Community Management is Not New » ManagingCommunities.com.
From the draft archives, 2012: It is just down right fun and funny to read this post by Patrick O’Keef from 2012. Some of you reading this know what I’m grinning at. ‘Nuff said.
From the Blog Draft Archives, 2012. I’m leaving this one as is with a short reflection from today at the end.
The 2012 Draft:
I am designing and facilitating a lot of face to face gatherings lately. People ask me “how do you do this work?” and I realized that I was acting as an unconscious practitioner some of the time. So it was worth stepping back and asking myself the question, “what is my design approach for facilitated events?” With a little reflection, I realize I DO have an approach. Here is a quick description. I hope in the comments you might share your approaches!
Or, as John Smith calls it “memory practices.”
The 2022 addition. Those five things are pretty mundane. It is the stories we tell about them that holds the key. So the thing that remains most salient for me from the draft today is the idea of “memory practices.”
What is this? A quick search found something from Geoffrey Bowker’s book Memory Practices in the Sciences. “How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past.” As I’ve been reviewing old blog drafts and creating new ones, the way I’m telling stories is changing. My memory practices are changing. I find that fascinating!
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!
It breaks my heart that although the tools we use have changed, our terrible online meeting habits persist. Mama mia! A classic Monday Video. Complete with dogs, which are still in the picture!
via YouTube – David Grady: The Conference Call.
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.