Hopping Between Notetaking and Backchannel Conversations

One of the practices that is part of my daily routine in communities and teams which use phone calls for meetings, is to take notes in a chat environment. I am really good at capturing notes so I’m often one of the note takers. I find typing increases my attentiveness and listening. Otherwise I’m prone to multitasking (email, checking twitter, writing blog posts. Should I admit I started writing this post while on a telecon?)

What I’ve noticed is that I’ve started to use the chat as back channel for voicing my own input and thoughts. This is more like the “backchannel” used by techie communities, particularly during face to face events. It is another layer of conversation that enables more than one person to “talk” at the same time. It is also useful in web meetings. Back channel, of course, has it’s risks too — fractured attention and a channel for mocking etc — but it is different from the note taking practice. One is a record, the other is part of the conversation. One represents the voices of others, the other IS the voices.

When I mix the two, I start wondering, am I compromising the note taking with my comments and input? Or am I adding richness and voice to the proceedings? Am I strengthening the conversation by adding text input and not interrupting, or am I undermining the speaker? All these are possible. So how does this inform my choices in my practice?

This duality reminds me of this “two hatted” feeling I get when I am in a facilitator role. I often feel I am not fully devoting myself to facilitation if I put my participant hat on. When I do, I do it explicitly. I am wondering, should I do that when I shift in chat, or does that just add more noise to a fast flowing chat?

What do you think?

Photo by Salvor

Visualizing Your Social Network




Social Network

Originally uploaded by eekim

I have done informal network mapping exercises and have often struggled with a medium for the line. Voila, look at this great picture from Eugene Eric Kim – cut outs that you put your name on and then it looks like a black-board like surface you can draw lines with chalk.

The network mapping exercises I have done recently have asked people to map their collaborative or project networks. At first everyone sort of grumbles, they think everything is obvious. Then they start seeing new things. Patterns. They compare with others’ maps and begin to think more strategically about their own network.

The power of the visual plus conversation!

Yes We Can – the role of emotion in system change

I tend to avoid political commentary in my blog. (Lots of reasons – I’ll not bother you with that at the moment.) But today I was pointed to a video about Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign that appears right now on Dipdive.com that is worth sharing. Oddly, it is not (yet?) embeddable video. It should be. (The http://www.yeswecan.com website itself is down for me a the moment.)

EDIT: 9:09 AM – here is the embeddable YouTube Version

What this video does is emotional motivation. It uses words and music – two very emotionally rich media – to convey a simple point of hope. The emotional state it can engender – if it resonates with you – prepares you for taking action.

When we think about facilitating change, we often focus on our logic. Our goals. Our tactics. What this video reminds me that we also need to attend to the emotional and emotive context of our change methods and plans. Read the note of will.i.am (of the Black Eyed Peas) the creator of the video, just below the video (also here on his blog). Read about why and how he acted. Who acted with him.

I think one reason I have been so captivated lately by graphic recording and facilitation is that images carry more than “the facts.” They trigger more than the logical and important “next step.” So does the music in this video.

will.i.am, thanks for the reminder. Yes, we can.

And, on a side note. I sense this video could be a sea change for the Obama campaign. “We are not divided as our politics suggests.” Oh, I hope so, regardless of the outcome.

yes, we can

What should be in my blog feed?

When I transitioned from Blogger to WordPress for my blog, I had a fresh chance to look at my RSS feed options. On blogger, I had a ton of buttons for people to choose different options. At the time, people NEEDED more options. Now services like Feedburner help consolidate options into one service.

In the transition, I could redirect my Feedburner burn to my new blog page (new url!) and hopefully those of you following via FB had uninterrupted service. But what about everyone else? Some of the other RSS methods were confined to the old URL, so I just posted a post on my old blog asking people to resubscribe to the new one. I suspect I lost a lot of subscribers.

In many ways, this is just like cleaning out old email addresses that people don’t use anymore. I suspect many of those subscribers no longer followed the blog, so it was good house cleaning. But I’ve heard from a few people that they just lost me off their radar screen. I haven’t quite figured out what to do about that.

In all this review of feeds, I also played with my Feedburner feed which allows you to include things like your del.icio.us tags and Flickr photos. I wondered if you, dear readers, found those helpful or not. Last night I got some feedback that the photos were not so great – not that the person didn’t like my photos, but in the context of expecting blog posts, they felt out of place. I tend to agree.

Then I thought, I should ask you. What do you like in the feed? What would you prefer taken out? If there is a strong consensus, I’ll plan accordingly. If no one cares, I’ll pull out the photos for now and see if that “feels” better!

Thinking about systems change practices – letting go

Change Mind MapThis is worth repeating and pondering…

I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Donella Meadows from Places to Intervene in a System

In my line of work, the task is often defined as “help us hold an online event” or “teach us how to work together online.” But in reality, it is always about change. Changing practices or habits. Changing the entire environment within which we work, play and live. Changing our perspectives.

People often ask me to tell them my “success” stories and I tell them two things. One, they are never “my” successes and often we have learned more and more profoundly through early failures so that we would be ready and resiliant to find ways forward towards success.

Change can rarely be dictated nor predicted in a log frame or business plan. So when I saw the Donella Meadows quote, I went ‘yessss.’ Change is as much about letting go as anything else. Letting go of old habits and perspectives. She calls for “casting off paradigms.” Yes.

“…disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.” Look at that lovely tension. Discipline, strategy, and profound, mad, letting go.

So next I thought about my habits and practices in system change that try and live up to Meadow’s lovely suggestion. I used an image from a session at last year’s International Forum for Visual Practitioner’s session on facilitating community change to jog my mind. Carl Otter has a lot of great experiences to share.

1. Know how to fall down – and GET up again. If I can role model learning through my mistakes, I make the environment safer for my collaborators, clients and colleagues to do the same thing. This does not mean disavowing what we know, but recognizing what we don’t know AND at the same time, not letting either of those things stop us from learning forward into the change. Humility and confidence. And a lot of letting go.

2. Always, always learnto ask better questions, particularly around strategic intent. I used to be great at questions that opened up possibility, but realized I had a lot to learn about questions that helped focus on the strategic intent of change initiatives. I am one of those odd people who loves change and I can lose sight of the goal. In my practice this means being disciplined about not letting someone talking me into doing something with or for them without asking those strategic questions, particularly when it comes to using new technologies and methods. We have a lot of delusions that changing tools means we are changing our systems. Not often the case. I’m still working on this skill of better questions. I think this is more about the disciplined thinking part of Meadow’s recommendation.

3. Find ways to visualize the system. I am pretty new to systems thinking, or thinking about the system rather than just the short term task. But I find we get overwhelmed with trying to get our heads wrapped around the whole system, so anything that helps us sketch and visualize the system helps us then think about how we want to change it. I’m working on the visual practices right now, as well as the thinking ones. This is just simply a practice.

4. Elicit stories. Stories help us make sense of things. They give us lines of sight into others’ perspectives and widen our view of the landscape. They take time. We often want to go fast. I’m learning to design moments for story telling and meaning making into my practice. As a result, there is often less time for benefiting from other traditional learning resources such as papers, etc. There is some tension here, but stories seem to be paying off. I’m still looking for the balance point in any particular context. The corollary is take time for reflection, both personally and as a group. This blog is my personal reflection tool.

5. Bring the players into the room. We have this false sense that we know what is going on, for example, “out in the field.” We often don’t. There is a lot of wisdom to tap and honor.

What are your system change practices?

As a side note – Nexus for Change II is coming up where a heap of people will be thinking about whole systems change, if this is a topic that interests you.

Hat tip to Lilia for the link to the Meadows quote. Thanks, sistah! And through a bit of kismet and timing, a related post on Michele Laurie’s blog.