“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

Climate Change Cafés in Reno

by | Nov 29, 2007

This report came in from Wendy Mason of Reno, NV, about a regional initiative to address climate change:

"On November 11, the Nevada Coalition for Climate Protection (NC4CP) hosted an introductory meeting regarding The Climate Change Cafés. Over 30 attended with another 10 responding that they supported us in our endeavors. Our goal was to see if there was enough interest in Reno, Nevada to make the effort of putting on the Cafes worth it. We were also looking for a few more volunteers to join our team.

Climatecafe042

The meeting was a big success. We had many short presentations (synopses of the following books: World Café, Blessed Unrest and Low-Carbon Diet) and short informative videos like Paul Hawken speaking at last years Bioneers meeting, and a few videos from Dr. Emmett Miller. We also showed a very cute one-minute video called Wombat and presented a short overview of what the city of Reno was already doing to address the carbon emission issue.

We met in a very nice art gallery right by the river in the downtown area, with music in the background and fresh flowers, along with a nice assortment of finger foods, coffee and tea. We had the space and enough time that we were able to invite people to stay around and visit with us after the meeting as well as fill out a survey we had designed, which almost everybody did.

At the close of the meeting we asked who was interested in bringing these Cafés to Reno and everyone put up their hands. So, we have decided to move along towards the goal of presenting the first Café in early spring 2008.

We appreciated all the support found on this blog and the World Café site."

Day 3: Conversation Space Debrief

by | Nov 9, 2007

At the end of the conference, Conversation Space hosts gathered with Ginny and Janice from Pegasus, who had organized much of the conference organizers and supported this space in being created, in debriefing about the Conversation Space experience.

We started by taking them on a journey through our time together, using the richly illustrated graphics around the room, with those of us who were in the space at various time sharing our memories of what worked and the patterns we saw emerging.

We noted that several of the people who showed up on the first day because the other sessions were full ended up returning again and again throughout the entire conference.

Someone said how they’d seen so many friendships and shared work projects born in this room.

We were able to create a culture that flowed over into the lunch periods and the un-hosted time.

It offered a space for people to integrate what they were taking in, time to bring the information down from their minds to circulate in their hearts and bodies as well.

We shared how important it was that there was a window on the outside world, giving us the constant reminder of the larger context in which we are all held. The ability to see nature, in the trees and rain, and to feel her presence in our midst was crucial to many of us.

Beyond

We all concluded that this was a successful experiment that will definitely be expanded in next year’s offerings at the 2008 Pegasus Systems Thinking conference in Boston.

* * *

Day 3: Final Keynote and Closing

by | Nov 9, 2007

In the conference’s last session, Peter Senge’s keynote Collaboration: The Human Face of Systems Thinking, the founding chair of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning) answers the question of how this conference grew into being. After some reflection he says that on some level it is mysterious, how events like this conference come into being – the webs of connection and collaboration that just “happen”.

Peter refered to the cultural myth of being lost until a charismatic leader appears – and says that few of us actually know the meaning of the word charisma – ‘charism’ is a noun that has its roots in the church and means your gifts; so to be charismatic is to bring your gifts into the world.

Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes, some are quite eloquent, and there are others whose focus is elsewhere. So, is it really about the individual? No, and Yes. You don’t become a charismatic leader until you have spent some time discovering your gifts – not necessarily your talents, but your gifts – gifts, so you get to give something away.

Webs of collaboration form around these charismatic leaders, who are just people out there doing what they do to share their gifts in the world, and sometimes, somehow, these webs align.

Reflecting on social networks, Peter shared a story about Dennis Sandow from Hewlett Packard who regularly connects with work colleagues through an initiative he calls ‘Day Care for Dennis’. Trying to understand how work really gets done, Dennis takes the opportunity to hang out with his co-workers for a day or so and really get to know and ‘see’ them – who their networks of support are, what their issues and working patterns are. That’s how he and his team can tell what’s really involved in producing the results of the work they do.

To give us an experiential sense of this, everyone in the audience got the chance to share a story with others at their table about something we’ve done lately that we’re proud of. Afterwards, Peter led us in a process where first we wrote down all the people who were important to this success.  Then, we counted up three names from the bottom of our list and crossed the name off our list, then count up four, and cross them off. He stopped and asked us what came up as we crossed those two people off the list; what did it feel like, what did it lead us to notice, how would it have been different had those two people not been part of the team. Then we talked about what happened.

Here are some responses from my table and around the room:

  • Without those people I wouldn’t have had the same inspiration or felt the same passion
  • Without those two, it would have been a very different outcome
  • Without one of them there would have been no purpose
  • The person was key to the project
  • I saw that the whole was greater than its parts
  • I had an emotional relation to the first person, but in relation to the 2nd I was more aware of the practical aspects
  • I was aware of how I did not acknowledge any of these people or share the celebration, even though they were all crucial to the project
  • The system is self-healing, and without them others would fill in; it’s just our attachment to them that makes them seem crucial
  • Just the act of writing down the names is powerful
  • Sometimes I feel lonely in this work, and as I wrote down the names I realizes I don’t need to feel so lonely
  • Some of us were happy to cross folks off the list
  • I became aware of all those people sitting behind me

In reference to this last comment, Peter spoke about the variety of Native American tribes who all refer to the term “all my relations’. That’s why, he suggests, in circle work we always leave an empty chair for all those who couldn’t be here, but without whom we wouldn’t be here.

This begs the question of who depends on us, and who do we depend on? The very act of identifying the networks in which we live and work makes them stronger. We do a lot of stupid things in the world, Senge says, partly because we don’t even begin to see the systems of which we are part.

Collaboration across boundaries is equally important, but it’s not always so easy to see these collborations clearly. Over time, we can see that a lot of key networks are not visible because they cross boundaries, within companies (the silo effect) and organizations, and across them.

Get the System in the Room (Convening)
Heating and air conditioning systems cause a huge percentage of global greenhouse gasses, and there are more toxins in most people’s homes and workplaces than there are outside. Lead Certification is a system that certifies new buildings on a variety of criteria that together signify a more sustainable model of building. 20 – 30% of all new homes in the US are built under lead certification standards, while a few years ago that figure was 3%. How did all this come about? Because about had a dozen people came together in 1991 and said something needed to be done about the problem, but the building industry is very fragmented and competitive.

Many people in systems thinking have a truism “We won’t get anyplace unless we get the system in the room" – so they got everyone in this system in the room – people from the timber and construction industry, the engineers and architects, members of the community, town planners and legislators. It took about 8 years of gathering, and it wasn’t always pretty, but they knew if they couldn’t bring together all the parts of the system and work it out, nothing would change. They had to learn to listen to each other.

They started to work together in teams to make small agreements, then they started a healthy competition between groups to find the innovative solutions.

Seeing Reality through Others’ Eyes (Suspending)
We all tend to operate most of the time as if what we hear, see, perceive, is. This is illustrated in this quote by Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, “When one human being tells another what is real, what they are actually doing is making a demand for obedience. They are asserting that they have a privileged view of reality, somehow superior to the others.”

We must respect each other. It’s easy to say this, but until we start to pay a little closer attention to our internal reactions, those little reactions that occasionally slip out into our behavior or speech, we just continue on in the same pattern. But humans can tell when we are listening to each other, and while many of us are versed in the mental models of how to listen, we need to learn how to really do this on a deeper level.

Putting our Purposes Together (Committing)
Real commitment is no something you do; it’s something that finds you – something you fall into. One day you wake up and realize there is no way you could NOT do this.

Collective commitment comes from a time when people’s purposes come together. Collaboration happens at multiple levels – in our behaviors and how we treat each other; in our stystems, even when we don’t see them; and then there’s another level. People think about Africa as a basket place, but the truth is we’re all Africans, we all come from Africa. One of the things you learn when you’re in Africa is that the level of connection is stronger there than almost anywhere.

There is a story about a painter who worked in Africa. After a while he developed a relationship with an elder in the village where he worked; they talked about their dreams every morning and often the elder’s dream would be a continuing story. Well, one day he asked the elder about this dream, and the elder answered “Oh, I don’t have that dream anymore – the elder in the next village is having that dream now.”

* * *

The conference ended with a most magical video of Tim Merry doing performance poetry for this year’s Pegasus conference experience. I can’t wait to share it with you, because it was really fantastic. The Pegasus staff promise it will be on their website, so I’ll link to it as soon as it’s up.

Here are a few lines I managed to catch from the fast flowing river of his verse:

“Human beings aren’t a curse, we’re a gem in the purse of the universe”

“We are native to this place, we are part of this space.”

I couldn’t stop myself from singing along with the chorus to this fabulous poem, and I could hear that there were others in the room doing the same thing:

“Look around you, who’s about you, 900 human beauties surrounds ya’”

And so they did, and so they do. As Tim says, just “look around you.”

* * *

We did a final debrief with the conference organizers about the Conversation Space, and if you’d like to hear what happened, click here.

Day 3: Conversation Space

by | Nov 9, 2007

In this last conversation space gathering of the conference, we took up the questions Tom and Sharon had raised in the morning’s weaving and talked about what we would bring with us in the transition back to “home”. After some popcorn-style conversation we went around the circle, answering “What question will you be bringing home with you?”

Here is an image of our answers to that question:

Questions

It was created out of a vision that one of us – I think it was Teresa – shared about us sitting around the fire together here and each of us taking an ember from that fire home to put in our own grate and serve as the spark to build our own community fires, beacons to gather others around. She saw those fires, too, growing strong so that in turn they could produce new embers for others to take home to start fires in other communities.

One of the words that came from our conversation was a beautiful Sanskrit word from the popular book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert that resonated with many of us as soon as it was spoken. It was “antevassin” which means edge dweller – one who lives on the edge of the forest. That place between, where the path can be seen and is able to be shared with those others who live deeper in the forest.

* * *

For the next part of the chronological harvest, click here for Peter Senge’s keynote.

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.