Hapiness Passing Thingies

—-> Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral » Blog Archive » Happiness located in Bristol – Alas

I’m dredging old blog drafts again. This is a dead link. But dang, I loved the title so much, I decided it would have to be reborn as a blog post. A blog search turned up nothing. So I’m going to adopt “happiness passing thingies” and bring it back to life.

In our pandemic context, there is so much trauma, most of which we can’t perceive beyond our own personal experience. As we start a video meeting, we don’t see each person’s undercurrents. 

On Facebook today, the marvelous human being and author Patti Digh wondered out loud about how to honor the amazing staff and volunteers at her local vaccination site.  You can’t bring presents, food or flowers — health protocols forbid. One person said she was going to dress up in green and sparkles because here appointment was on March 17, to share some silly joy. Many other suggested kind words and “eye smiles.” (Those masks!)

Then I thought back to this draft. Happiness Passing Thingies. They are everywhere. They are in words, eye-smiles, the pause to step aside for a safe six foot pass while conveying warmth and community through eye contact. 

They are in the unexpected moments of grace, of recognition, gratitude and gifts. My walking partner shared how she gave one of her amazing staff people an unexpected day off to enjoy the Spring weather we so crave here in the PNW as a recognition of his above-and-beyond work. 

MORE HAPPINESS PASSING THINGIES! And Thanks, Ed!

Dredging: Community 2.0 2018 – My Sketch Notes

Another draft post, dredged up, examined for relevance or humor. This one from 2018, the oldest draft in my queue.

Wow, this is an old draft. 2008, the Community 2.0 gathering in Las Vegas, Nevada. Some people blogged about it (Thanks, Victoria Axelrod!) in a more – ahem – timely manner! I did a talk on the history of online community, which I live sketched as I went. Trust me, I have not tried that again. My conclusions were pretty spot on, but relatively safe. Heh!

Community 2.0 – Las Vegas – a set on Flickr

My sketch notes. 12 + years later and a pandemic, what has changed? Patti Anklam’s stuff is still spot on and I wish she was still blogging. Tony Hseih is sadly gone but his approach to customer service still warms my heart. AmyJo Kim’s stuff continues to evolve from the base she shared that year. Shel Israel has stopped blogging and sadly I can’t find many recent traces of him.

My conclusion? Us old timers are getting old. 🙂

What is made possible: unleashing Liberating Structures in our personal practices

Mari Dumbaugh
Mari Dumbaught, PhD

Note: Last September I co-led a Liberating Structures Immersion in Atlanta and met Dr. Mari Dumbaugh, BA MSc PhD, Founder & Lead Consultant, Insight Impact Consulting, Adjunct Instructor & Research Associate, University of Illinois-Chicago. I was so enlivened by her follow up comments, I asked to interview her. It took us a while, but enjoy what she has made possible in bringing LS to her international development work!

What happens when you discover something that simply resonates for you? Mari Dumbaugh, qualitative program evaluator, training facilitator and professor of Global Health, had that experience by the end of the first day of a two day Liberating Structures immersion workshop in Atlanta last year. The moment of clarity came towards the end of the day when she was sitting with two others in a Troika Consulting exercise. Troika allows each person to get help on a challenge – no matter who they are sitting with. In the span of twenty minutes, Mari received significant feedback and ideas. “In just a day I discovered how accessible the structures are, and with the immersion – even one day – I could walk away with concrete things I can do across settings and cultures.” She also discovered things she had in common with two people who were before perfect strangers– both were also independent female consultants, looking to engage their clients in innovative, interactive ways. These two strangers-turned-colleagues inspired Mari to shift her entire approach to her facilitation and training work.

Mari realized she could make radical changes in how she was going to deliver her next training of qualitative research teams two weeks after the immersion. In the span of a few days she redesigned her training program from a primarily content delivery mode to an “unleash and engage everyone” mode using Liberating Structures.

Mari shared, “Often I’m facilitating training in settings where participants are coming from didactic education systems with few experiences of real engaged, classroom interactions. They are used to just taking notes of what the professor says.  So their starting expectations were different. They were used to sitting around tables and expecting to be filled with knowledge!” One thing her Troika group suggested was to get rid of slides. Mari was very open to the idea – she was not a huge fan of PowerPoint. As a university lecturer at a public university in Illinois, she found slides a convenience. There was some hesitation to dump the PPT all together because like so many of us, it had become a crutch. A safety tool.

And then she left for a remote part of the Central African Republic to run a Qualitative Research training workshop for a group of individuals with varying degrees of research experience. For some workshop participants this would be the first time they heard the term qualitative research. The training and subsequent program evaluation would take place in an area where there was often no power (no PowerPoint), a ton of material to cover, and on top of it all, she would be working in French! Did she regret missing day 2 of the immersion? I don’t think so. Mari was on FIRE!

Civil society and education systems in the Central African Republic have been rocked from general lack of funding and the most recent civil conflict that began in  2014. Education systems have been completely interrupted, and Mari was working with people with varying levels of literacy. It was clear to her that having participants write down notes, word for word from slides, was not an efficient way to learn.

The transition was not always easy. “When I tried  interactive activities on Day 1 of the training, it was hard to pull people out of the structured classroom expectations.” But by ditching most of her slides, she also ditched the stress of not knowing when the power (and thus PPT) might go off. So she got rid of it entirely! She delivered a full 5 days of training with her newly created workbooks she printed in Chicago and carried with her on the 7,000 mile journey to Berberati, Central African Republic..

The workbooks featured all of the qualitative training content and content Mari used in previous trainings, but now with Liberating Structures as the vehicle for a more participant-engaged delivery. Some of the foundational qualitative content  came straight from her previous slides, and other parts were left open to build on the participants’ knowledge, perceptions, questions and experience. A number of Liberating Structures lend themselves seamlessly to teaching qualitative research techniques, so participants had the chance to experience some structures and think about how to use them in their field research work.

Here are some of the structures (both established and emerging) Mari used and how she used them. I felt the detail was worth the longer reading time. 🙂

Spiral Journal – To emphasize the centering of participant voices from the very beginning of the workshop, Mari began the workshop asking participants to reflect and journal on their previous relevant experiences and why the group was lucky to have them as part of the research team. Journaling sessions served as the foundation for a number of LS strings throughout the workshop, including Impromptu Networking and 1-2-4-All.

1-2-4-All – From creating a Community Collaboration Agreement to establish agreed upon ground rules and parameters for our workshop together (i.e. mutual respect…and turn off those cell phones!) to reflecting on what participants took away from the Celebrity Interview, 1-2-4-All was an excellent way to get participants reflecting, sharing, benefiting from all of our diverse perspectives and previous work and co-creating the workshop experience. Mari strung 1-2-4-All after a Celebrity Interview, a Spiral Journal session or as a way for participants to generate questions about the material being covered. Mari reflected that this structure was especially helpful in moving away from PowerPoint-centric teaching and facilitation. After participants shared their own perspectives, Mari was able to expand upon, gently redirect and/or insert new information around what participants already knew or shared.

Celebrity Interview – To introduce the foundational concepts and associated skills of qualitative research Mari had great success using an expert “Celebrity Interview.” “I served as the ‘expert’ and gave my colleague questions to use in the ‘interview’ so that I could introduce the basic concepts of qualitative research…while also modeling in real time how to conduct a quality interview!”

Mari followed the Celebrity Interview with 1-2-4-All. First, participants individually reflected on what they learned and observed during the interview, then shared with a partner, and finally merged into a group of four. By the end of the activity the group had collaboratively formulated a list of key concepts and competencies and Mari filled in any gaps with anecdotes from her own field experience – even acting some of the anecdotes out! The entire activity was so personal and rooted in the lived experiences in the room. The key was that the participants had ownership over the process. In reflecting back on the experience, Mari shared “It felt liberating for me as an instructor. I know this stuff, of course. I have a PhD. But with  PPT slides you feel you can’t break away from them. All the knowledge in the slides is IN me and I can deliver without slides.”

Mari also learned some other things from the Atlanta workshop. “We had someone illustrating the entire session, an artist who put a visual to every activity we were doing. I thought about how to do this to give my qualitative researchers some context about their work. I had to explain this complex intervention we were evaluating. I decided to do it as a visual. I practiced ahead of time with a colleague. I visually drew out each of the stages of a relatively complex intervention. I know this sounds simple, but it flips our way we have traditionally developed teaching and learning. That has been dry, and not multisensory. This flips it on its head and is shockingly different ways of looking at the world. In 15 minutes I clearly shared, and they saw where they fit into the picture.”

In the end, Mari felt they had accomplished something huge. “It felt like a collaboration, instead of me just delivering information and being in hierarchical power and knowledge relationship. We were collaborating together as a team. We asked much more and more engaging questions.”

Of course, some form of didactic information transfer is necessary, especially when introducing concepts or skills to a group. Mari wanted to make sure participants left the workshop with consistent information in print. Yet she  worried that by printing workbooks of what was in her previous training slides people would just fall back into “receiving mode.”  Her solution was to print text that conveyed foundational concepts, but bring along highlighters for each participant. “There was an exercise to highlight key concepts and words as we went through the stages. This played well into the Liberating Structures. Then they discussed between and amongst themselves. In the end, I avoided having participants writing out information or having an extreme amount of reading. There was just enough of both to engage them.”

When I talked to Mari, I asked her to think about the moment when she was able to say “yes” to shifting how she did this work. “I was feeling the support and enthusiasm at the immersion, and it buoyed me a lot. I participated and went through the activities, and not just a superficial way, but in a way that gave me concrete, applicable strategies. I saw the structures worked.”

“Troika Consulting was especially helpful. By the grace of universe to be paired with two women from different fields but both consultants, we were able to communicate similar challenges across our fields where we need to communicate information that isn’t always so exciting. They gave suggestions with confidence,” recounted Mari.

Liberating Structures constantly talks about engaging and unleashing everyone. I asked Mari if her workshop participants in Central African Republic started to have access to their own expertise? “Yes, [after 3 days of classroom training] we started with a pilot study to test the research tools and give the workshop participants experience before the “real” data collection phase. Comparing this experience to a previous (successful) ppt based training, the reactions were very different. The team from CAR came back from the field more animated and excited about their roles as researchers. It got them excited about their role, to apply the role to themselves and built confidence for conducting the research. They too can do this, even just having been introduced to qualitative research. After three days built using LS, they came back with huge smiles on their faces. And they were motivated to continue.” During the training session immediately following the participants’ pilot field experience Mari used Spiral Journaling and 1-2-4-All to encourage personal and group reflection. Participants shared challenges they encountered during the pilot study and the group generated ways to address the solutions during upcoming data collection together.

We talked about what happened after Mari left, what she did to support her CAR colleagues’ new skills and confidence. “I left them with something… the workbook that they actively contributed to creating and added along the way. They have a resource to go back to should they confront challenges and opportunities (even in different contexts).” Mari also added that a number of participants expressed a palpable enthusiasm and deep understanding of the importance of qualitative research. Mari believes the collaborative and experiential approach to the workshop played a huge role in communicating the power of qualitative research to workshop participants in a profoundly personal way that is not always possible with a more traditional, didactic approach.

Mari sees the power and applicability of Liberating Structures. “ LS needs to be introduced to more NGOs in general, especially in contexts like Sub Saharan Africa where many systems are still scripted, where the leftovers of colonial approaches remain. As far as engaging individuals, NGOS could really benefit from having these trainings brought to local levels.

What is Mari’s next step? “Attend more immersions! Experience more of the structures myself. My next step is looking at my next semester of teaching. I get mostly great reviews, but the class could benefit from more engagement and less straight lecture. I want to learn how to integrate more structures into my classroom teaching.”

From training, to university teaching, to consulting – Mari doesn’t stop. “I want to refine and develop my LS skills for my consulting as well.” Mari is interested in how immersions can help spread LS. “The immersions and the ways you apply them into your setting depends on your group. I love that creativity – react to the group you are with. It keeps me on my toes. While I can plan, I can also leave space for creativity to emerge. Of course, vulnerability is required.  The structures allow it.”

Note: After this interview Mari went on to facilitate a training of qualitative researchers from both Malawi and Ethiopia in Addis Ababa. Liberating Structures – and the lessons she learned from her workshop Central African Republic – formed her approach to training a group of experienced researchers, many of whom were university professors themselves! The workshop and subsequent data collection were great successes, proving yet again that these approaches are flexible and translatable across context and levels of experience.

Mari has also maintained a personal and professional relationship with one of the Atlanta Immersion participants who was in her Troika group – they exchange on their experiences using LS in different workshops and hope to collaborate in future to bring LS Immersions to more of their circles.

I am the Immigrant to my Neighborhood Crows…

I have been intrigued by Seattle’s crows since I moved here in 1981. They attacked my sons walking to school during nesting season one year and I went out and told them “hey, I’m a mom too. Don’t bother my kids, and they won’t bother yours.” They stopped dive bombing the boys. Since then I’ve been talking to them… in the yard, on the street. The other day one crow was having problems cracking open a walnut by dropping it on the street. I picked up a rock and cracked it open and walked away. These are my neighbors, who I barely understand, but whom fascinate me. I am the immigrant in their neighborhood. Read the article for the science! Beautiful photo from KUOW.

Listener Lauren Linscheid of Seattle sees crows flying every day toward Lake City Way. “I want to know where they’re going and why,” Lauren told KUOW’s

Source: Where Do Seattle-Area Crows Go At Night?