Category: engagement

Collaborate? Start marching, dancing, singing together…

This post from Carol Kinsey Goman from 2014 still resonates with me. Goman shares how we use our body language to impact our intentions. I am always amazed at how some people make major power plays with their bodies and I always wonder how intentional they are.

Two women singing out loud outside while a third smiles in appreciation.

While some of these 10 tips don’t fly via Zoom (have you tried to sing together? It’s a mess!) they are still a good reminder, starting with breathing.

10 Simple And Powerful Body Language Tips For 2014 – Forbes.

7) When you want your team to collaborate, start marching.

From the Archives: Two more friends better than two more enemies

Social Media in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.

It is encouraging to see this article from 2013 is still online, and is still relevant examining how young people from conflict areas can be connected with each other. And the risks involved. . With the current conflicts continuing in Armenia and Azerbaijan and with the emergent issues in Russia and the Ukraine. It also reminds me of the amazing work I was invited into in the Caucasus with Project Harmony, with the highs, lows and learnings. I was hopeful and naïve – I’ll own that!  (More here.) 

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/

From the Archives: Tom Atlee – Responding deeper than symptoms

Four quadrants of a Critical Uncertainties exercise in multiple colored pen written on a white flip chart.

The blog link for this amazing quote from 2011 is dead, but Tom Atlee (Co-Intelligence Institute) continues his amazing work (you can support the Institute here.)

As I reflect on the quote, I think of the current high level of polarity that we so often seem to want to ignore, gloss over of simply avoid by not interacting with those who believe differently than we do. If we just focus on symptoms, we just make it worse. See a few ideas below the quote…

Just because some energy or activity ceases to be clearly and publicly visible, doesn’t mean it has died or gone away. Especially when you suppress it with violence, you almost guarantee it will continue, growing and evolving, surfacing with new energy and impacts in new times and places, often to people’s great surprise. Addressing symptoms of a disturbance seldom handles the cause, which will soon find other outlets to manifest whatever need is not being met.

Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute

I appreciate a few of the Liberating Structures that help us step past our assumptions (the place of just focusing on symptoms and not causes?) such as Critical Uncertainties, Agreement Certainty Matrix and Ecocycle. When we offload some of the posturing and judgement and give some space for sense making, we can get closer to cause.

via What happens now with OWS? – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge.

OLD! The “chairs” technique for synchronous web gatherings

Blast from the past!

This will give you a laugh about the types of things we were doing back in the early 2000’s for synchronous online interaction. This is a conversational snippet from the now defunct CPSquare community (a community about communities of practice.) Skype allowed us global teleconferencing, but no video at the time. I love that dredging this up reminded me I learned the technique from Fernanda Ibarra! The image referred to in the conversation is below. Ah, the days of clipart. More from 2010.

Picture of a circle of cartoon clipart chairs with a name underneath some of them and instructions in the middle.
Just used this today with a group of people most of whom had not used Skype  for teleconferencing before.   I posted the slide  (modified to arrange the chairs in clock mode as you talked about in the FCoP telecon the other day) as a google presentation.  Names were ready in the center and to open I asked people to “take a seat” by moving their names — demonstrating by moving mine.  Then we used the result for the speaking order (group was small  — only 8 people)  — it worked like a charm  — Fernanda Ibarra and Nancy White — you are  geniuses! As you said in your guest appearance at FCoP earlier this week, small things do indeed make a big difference.  One person mentioned the “chair thing”  as an example of “what worked” at the end of the call when we did a round robin of what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently — so I had the opportunity to mention that I learned about the circle of chairs from you!

best,

Ann Braun

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, < Help_in_Real_Time@conversations.cpsquare.org> wrote:

Excellent Webinars Reply #10
Posted onSat Feb 07 2009 19:19:00 GMT-0100 (PST)
Nancy White-
One Small Interactive Exercise per Webinar
I learned this small trick from Fernanda Ibarra, who I think is a Foundations alumna as well, so maybe we can lure her here. She showed me the value of doing some small, easy interactive exercise at the start of a webinar which stealthily increases people’s familiarity with the tool and adds something to the meeting.
Fernanda taught me about the chairs. She puts up a slide (I’ve attached my version) at the start and asks everyone to use the text tool to put their name under a chair. This sets the sense of group/circle/conversation, acquaints people with the whiteboard tools and is an easy, non-intimidating task.
Attachment: chairs.ppt