From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process. 
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things. 
  • Celebrate!

 

Look Who is Blogging Again

Here comes a wander. Be warned.

There are some bulbs along our driveway that were here when we bought our house in 1984. In the Spring, they put up a bunch of large green, strappy leaves which dry and fade away as the Summer heat comes on. Then, come Autumn, large pink crocus-like flowers emerge. The surprise was delightful the first time and still is, 30-some years later. (Turns out they are probably Giant Colchicum – Autumn Crocus).

Image of an Autumn Crocus in full bloom against a neutral light blue background.
From https://www.gardenia.net/plant/colchicum-the-giant

So blogging… I’m not sure if it is because I’m paying attention differently, or if there is something emerging around personal blogging like the crocus. It is alive all year long. It sends up shoots in the Spring then disappears again, and then it flowers. Is a new cycle starting? People whose blogs I used to read consistently but who have faded out over the years are blogging again. There is crosslinking around the topic at hand. Look who is blogging again!! I’m so delighted. (AND: I need a better feedreader, email subscriptions are not as useful, help!)

Blogging is different than participating in social media for me. But it takes more time and attention. It is quieter for the most part. Sometimes solitary. Sometimes it connects. Sometimes it needs the permanency of a url so it can sit, and later, even much later, the flowers can emerge. It is NOT feed of the moment for me.

I wrote yesterday about my Blogiversary. One of the observations was the power of thinking out loud in a blog post and the tantalizing possibility that others may chime in, counter, improve or simply show they were “there” in a comment. As Chris Corrigan noted, the satisfaction is NOT like the (addictive, distracting, destructive) “likes” or “retweets” of FB, Instagram and Twitter. I feel something visceral in this. Cellular versus a visual stimulation that comes and goes in an instant.

Dave Pollard wonders out loud about the role of relationship in our blogging. About how relationships do or do not inform our sense of identity. Euan Semple riffs on the relationship and self knowing. ( I find Euan’s post today on non-identifying usefully troublesome and need to think about what is surfacing for me, about the down side of non-identifying when one is from a dominant culture, race, gender etc. Claiming non-identification can also be an abdication of the negative impact of privilege but that is another topic for pondering.)

What we all have in common is that we wonder out loud in our blogs.

P.S. If you don’t blog, and are INTERESTED, check out these suggestions from Chris.

From the Archives: X years of blogging and what’s next

Agenda from BlogHer 2005

May 1st, 2004 was the first post to this iteration of my blog. 18 years of writing blog posts in one place. The previous blog waffled, wandered and the digital artifacts are for the most part, lost. But even those four years were instrumental to my discovery and learning. (I used the first blog mostly to curate resources for clients!)

In 2017, my dear friend Lilia Efimova reflected on her blogging history. She is, happily for me, still blogging, as is Ton Zylstra, whose post triggered Lilia’s. Those two were pioneers for me, and their writing still inspires and teaches me. (The list of other people whose blogs were/are still dear to me should be added to this post. Someday, right?)

Ton’s post on 15 Years of Blogging made me realise that I had reached similar milestone last June. In this post I look into “more blogging, less FB” issues and outline several points to work on.

Lilia Efimova

Source: 15 years of blogging, FB and what’s next — Mathemagenic

Lilia reflected back then on the wider range of places we can write, share, post, connect and most directly reflected on the borg that is Facebook. The proliferation of other socially-oriented platforms definitely had an impact on blogging in general, and directly for me.

Ton wrote:

When I started blogging it was the source of a tremendous proliferation of new connections, a whole new peer network emerged practically overnight. Distributed conversations became face to face meetings and brought us to places like the Blogtalk and Reboot conferences. Many of the people I regard as a major source of learning, inspiration I met because of this blog. Many over time have become dear friends. That alone is enough to keep blogging.

Ton Zylstra

Back in the day blogging was so many things. It created an online identity, connected me with people who have been essential in my life and formation. It triggered F2F things like Blogging conferences (Northern Voice! BlogHer!)

For me blogging is still primarily a place to think out loud together. Since fewer people blog/read blog posts/comment, the level of connection has shrunk. There has been no group F2F for years. But the last four months of regular blogging have reenergized some of those connections. And reaffirmed the value of thinking out loud together. Thank you for reading… and happy Blogiversary to me!

From the Archives: Passion in Individualistic Cultures

Text on paper reading "Open doors remind people of passion" accompanied by two thought balloons reading "we are always learners" and "tell me who you are, and your story!"
A snippet from a graphic recording I did in 2016 that seems to fit with this post!

Futurity.org – Autonomy sparks on-the-job passion. This article from 2011 caught my eye only late last year about Xiao-Ping Chen’s research at the University of Washington. It reflects on individualistic and harmonious passion. (I like that latter term!)

I have been thinking a lot about the destructive power of individualism in the US lately. If every individual sets their behavior on individual gain, our society suffers. If we are all in lock step and lose diverse thought, our society suffers. (Yeah, oversimplification!) So we need harmonious passion.

“Harmonious passion comes from intrinsic motivation,” explains study co-author and doctoral student Dong Liu. “You are passionate not only because you are interested in the work, but because it identifies part of you. It defines you.”

The research team found that harmonious passion facilitates increased workplace creativity—acts of devising new and improved ways of doing tasks, from an ergonomic shift on an assembly line to an innovative marketing campaign. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Some people, Chen explains, are naturally predisposed to be passionate about their work. These people will exercise creativity whatever the environment. The rest, however, could develop harmonious passion if given a degree of autonomy to decide how they will execute their tasks—even when pressure to perform is external (think deadlines) rather than internal.

https://www.futurity.org/autonomy-sparks-on-the-job-passion/

Of course, context matters, but the frame of individualistic and harmonious passion allow a different frame of reference that might be useful these days!

Franzen: Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

childs drawing of a network of hearts and the caption "love is powerful."

Jonathan Franzen wrote in a NYTimes piece back in January of this year something that keeps haunting me. This quote may be beyond what is appropriate – and yet, go read the whole thing. 

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

via Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. – NYTimes.com.