Building Online Meeting Muscles – chunking and practice

I’ve been both working with some distributed communities of practice and talking to different folks in my networks about online meeting practices. I’m feeling a resurgence of the kind of interest we saw in the earlier waves of online interaction. There is a pattern that I realize I use, but had not written about it. It is nothing new nor earthshaking, but every once in a while it is worth a moment of reflection and reification.

Many people have been migrating to Zoom for online meetings, both for its ease of use, decent video and chat, but also because it allows breakout groups, something that can be VERY useful for engagement and deeper work. Other groups are adopting tools like Slack and Trello.

So we have new tools. That means we either need new or adapted practices, especially if we are seeking to move away from top down, presentation oriented meetings. (My version of a waste of time!)  Here are a few heuristics I’m using to initiate and build the online meeting practices and muscles.

  • Experiment/introduce a new practice, then make sure you briefly debrief it. Use it again in the next meeting. It gets easier to do, and the work gets deeper and more meaningful. Encourage people to be curious and withhold judgement until they get to that moment of greater depth. Right now it seems that new practices really bear fruit on the third use.
  • In the second meeting of a sequence, use the first practice and add just one more. Then in subsequent meetings you start rolling off some practices to save for when they are most useful, and introduce others. Debrief, practice and then use discernment of what you should stop doing, keep doing, change or start over. This builds an online interaction repertoire.
  • Explain just enough so that people interested in using the processes and methods themselves have a starting point to carry the practices elsewhere. Offer links to resources or deep debrief to the interested. Don’t torture the others by droning on about process.
  • In debrief, some useful questions can be (drawn from Liberating Structures and elsewhere): what was liberated or enabled by this process? How was it structured? Where else might you use it? These three questions help people be aware the role process plays in their experience, success or failures.
  • Finally, don’t expect people, including yourself, to be instantly comfortable and competent with new practices. Take a learning stance. Be an experimenter. Laugh at and learn from failure. If you are leading the charge, role modeling this stance makes a huge difference.

Your ideas? Practices?

Joint Use in Online Spaces

An article in the New York Times caught my eye a while back about the power of joint use of schools and churches as community spaces for exercise, play and other community activities, particularly for communities where there is a lack of park space, or inability for the average community member to pay for private gyms and play areas. I’ve put a snippet at the bottom to lure you to read the whole thing because I think this concept of Joint Space may be a powerful antidote to what is happening with Facebook, Google and others being owners of the online spaces, and thus owners of our data.

Today, Stephanie West Allen posted (on Facebook, natch!) a link to Raph Koster’s work on games and the idea of the “magic circle.” (See https://www.theoryoffun.com/tfall.shtml ) Again, this piece about space being essential.

“The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

Read the New York Times and Raph Koster pieces together and some tinglings of ideas start emerging. Are our online convenings “performance” — of “an act apart?” Or part of a larger circle that is both online and offline?

We have flocked to Facebook and other online spaces as a “third place” to connect, gather and do things together. Because of the way our social media spaces are designed, they tend to become silos of people most like us, rather than places where we might rub elbows with the diversity of our communities.

A common scenario is a swap in which a city will indemnify a school in exchange for the school opening its gates for community use, resulting in “a new park that’s been sitting there all along — taxpayer paid,” Winig said.

The concept also extends to rural churches, making fitness part of the lifeblood of these community staples along with meetings, weddings and funerals. At the First Missionary Baptist Church in Concord, N.C., Theoma Southwell, the parish nurse, worked with the county health alliance to include a mile-long walking trail and a fitness class for older people. “ If you don’t feel well physically you won’t feel well spiritually,” Southwell observed. “They all go together.”

Unlike Uber, Airbnb and other shared economy juggernauts — profit-makers all — opening up schools, churches and other buildings for public use during off hours represents something far more powerful: shared health programs in communities in which having a safe place to kick a soccer ball or unwind with an evening run has not been an option. It is also common-sense land use policy, representing the recycling of resources instead of building anew.

“Joint use is a winner because it is simple,” said Harold Goldstein, director of Public Health Advocates, a nonprofit organization based in Davis, Calif. “In policy jargon, we call it a no-brainer.”

Source: Sharing Public Spaces to Improve Public Health – The New York Times

Context for Group Process for Reconciliation (and other hard things)

I snipped the quotes below from Chris Corrigan back in December (Some things that work in real reconciliation dialogue – Chris Corrigan ), meaning to write more about it. I think it is too important to wait for my “round to it” to happen, so here it is. Chris is writing about reconciliation. In our current political environment (especially here in the US) this is becoming a core competency, and can’t be left to luxury. The BOLDING is mine, with comments between points.

Very small groups – no more than four at a table – meant that there was no need for people to “take their best shot” as they would have in a larger plenary format. Groups smaller than five reduce the performative nature of conversation and allow dialogue to fully unfold.

This is where I constantly get push back from convenors and people in authority. They want whole group for fear of missing out on something, or having something happen that they can’t see/control. Working with positional leaders to move past these fears is important prep work, and resisting their urge to derail small group practices mid-stream.

The questions for the dialogue were very broad. Sometimes the most powerful question is “what are you thinking and feeling about what you just heard?”

This was interesting to me as part of me seems to push for sharper, focused questions. I think I have been confusing sharpness and focus. Broad questions can have the stimulating characteristics of broad questions. Or maybe it is the invitation process (see next point.) I clearly have more thinking/learning to do here.

The invitation process is everything. We helped our client design an invitation process but she took the lead in going to each group separately and talking to them about why they were needed in the conversation.

The practice of “everything from the front of the room to all groups” had not been working for me so I’ve started to encourage very broad instructions at the front, then travel to each table/group. People use their questions to me to sharpen their own thinking and understanding. It is far less passive than just waiting for instructions!

There were no observers. Everyone in the room was at a table except for me and our graphic recorder. Everyone at a table had a question they needed answered or a curiosity about the outcome.

I just say, “Amen!”

There was no certainty in the room, no positionality, and yet, each person spoke about their own experience and their own perspective and listened carefully to what others said.

It was interesting to see Chris put certainty and positionality in the same sentence. Chris, was there a reason?

 … everyone in the room had to stretch their perspectives to participate. This was not comfortable for anyone, because this work isn’t comfortable for anyone.  It is literally unsettling. …there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history.

Here is the other area I need to learn a LOT more about. It goes to the whole other side of preparation, including self awareness and my own power and how I do or do not use it.

What are your practices for context setting and facilitating for reconciliation?

Two Liberating Structures Workshops at University of Illinois April 5 and 6

Are you at or near the University of Illinois at Champagne/Urbana? Interested in Liberating Structures? Then join us for one or two days of hands/heads/hearts on workshops.  The first one is a new offering I’ve put together that builds on some of my recent blog posts (and more to come) about facilitating in complex contexts!

April 5 Learning the Strategy Game Plan: Liberating Structures for Development

The first workshop is on April 5th, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm. It is designed to explore how we can use Liberating Structures, a repertoire of 33 group practices, to improve project planning and execution for participatory projects that are often on complex and emergent contexts. While a funder or boss may want a linear log-frame and a budget, we need to find approaches that embrace ambiguity with practical approaches, ensure learning and improvement are part of the design, not an afterthought, and which consistently liberate and unleash the knowledge and experiences across the system at play.

In the workshop you will practice 6-8 structures and utilize an overarching framework to tie the pieces together in a cogent, visual whole. The fee is $100.00, registration is here, and a brief flyer is attached to this blog post.  Leave me a comment with any questions. Spread the word!

April 6th, Unleashing Learning Engagement in the Classroom 

The second is a series of three, 90 minute workshops that dive increasingly deeper into the use of Liberating Structures for increasing classroom engagement in higher education. We’ve designed this with the busy professor/lecturer/Graduate Student/TA in mind.

Is it a challenge to engage all student voices in your classes? Do you look for ways to spark deeper student engagement the subject matter and with each other? Do you wish they would take more ownership and risks in their learning? Engagement deepens learning and application. It strengthens the muscles that help students work with ambiguity. But it can be challenging, in both small and large groups.

Come explore Liberating Structures, an easy to learn and deploy repertoire of of 33+ open source interaction structures that can build patterns of easy, regular student engagement in the classroom.  They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

You can start with a short 90 minute introductory workshop, or stay for all three learning sessions. First is an introduction of the easiest and most often used Liberating Structures, second, a focused application to solve a real challenge, and third, a deeper dive into the theory and practice behind Liberating Structures.

8:30 – 10:00  Workshop 1: Liberating Engaged Learning: discover and use 4 structures that can immediately increase engagement in your classroom.

Friday, April 6, 2018
Illini Union Ballroom

8:30 am to 10:00 am  Workshop 1: Liberating Engaged Learning: discover and use 4 structures that can immediately increase engagement in your classroom. In this 90 minute session you will get a hands on introduction to some of the easiest and most commonly used Liberating Structures to build student engagement in your class. It will conclude with a debrief and identification of immediate applications in your classroom. You can then build your practice by turning to the instructions for individual structures on the website (www.liberatingstructures.com), mobile phone app (available free on  iTunes and Google Play) or continue with the two following workshops.

10:30 am to 12:00 pm Workshop 2: Stringing Structures to Tackle a Challenge in Your Classroom: learn how a sequence of multiple structures can address specific challenges (student, passivity, unequal participation, lack of critical thinking, etc.) and larger outcomes. This builds on Workshop 1. 

 

Liberating structures can be used individually, but their power becomes more visible when they are joined together or “strung.” In this 90 minute session we will use a string of 2-3 Liberating Structures to collaboratively work on addressing a concrete shared classroom challenge such as how to create an open environment and tackle a lack of student participation, end student passivity, weak discussions, or the lack of productive risk-taking. You will walk away with at least one actionable solution you can apply the next time you are in the classroom. You will learn how to use the Liberating Structures Matchmaker tool to select and string the structures. Prerequisite: Workshop 1

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm   Lunch Break (grab lunch in the food court or on Green Street) with someone you just met this morning

1:00 pm to 2:30 pm Workshop 3: Understanding the Theory Behind Liberating Structures: an advanced workshop that looks at the underlying elements of Liberating Structures and how they can become part of the everyday pattern of highly engaged classrooms. Liberating Structures can appear to simply be “yet another facilitation tool.” What sets them apart is the attention to five microstructures that sit beneath each Liberating Structures, and the ten principles that guide them. These give us insight as to how and why Liberating Structures work well for stronger classroom engagement, enable more critical thinking, innovation and action. In this workshop we will explore some of the theory behind Liberating Structures and experience a few of the more complex and rich structures. You will also be introduced to various vectors for continuing to learn and practice Liberating Structures. Prerequisite: Workshop 1 and/or 2.

It’s worth your time to come to all three, but if you can only attend one, then come to the first. If you can do two, then combine workshops 1 and 2 or workshops 1 and 3.

Registration is here and the short flyer is attached below.

Flyer – LS Workshop on April 5 2018 – Strategy Game Plan

Flyer – LS Workshop on April 6 2018 – Unleashing Learning Engagement – external