Category: community indicators

From Control to Free Floating Reverie

Fresh Post! No Archive redraft!

Johnnie Moore pointed to a great LinkedIn post by Laurence Barrett that resonates with my current “fallow” project. It is no accident that Johnnie is an advocate of “unhurried!”

Laying fallow, I can reflect, observe and cross-pollinate ideas and experiences that surround me because I have the free time and head/heart space to do that. I am not fully confined by a large set of obligations. Yes, the grandkids are still #1 priority and that is a place for much of my energy, but the freedom from deliverables is quite intoxicating. I am available for reverie!

I’m pulling out two quotes, but it will make much more sense if you go and read the whole post! And don’t miss the P.S. at the bottom, which is fodder for even more reflection and blogging!

Mr. Barrett is talking in the context of coaching and the dynamic of “containment.” When I read it, I immediately thought about how a facilitator may try and contain human interaction in the well-intentioned service of the goal or purpose of a gathering. As group process folks, we have the opportunity (motive! means!) to create containers where people might do something different and more effective if engaged in something more free floating than overly structured.

The older I get, the more I sense that a lot of group process practices are about how we actually make a space less welcoming, “safe,” etc. Instead, Barrett reflects on another way that is less contained, and more “free floating.”

Here we may think of it as a dynamic, mutual and rather messy process of meaning making. Images and associations arise from the unconscious to be exchanged and evolved in what Wilfred Bion termed a ‘reverie’; a free-floating dialogue without defined goals and objectives.

In reverie both coach and client are ‘in’ and committed to the dialogue. Both can potentially be transformed.

And…

If our need to be ‘masterful’ or ‘powerful’ (words I see in some coach training) prevents us from entering a reverie we do not contain our clients, we just limit them.

A client is contained not by the coaches calm, rational, objectivity, but by our engagement and involvement, and both parties may be transformed by the encounter.

Pretending we are wisdom figures may fuel our narcissism or hide our anxiety, but it is definitely not containment.

I have worked hard through my professional life to show up not as some sort of wisdom figure and to engage in reciprocal work and learning. But there are old patterns in there that creep up in my head saying “I know what to do here.” Fully recognizing those moments, and choosing to let go, is something quite wonderful. And a door to reverie. (Using a “door” metaphor also reminds us there are many ways to think about space and containers. See this wonderful piece about other ways to think of space.

P.S. I love the four fundamental principles Mr. Barrett’s company espouses. I love them so much I took a screen shot. Mr. Barrett, if that is not OK, let me know and I’ll take the image down!

Image of four principles of Heresy Consulting. Each has an image, then the words underneath including: All change is a step into the unknown, Only through difference can we learn, Leadership is an expression of the soul, and We are made through our relationships.
The four principles of Heresy Consulting https://www.heresyconsulting.com/

The Lessons of Endings: Part 1

I was in an email conversation last week about endings. Endings of collaborations. Endings of communities of practice. Something I want to ponder and write about. It seems to me, like in any other part of our lives, we do little to build a literacy and practice of endings. Endings provide an amazing place for reflection and harvesting of insights. Things dawn on us that we might have been too busy to notice.

A soft spread of dawn colors of pink, orange, purple and gray over two small islands in the Skagit River Estuary, January 22, 2022.

When I dove back into the draft archives today, I dug the quote below out of the 2011 and it rose to the surface. And shockingly (yay Scott Rosenberg’s personal blog), the post is still web-viewable. TT refers to Table Talk, the online community hosted by Salon.com.

Two things stand out. First, Scott’s important note that we should not confuse community with content. Still true.

Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t after-thoughts, add-ons, or sidebars. They are the point of the Web.

Scott Rosenberg – fuller quote below

Seems we still do worship content over conversation and community, albeit now in the guise of simply “social media.” (I’m talking to you, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, et. al…)

Here is what the Salon community staffer wrote of the Table Talk (TT) community closing, quoted from Scott’s piece, because Salon’s is no longer online…

Over the years in TT, we occasionally had members who said they were suicidal, and their virtual friends rushed to offer very real assistance. We had a few members meet and fell in love. Some even had kids. There are people living now in the world because of this funny place, and of that I am proudest. And though this is the end of a nearly 16-year adventure that I adored being part of, it’s not the end of the friendship and the wisdom and the sass that made this, truly, one of the very best places to be on the Net. We’ll see you around, I promise.

via Au revoir, Table Talk – Inside Salon – Salon.com. (DEAD LINK – see, Salon.com didn’t thing this was worth saving… nw) 

Did we still see each other “around?” That brings me to the second thing that poignantly comes up for me is how we honor – or don’t – conversation anymore.  It is diluted by breadth, rather than nurtured, contemplated and developed in depth. Not to get maudlin or talk about the “good old days,” but if I’m spending my time skimming posts on FB, Instagram, Twitter; leaving drive by likes or comments, how much conversation am I really part of? Not much. 

As I continue my sabbatical, my “fallow period,” I’m luxuriating in the availability of time to go a little deeper. And maybe cut out some of that breadth. 

Here is Scott’s fuller quote: 

I don’t second-guess Salon’s leadership for deciding to end TT today — I might well do the same in their shoes. I do think there’s a lesson here, though, not just for Salon but for all the other enterprises out there today that dream of doing what we tried for so long to do at Salon. (Hi, Arianna; hi, Tina.)

The lesson is simple: Don’t think of “conversation” and “community” as subsidiaries to “content.” They aren’t after-thoughts, add-ons, or sidebars. They are the point of the Web. Here’s how I put it in Say Everything:

[Interactivity] is just a clumsy word for communication. That communication — each reader’s ability to be a writer as well — was not some bell or whistle. It was the whole point of the Web, the defining trait of the new medium — like motion in movies, or sound in radio, or narrow columns of text in newspapers.

Editors and publishers keep crossing their fingers and hoping to find some new platform that reverses this principle and puts them back in the comfortable realm of piping content out to consumers. They think this stuff will finally settle down. But change keeps accelerating instead. Today we are feeding one another stories, passing links around, telling friends what we’re fascinated by or excited about or steamed over. My Flipboard is more useful and interesting to me than the front page of the New York Times (sorry, Bill Keller). The conversation isn’t an after-thought. It’s interesting in itself, and it’s how we inform one another.

So Table Talk is dead: RIP. But Table Talk is everywhere, too — on Facebook and Twitter, all over the blogosphere, and in a billion comment threads. Table talk is what we do online. It’s not what comes after a publication’s stories. It’s what comes before.

BONUS LINK: If you haven’t already, go read Paul Ford’s wonderful essay on the nature of the Web and its fundamental question — “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

via Salon’s TableTalk shutdown: What we can learn from the story of a pioneering online community — Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard.

Someday again? Random Act of Culture

Monday Video: From the draft archives.

In our divided, socially distanced times, it is both refreshing and poignant seeing this video from 2010. We are in a different world. So I’m here, singing to you, even though you can’t hear me.

via YouTube – Opera Company of Philadelphia “Hallelujah!” Random Act of Culture.

Draft Archives: Threads, Connections and Costs

From 2010, this draft is ironic as we enter another year of staying home with Covid. My wide-spread life is becoming a little more locally dense again, but isolation, like leaving town, doesn’t do a lot for community connections!

image of sand on a beach in waves with two rocks as "eyes' and a semi circle of rocks as a smile.

Anyone who follows my Flickr stream knows that I love my garden and the projects my family and I cook up in that little space. Our latest addition is a chicken coop and some crazy little chicks. I can’t wait for sunny summer weather to sit on my little circular patio with my new granddaughter.

While travel often takes me away from home, the gravitational pull to stay is strong. When I’m away, I miss my walks to the local yoga studio, passing familiar homes, often waving and saying hello to some of the habitual neighborhood walkers (and their dogs.) Right now a couple of blocks from my house they are breaking ground for a community garden and I hanker to go by, to volunteer this Saturday. But yes, I’m on the road. So it is a great pleasure to be able to follow my neighborhood blog, to read about the city wide urban gardening projects IDEAD LINK!) and, of course, to stay in touch with my family online.

So last night over a lovely dinner and relaxed conversation with Dave Pollard and his brother Alan, we started talking about the impact our online interaction/time/investment has had on our lives. For both of us, it has entirely changed the trajectories of our lives.  Dave brought up the question that (in my words) asks us “at what cost?”  It has a cost and Dave has me thinking and wondering – which is a good thing.

One cost to me was that I went from very densely connected in Seattle because of the nature of my past work, to very widely connected across the globe. I have a huge network of connections of varying strength that I treasure. But I can’t even conceptualize them, let alone keep them all in my head and even keep a reasonable number of them in my heart. When I’m connected to them (online or F2F) that connection reignites. But the amount of “out of sight, out of mind” is actually very discomforting when I examine it. What does that say to the quality of the relationship, to the amount of caring we can muster for each other when our networks become very large?

Lots to think about.

Leadership and Trust

So many years ago there was this great blog, Weknowmore.org run by Antoon van het Erve and Johan Lammers. (Hey, both of you are also KM4Dev members. Johan, here is your KM4Dev bio! Remember this post?). The post is now digital dust. I had copied it back in 2009 with the intention of blogging about it. I could not find the particular post on the Wayback Internet Archive, but I was able to find one page for a screen grab.

Screen capture of the weknowmore.org front page from the Internet Wayback Machine showing a crowd of people and links to what the company did and their blog posts.

The post was titled: “Ten ways how leadership can influence and promote interpersonal trust in knowledge management behavior and processes.” 

As I read them, they resonated with the 10 leadership principles that emerged from Liberating Structures. They are not the same, but they are related. Take a look and see if there is something resonant and useful for you. I’ve put a few notes in bold dark red. 

From WeKnowMore.org

Trustworthy Behaviors

1. Act with discretion Keeping a secret means not exposing another person’s vulnerability; thus, divulging a confidence makes a person seem malevolent and/or unprofessional.

  • Be clear about what information you are expected to keep confidential.
  • Don’t reveal information you have said you would not . . . and hold others accountable for this.

In the digital era, this becomes a gnarly intersection with both transparency, and organizational policies and practices. Secrets are rare things these days. 

2. Be consistent between word and deed When people do not say one thing and do another, they are perceived as both caring about others (i.e., they do not mislead) and as being competent enough to follow through.

  • Be clear about what you have committed to do, so there is no misunderstanding.
  • Set realistic expectations when committing to do something, and then deliver.

In complex, uncertain times, there is the layer of working with uncertainty and ambiguity when setting expectations!

3. Ensure frequent and rich communication Frequent, close interactions typically lead to positive feelings of caring about each other and better understandings of each other’s expertise.

  • Make interactions meaningful and memorable.
  • Consider having some face-to-face (or at least telephone) contact.
  • Develop close relationships.

In our remote/hybrid/F2F continuum, we have to reexamine these practices. What worked in the “good old days” pre-pandemic may no longer be relevant. This is a place for creative destruction not only for communications practices, but understanding the value of them – not just doing them because we always did them!

4. Engage in collaborative communication People are more willing to trust someone who shows a willingness to listen and share; i.e., to get involved and talk things through. In contrast, people are wary of someone who seems closed and will only answer clear-cut questions or discuss complete solutions.

  • Avoid being overly critical or judgmental of ideas still in their infancy.
  • Don’t always demand complete solutions from people trying to solve a problem.
  • Be willing to work with people to improve jointly on their partially formed ideas.

Ditto to #3!

5. Ensure that decisions are fair and transparent People take their cues from the larger environment. As a result, there is a “trickle down” effect for trust, where the way management treats people leads to a situation where employees treat one another similarly. Thus, fair and transparent decisions on personnel matters translate into a more trusting environment among everyone.

  • Make sure that people know how and why personnel rules are applied and that the rules are applied equally.
  • Make promotion and rewards criteria clear-cut, so people don’t waste time developing a hidden agenda (or trying to decode everyone else’s).

See #1. I also think we have to rethink the value and application of rules, heuristics and practices in complex contexts where rules are not useful!

Organizational Factors

6. Establish and ensure shared vision and language People who have similar goals and who think alike find it easier to form a closer bond and to understand one another’s communications and expertise.

  • Set common goals early on.
  • Look for opportunities to create common terminology and ways of thinking.
  • Be on the lookout for misunderstandings due to differences in jargon or thought processes.

Reframe to purpose, which can be tracked or measured, even if the indicators are less-than-perfect. The rest is still spot on. But “vision” is too vague these days.  It leads to the very misunderstandings noted above.

7. Hold people accountable for trust To make trustworthy behavior become “how we do things here,” managers need to measure and reward it. Even if the measures are subjective, evaluating people’s trustworthiness sends a strong signal to everyone that trust is critical.

  • Explicitly include measures of trustworthiness in performance evaluations.
  • Resist the urge to reward high performers who are not trustworthy.
  • Keep publicizing key values such as trust-highlighting both rewarded good examples and punished violations-in multiple forums.

What is the line or continuum of measuring trust and measuring performance, progress, etc.?  How do we succeed in lower trust environments while trust is forming or absent but we still work together. This gets to the nubbins of trust itself and how essential it is. I think this is super context dependent. But I’ll save that for another day. This is getting LONG!

Relational Factors

8. Create personal connections. When two people share information about their personal lives, especially about similarities, then a stronger bond and greater trust develop. Non-work connections make a person seem more “real” and human, and thus more trustworthy.

  • Create a “human connection” with someone based on non-work things you have in common.
  • Maintain a quality connection when you do occasionally run into acquaintances, including discussing non-work topics.
  • Don’t divulge personal information shared in confidence.

Still resonates with my “if we get to know each other, even a little bit, we are less likely to shoot each other…

9. Give away something of value Giving trust and good faith to someone makes that person want to be trusting, loyal, and generous in return.

  • When appropriate, take risks in sharing your expertise with people.
  • Be willing to offer others your personal network of contacts when appropriate.

Love this one. The most.

Individual Factors

10. Disclose your expertise and limitations Being candid about your limitations gives people confidence that they can trust what you say are your strengths. If you claim to know everything, then no one is sure when to believe you.

  • Make clear both what you do and don’t know.
  • Admit it when you don’t know something rather than posture to avoid embarrassment.
  • Defer to people who know more than you do about a topic.

Well, maybe I love THIS one the most. 🙂

Liberating Structures Principles

As I revisited the principles and cross checked them to the things above, my sense was the principles support the practices noted above. Your thoughts? The comments are OPEN!

  1. Include and Unleash Everyone
  2. Practice Deep Respect for People and Local Solutions
  3. Build Trust As You Go
  4. Learn by Failing Forward
  5. Practice Self-Discovery Within a Group
  6. Amplify Freedom AND Responsibility
  7. Emphasize Possibilities: Believe Before You See
  8. Invite Creative Destruction To Enable Innovation
  9. Engage In Seriously-Playful Curiosity
  10. Never Start Without Clear Purpose