different people.
  • Going from “ask” to “listen”
  • We kept seeing “sharing” and inviting people into the conversation that don’t usually talk.
  • Speaking without fear and having trust for other people. We also
    discussed why conversation is so valuable now – what have we lost for
    it to feel so precious?
  • Be open and honest, true to yourself; visual a positive future; be a catalyst.

Everything we have heard, Nancy points out, the common thread that
weaves through everything that has been said is all about the web of
conversation. "What are these threads that can connect us even when we
don’t know each other?" she asks. With the internet, we can now see a
conversation move around the globe at a rate we never could have
imagined before. Before most of us could only have an effect our own
areas of work or life; now we can change the world. These tools offer
the capacity to involve many more people in the conversation.

We’d like to invite you into spreading the ideas we’re coming up
with today… As an experiment we’ve created a wiki– a web page that
anyone can edit – to share our harvest today. Here’s the link:

http://conversationasradicalact.wikispaces.com

We’ll post the photographs from this session and if you leave us
your cards we’ll make patterns from them, photograph and post those
too.

Maybe you will have a look at the wiki and see the patterns that are
emerging from your ideas in combination with others… maybe you will
bring those patterns into a conversation in your own organization or
community or family.

"These ‘artifacts’", Nancy says "can be brought in to support the
conversation wherever you are and you too can be part of a conversation
that can change the way change is made…"

* * *

To close, Juanita says "Many people think of the World Café as
a process for holding great conversations." Yes, AND its deeper
potential is to share this large-scale possibility and to support us
acting in small ways within our own systems. Through this capacity of
conversation to transform itself, we know we are not alone.

Christopher Alexander says that all living systems are made up of
wholes at every level of scale, and that life-enhancing shifts in these
systems do not come from grand plans and edicts but from the repetition
of millions of small acts carried out throughout the system, whatever
its scale. Every act helps to repair some older, larger whole, but the
repair not only patches it, it modifies it, it transforms it and sets
it on the road to becoming something else, something entirely new.

That’s what we’re about here – co-evolving, sharing and re-shaping
our futures together. If we’ve brought ourselves to this place, there
is no reason we can’t go somewhere else. With the tools humanity has
created, we can make this change happen even faster than ever before.

Then Juanita shares a diagram of something she’s been working on:
Wiseaction

As an experiment in ideas, to see how we can begin to inform our
co-evolution together of conversation as a radical act, just imagine
that conversation is the root act of this transformative process…

People are always talking about issues… but if we don’t connect
these issues to what Juanita is calling architectures of engagements –
those processes that bring new voices into the conversation – then
people are going to be working on the issues in the same ways we have
always done. We’ll create social movements, but we won’t necessarily be
creating wise action.

Imagine a key issue or question that you care about…

Put your issue on the left (the what), and on the right imagine the
how, or the approach or process by which you will engage people in
working it through, and on the top – the who, what are the voices that
you would like to bring into the conversation? Who needs to be at the
table in order to make sense of this issue?

Our hypothesis is that out of this interface, wise action will emerge.

Day 2: Evening

by | Nov 9, 2007

We co-hosted an informal pre-dinner reception this evening with our friends and colleagues at Berkana Institute and Art of Hosting. The room was bursting with the energy of the conference (Van Jones had just spoken) and the sense of friendship and collaboration.

In lieu of a formal welcome, an impromptu story began to weave between us, amplified by two little hand-held microphones and our deep listening as we heard of World Cafés in Saudi Arabia, China, Japan and Wisconsin, Berkana learning centers in Zambia and Art of Hosting in indigenous British Columbia.

We heard about conversations of hope – in hospitals, in business offices and jails, online and in person – and as the microphone wentaaround and the stories poured out, I experienced an ever-increasing sense of shared purpose weaving between us all at the macro-level. The form in the stories we told were quite different, but the willingness to step into the conversation about things that really matter was the same in all of them.

After the reception, many of us continued the conversation at dinner, weaving the web of relationship ever more strongly and beautifully.

* * *

 

To continue reading the harvest of the 3rd and last day, click here.

Day 2: Afternoon

by | Nov 9, 2007

Coming into the afternoon session of day two, the weaving between Tom Hurley and Sharon Eakes started to thread together the themes of emerging patterns.

Tom talked about the challenge of holding the moment of stillness – presencing – in a reality that is constantly changing. He referenced his aikido master who is not always in his center, but – crucially – knows how to return to his center when he loses it. So, nurturing the practice of returning to source on the banks of the river while engaging in the flow of the stream.

* * *

Juanita’s afternoon session, Conversation as a Radical Act, hosted in collaboration with Nancy Margulies and Nancy White was incredibly powerful and held a truly radical role for the conversational arts in the transformation of social issues. Because of its relevance to so many other conversations, I am giving it its own post to make it easier to link to, and going directly on to Van Jones’ talk here.

I was unable to make the afternoon keynote by Van Jones, who is co-founder and chair of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California, which was one of those talks the whole conference was buzzing about from that moment onwards. Like other inspiring and thought-provoking conversations being generated here, you can almost see the effects from Jones’ work rippling out from here, far into the future all across the land.

I had the privilege to have seen Van Jones very recently at the Bioneers conference, so I know first-hand how paradigm-changing his passions are – "Green Jobs, not Jails", how we are leaving whole populations behind in our ‘progressive’ moves into a better future, and how a idealogical collaboration between economics, environmentalism and social justice is necessary for there to be real change in any of them.

Again, I defer to Nancy  Margulies’ deft harvesting of the key points of Van’s talk:

Vanjones1

Vanjones2

Vanjones4

Vanjones5

If you want to read my harvest of Van’s session at Bioneers, click here.

To continue reading chronologically, click here for a harvest of Tuesday night’s co-hosted reception .

Day 2: Conversation Space

by | Nov 9, 2007

The Conversation Space was jumping as the group began to integrate some of the powerful concepts from Otto Scharmer’s talk. Gabriel Shirley shared an insight he had about the moment of ‘now’ being not a quick blip in a continuum between past and future, as he had often imagined, but rather an expanding present, reverberating in all directions. He had a wonderful image for this insight, too – Otto Scharmer’s dot of presencing with increasingly larger parentheses echoing out on each side.

Tag

At the same time there was a whole new harvesting movement being born with Chris Corrigan beginning to identify patterns he was discerning in the graphics by ‘tagging’ them with words written on colored post-it notes. Several people were joining in, and Nancy White and I extended the practice out into the hotel’s common spaces and other areas of the conference … tagging the patterns and links we saw there. At one point we got so excited we spun off into an imagine of covering each other with descriptive tags and tagging  strangers as street performance.

* * *

To keep reading chronologically, click here for the afternoon weaving.

Day 2:AM

by | Nov 9, 2007

Tom Hurley brought us into the second day with a moment of silence, imagining ourselves standing in front of the blank canvas of the day. “Listen to the room breathing”, he muses, a line in a poem by Lorca “there are spaces that ache in the uninhabited air”, suggesting these spaces as our collective mind.

Hurleyday1

The morning’s conversation with the whole was seeded with “What are the questions in our collective mind and heart today?”

Chaiwat Thirapantu from Thailand stood up and said: “How can we make the American people be mindful when they go to the polls on election day!” which got a big laugh and many nods.

“How can we combine the breadth of social networking with the depth of stillness (presencing)?”

* * *

The morning’s keynote was by a team at Boeing. I couldn’t make it, but the genius of Nancy Margulies was at work and she harvested these images of their talk:

Boeing1

Boeing2

Boeing3

Boeing4

Boeing5

Boeing6

To keep reading chronologically, click here for Tuesday’s Conversation Space.

Day One: Evening

by | Nov 9, 2007

Monday evening we had a dinner with some special guests from Asia to honor the publication of the new Japanese and Taiwanese translations of the World Café book.

There were five members of the Japanese translation team, including Daisuke Kawaguchi, who had been my main contact throughout the process, and his colleagues Toshimitsu Kanekiyo, Kazuaka Katori, Mikako Yusa and Riichiro Oda; Stephen Meng from the Taiwan translation team was there and Chaiwat Thirapantu from Thailand, along with Alfred Hanner of Saudi Arabia.

We were all tired from a long full day and our various travels, but the energy was wonderful, the stories inspirational and the conversation incredibly rich and heartfelt. Sitting next to Japanese colleagues I learned that there is a new online World Café community being formed in Japan, and that Riichiro had himself hosted seven World Cafés in Japan this year, the most recent being one on Climate Change.

I fell in love with each of these incredibly kind and thoughtful people as I found myself relaxing after the full day, being asked wonderfully gentle and stimulating personal questions like “What is your vision of the future” and “What do you hope for in your own life?”

* * *

 

To keep reading this harvest chronologically, click here for Tuesday morning’s weaving and the keynote by Boeing.

Day 1: Afternoon

by | Nov 9, 2007

Weavers

In the afternoon weaving Bard Hurley gave us a metaphor for what he sensed “in the field”, a beautiful image from James Mitchner about a slow accumulation, a melding of meaning like individual droplets of dew gathering together to create a river. We were invited to take a moment and reflect on the intention that had brought us each here, and then share with each other what had been meaningful in relation to that intention so far.

In my small group a bishop form NJ shared his intention as a wish to experience a “moment of light”.

***

Otto Scharmer jumped right into the “Theory U and the Blind Spot of Leadership”, which offers a lens that sheds light onto a blind spot in our understanding of leadership – the crucial importance of the leader’s interior condition.

For example, as a painter you could have a completed painting, which is the “result”. It came into being through the process of painting, which is the “how”, but at the source you have the blank canvas, the moment of origin, the blind spot where you are present with the creative process.

He illustrated this moment of origin in an amazing bit of footage taken of the great operatic tenor Placido Domingo and a virtuoso conductor whose name I didn’t catch. In this film, there is a moment where the conductor and Domingo become one. The whole room felt it like a thrill, a surge of electricity, and when it was over Otto asked us to describe what they’d seen. Here are a couple of the responses: “I saw them touching the divine, becoming one”, “an opening – one moment manifesting through two people.”

Otto pointed to this moment of presence between the conductor to the tenor as an example of a shift in leadership – at times like this a crack appears, he says, and there is a choice – to let the ego get out of the way and hold the space for something else to emerge, or to try and control the space and bring it “back on track”.

When the ego can get out of the way, perception begins to extend to the whole. It shifts from the inside to the outside in an empathic listening, where feelings are organs of perception and boundaries break down. All the attention is focused on the emergent. You step back and create an empty space where others can step in and something new can emerge from the “pregnant” aspect of the now.

He described four types of listening – in the first, of old patterns, the person is situated inside themselves. In the second, the move to the edge of themselves and begin to see possibilities. The third is empathic listening, where the focus is outside oneself, in another. In the fourth mode of listening you are listening from the emergent, simultaneously focused inside yourself and in everything around you, shifting the place from which you operate and staying with the moment of stillness at the moment of presence.

The slidehow that illustrated his talk shows his theory of two sources of learning and learning cycles, and two cognitions: [Download Otto_Scharmer.ppt (561.0K)]

Presencing, Otto says, is “sensing” and beginning to operate from that place in the now. The future shows up in our heart first. The mind can only see what has happened in the past; to connect with the future we have to activate a new source of learning – the heart.

He points out that when you are connected to source in this way, your “hands know what to do”, and that conversely, you need to embody something in order to really learn it. If you always let someone else take the lead, like the prevailing ‘expert mode’ encourages, you never learn how to lead yourself. So, he advises, get out of the institutional bubble, connect with what really matters to you, and do it!

The ultimate “open will” stage of the “U” is operating in harmony with what is around you. Each of us is two selves, he says, the small self and the Self – who we can become in the future. Presencing is these two selves connecting and beginning to act together.

***

To continue chronologically and read about Monday evening’s dinner with our book translation colleagues from Asia, click here.

Day 1: Conversation Space

by | Nov 9, 2007

After the first keynote by Debra Meyerson, the conference moved into the morning’s concurrent sessions. This year we had arranged to have a conversation space available throughout the conference that would be hosted during the scheduled morning break-out sessions and afternoon forums.

Several of us from a variety of hosting communities – World Café, Open Space, and Art of Hosting – had gotten together, created a hospitable environment and devised a hosting schedule so that there would always be at least two hosts collaborating during each session. This first session was mine, working with the amazing Nancy White.

I was a bit nervous because this was the first one and would set the
tone. I’d never formally hosted a conversation before and hadn’t had
the chance to huddle with Nancy to get a sense of what we would do,
which I had expected we would. To compound my insecurity, most of the
initial people who gathered came because the other sessions were all
full. 

But even from the beginning the hosting team was attracted to play
together no matter whose ‘turn’ it was, so there were several others
there to give me courage and support and it soon became clear that I
knew exactly what to do. The conversation space was launched!

Temperedradical

As our small circle grew to over 20 people, and the conversation began
to weave its juicy way around, our experiences from the morning began
to settle and reflect themselves back to us. Through the speaking of
our words and the listening to each other’s words, through the essence
that Nancy sensed in the conversation and translated into visible form,
colors, images, metaphors and phrases for us to see, we began to
integrate the information we had taken in and ground it. We began to
bring it through the cognition of our minds and into the knowing of our
hearts and bodies.

For the continuing blog harvest, of the afternoon session of the 1st day, click here.

Systems Thinking in Action 2007

by | Nov 9, 2007

This post is the ToC for an in-depth harvest of the 2007 Pegasus Systems Thinking in Action conference, held in Seattle, Washington.

If you were there, please use the comments link at the bottom of
each post to give your own perspective or share your experiences at the
conference, and if you weren’t, please add your questions and ideas.
(Use the Quick Link guide below, or start at the beginning and just follow the links straight through)

 Prelude – A quick background of the relationships behind our collaboration and the role the World Café played at this year’s event

Day 1: AM – Monday’s morning weaving & Debra Meyerson’s Keynote on ‘Tempered Radicals‘

Day 1: Conversation Space – The first hosted Conversation Space session

Day 1: Afternoon – Afternoon weaving and Otto Scharmer’s Keynote on ‘Theory U‘

Day 1: Evening – Dinner with the Japanese book translation team and other colleagues from Asia

Day 2: AM – Tuesday’s morning weaving & a Keynote by the team from Boeing entitled ‘Synergy of Action: Large Scale Change Takes Flight at Boeing‘

Day 2: Conversation Space – Tuesday morning’s Conversation Space session

Day 2: Conversation as a Radical Act – Juanita Brown’s presentation, with Nancy Margulies and Nancy White

Day 2: Afternoon – Tuesday afternoon’s weaving and Van Jones’ Keynote on ‘Multiplying our Impact‘

Day 2: Evening – Informal open reception co-hosted by The World Café, Berkana Institute & Art of Hosting

Day 3: AM – Wednesday morning’s weaving session

Day 3: Conversation Space – Wednesday’s hosted Conversation Space session

Day 3: Final KeyNote & Closing – The last Keynote, Peter Senge’s ‘Collaboration: The Human Face of Systems Thinking‘, and the conference closing

Day 3 – Conversation Space Debrief – with the Conversation Space hosting team and the Pegasus conference organizers