Best Seminar Chair, 2006
September 23, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL | Travel
I sat in these chairs 32 hours last week. I would not want to work full-time in this chair, but it is, by far, the best seminar or workshop chair I have ever experienced. Very comfortable. They deserve an award for designing a chair that fits the body, and Ford deserves an award for purchasing decent chairs for large group meetings.
The Notio award for Best Seminar Chair, 2006, goes to the arper Pamplona, designed by G.Terin & G.Topan, made in Italy.
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NSA & NPS @ SoL
September 20, 2006 | Governance | People & Society | SoL
I had lengthy conversations today with two interesting people. One is very senior in the National Security Agency, the other is very senior at the Naval Postgraduate School. In both cases I had increased hope that there are people in government who are thinking deeply about long-term issues that I care about, and are trying to make a positive impact. They were not trying to persuade me of anything. It was in the topics, the depth of thinking, the sophistication of approach, their vision, and commitment to their work that made me realize things may not be as bad as they seem. Modulo the current executive branch, of course.
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Social Capital
September 19, 2006 | Life | SoL | Travel
I'm at a SoL meeting with about 60 people. About 20 of them are in my consulting convergence group, and we're meeting as a sub-group frequently throughout the four days. The schedule is fairly grueling for white-collar types, mostly 8 AM to 8 or 9 PM every day.
Tonight was the 'open' night, where we can have unscheduled dinner with friends and colleagues. I was exhausted, and was the first one on the 5:45 bus to the hotel. Next to me sat Joanne and Karen, and on the way to the hotel in talking about dinner options I said, "I'm exhausted. I want to walk to the Olive Garden, eat with one or two people, or alone, and do it soon so I can get some sleep." They thought that was a decent idea, and after a 15 minute wash-up we walked over there and broke bread.
We had a lot of good conversation, and when I said George Bush was a war criminal we found out that Karen strongly disagreed—he is a man of faith who believes in democracy and freedom; gag me—but we were able to gracefully move on without too much politics or hard feelings. They were intrigued with my online dating story, and essentially outed the whole marriage story, the public parts anyway, and we had a very open and honest conversation about intimacy and relationships.
On our way out we ran into a table with 12 of our colleagues, and we stopped over to say hello. M.S. briefly surveyed the situation, called me over, pushed his chair out, and pulled me close. He whispered: "Notio, can you tell me how it is that you ended up with the two best-looking women in the entire conference, alone, for dinner?" I said, "I have no idea; it just happened." He replied, "More power to you."
Then I.W. called me over to the end of the table. She and I have had a kind of rocky relationship, because she's been around since the early days of SoL, and her 68 years of Croatian wisdom sometimes annoy my modern sensibilities. But she leaned over to me and said, "Notio, you are very lucky to have your supper with those two women. That is really quite something. Do you that that [x] used to be an actress?" No, I didn't know that. She looked me in the eye, "Well—you enjoy yourself." That whole end of the table was grinning and staring and generally letting their imaginations run wild to my great benefit. We three soon said our goodbyes, and walked back to the hotel, and each went to our respective rooms.
But the unintended social capital of that five minutes saying hello to colleagues will last the rest of the conference, without doubt. Tomorrow night is the party at the Model T museum, and I can already hear it now....
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Mapping Dialogue
June 8, 2006 | Governance | People & Society | SoL
Fantastic 86 page research report on the fundamentals, forms, and usage of ten different dialogue approaches. [via Chris.]
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Hotel Marlowe, Cambridge, MA
March 2, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL
While I was in Boston (Cambridge), I stayed at the Hotel Marlowe; first time. The Marlowe is part of the Kimpton Group boutique chain - "Every hotel tells a story" - found in all the upscale cities you'd expect. It is very close to the SoL offices, and attached to the Cambridgeside Galleria mall. I had heard from SoL staff that people either love it or hate it, and I can see why, and I love it. The reason I love it is that they are going after an aesthetic. Success or failure, you judge, but they have attempted Hotel As Art.
Things to like:
Leopard-style carpet. How cool is that? Probably done to cope with their pet-friendly policy, but it's a lively change from boring brown.
Cool Leopard-style robes. Use in the room, and optionally purchase upon departure for $120. Wore mine every night and morning. Warm, weird, different.
Free wi-fi throughout the entire building, plus Ethernet in the rooms. This was great, and easy to set up. My only criticism here is that throughput was a paltry 20-30K/sec. Things were kinda pokey; they need a speed upgrade.
Four sampler CDs on the in-room stereo. The labels said, Please enjoy during your stay and leave in the room for the next guest. Hey, no problem, I got iTunes right here. 20 minutes later I have four promotional samplers of music including "Frequent Flyer: Buenos Aires," (2 discs), "Suite Life volume 1," and "Rosa (zipper)." All have multiple bands, and they were all found at Gracenote, so I know that the songs are!
"Om Away From Home" - an 8-panel 4"x4" full-color guide to hotel yoga, produced with Yoga Journal. There's an in-room tee-vee channel with all-day Yoga instruction. They provide a free Yoga Basket for in-room use that includes a mat, strap, block, and free issue of Yoga Journal. You can buy the basket, or have it shipped to your next destination. The guide shows five simple postures that can be done with typical hotel props like a blanket, a side chair, an empty wall, and a carpeted floor. They encourage you to take this with you, so I dropped it in my suitcase and will find it the next time I'm away. Sometimes all you need to get started is a starting point. I found this and the CDs a brilliant way to provide me some real value and remember this chain in the future.
Free wine bar in the lobby from 5-6 PM every day. A red and a white featured wine. Gathering spot, learning moment, socialization opportunity.
"Wines of the World" - a 16-page 3"x6" guide to wines presented by the Kimpton Wine Club. Wine expert Leslie Sbrocco provides comments on two wines per month, which are featured at the free evening wine bar. So now I have this kicking around on the kitchen table, and if any of them catch my interest I can try to track them down. The guide provides URLs for each vinyard, and Kimpton has their own monthly by-mail wine club with three price levels ($29/month to $125/month for two bottles.)
"Kimpton Style" - a style guide cum catalog, where you can buy accessories that style each of their hotels. The catalog is organized by hotel, showing a room and then keying the products to what's in the room. Candles, robes, linens, lamps, pillows, beds(!), plates, glassware, etc. 24 pages, full color.
So I'm walking out of there with four new mix CDs, a hotel yoga guide, wine notes on 24 interesting wines, and a catalog of stuff to buy to reinforce the lifestyle. That is some modern marketing think applied to business-class hotels. These guys have done their homework, and are thinking about the experience beyond the basics.
Anything I didn't like? Well, paying $22.80 for a bowl of oatmeal, three bacon slices, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of green tea is a bit much, don't you think? The $18 hamburger and coke was a stretch too. Their 'net connection was too slow, as noted above. $20 a day for parking is the going rate, but it's annoying.
I was there three nights. Two of those were paid by my hosts. My one night expense, with incidentals for three nights - parking, two meals, taxes - came to $291.07, which can take your breath away. Maybe I'll feel better about the price if I buy some stuff out of their catalog. I'm certainly digging the new music.
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Jack of All Trades, Master of None
February 8, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL
A business colleague whom I met at a SoL gathering emailed asking if I or anyone I knew would be qualified and interested in presenting his seminar for 5-7 days in May and June. I sent a bio, CV, and selected projects list. The response (in part):
Wow! Talk about diversity! Clearly you are virtually undefinable.
Taking it as a compliment, I asked if I could use his quote in my media kit. What the heck - if people can't figure out what you do, you can at least have good marketing.
Question: Correct use of 'whom' in the first sentence? Answer: Yes. Details in the comments.
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Transparency and Decision-Making
January 23, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society | SoL
On a long conference call today 19 of us were discussing group process in decision-making. Specifically, how to assign consultants to incoming work requests. The issue is fraught with flaws that undermine community. For instance, central decisions might be made too quickly, based on who knows whom, using old bios, overlooking a more qualified newcomer to the group. If you want to build a community of practice, a closed process will result in a metaphorical blue screen of death.
My contribution, which seemed to generate murmurs of agreement - hard to tell on a large multi-contient teleconference, with lots of people muted - was that if the process were transparent, then decision-making could be self-correcting. That is, focus on the transparency aspects, then when a decision has to be made quickly, or by a small team instead of the whole group, there is trust and openness and the occasional error can be addressed and used as a learning opportunity to tweak the process.
So, focus your initial effort on transparency, and implement the simplest decision-making process possible. It's easy to evolve an open decision process, but hard to make a closed process open.
Compare to the US President when he says, "I'm making good decisions!" but they are made in secrecy, and no records are released. Trust, but verify. That's what a transparent process provides.
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[SoL] Cynefin Case Study: Managing Complexity
September 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | SoL
Dave Snowden was present, but only addressed specific detailed questions. The presentation was done by the lead researcher/practicioner, Bruce McKenzie, and the client's liaison, Dr. Robert Kay, who is the Head of Strategic Thinking, and has published widely in the areas of autopoietic and social theory.
The client: Westpac Banking Corp. 8.2 million customers in Australia and New Zealand, 27,000 employees.
Project revolved around strategic risk management:
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Surfacing assumptions
- Mapping knowledge flows
- Strengthening the resilience of the organization (in the face of uncertainties)
- Strategic insurance for plausible events
Organizing companies/teams is in essence about establishing a network of knowledge flows. Corporate restructuring destroys existing flows and lowers the resilience of the company.
Can be very subtle. Gave an example about a large company where people with newish cars were concerned that people with oldish cars were not respecting the new cars (opening doors fast creating minor dents, etc). They put a policy in pace where parking was now assigned based on car age, with three categories (new, middle, old). Well, it turns out that the three top dogs at this company had been arriving at work more or less the same time every day for years, and had walked into the building together, riding the elevator, and catching up on the business they didn't have time to discuss during the day. The informal knowledge that lubricates organizations and keeps people in tune with the various distributed aspects. It also turned out that the three of them each now had to park in a different place: One had a new sedan, one had a family van, and one had a clunker. When the parking was reorganized they lost their "glue" time each day, and all three noticed that they felt disconnected from what was happening at the company. It's very hard to consider all of the side effects, and so reorganizing any aspect of an existing structure should be undertaken with great care.
The challenge and responsibility in managing complexity is moving from analyzing the past to imaging the future. The key is: Don't try to be right, try to not be wrong.
Companies have to change their cultures to move from "knowledge is power" to "sharing is power." One advantage of the acceleration of culture and technology is that knowledge becomes outdated sooner, reducing the "holding power" of individuals.
At this point there was a series of amazing charts, graphs, software screens, and analysis methods from the project that would be impossible to capture in ASCII diagrams. I believe they are going to post session materials, and if so I'll update this post with a pointer.
- Conversation maps.
- Narrative collation.
- Soft systems.
- Uncertainty/Impact matrix.
- Wind tunnel matrix.
- Knowledge interdependency map.
I think this was the most amazing aspect of the work: They have a series of processes, and custom software to support the capture and analysis of qualitative data, that generate complex yet comprehendible information. It's clear to me that if most executives were faced with the information Westpac Bank had, they would change their decision-making process to support these plausible future scenarios.
That's another thread of the work. Previous work with scenarios tended to end at the scenario generation, with the hope that line managers would Do The Right Thing. Here, tied into the management of strategic risk, the leadership team could together figure out The Plan, and use it as a focal point for implementation, modifying as they went based on changing conditions and employee feedback.
Much of the data was gathered not from sitting in the corporate boardroom brainstorming, but through interviews with front-line staff (like tellers and loan officers) and customers (who had both good and bad experiences). Hence, the scenarios and plans have a tangible, practical, "rings true" quality that you don't see from most top-down initiatives.
This work feels far from incremental, but rather a quantum lead from any type of consulting process or software support system I've ever seen. The Cynefin website doesn't do it justice, but we're told to visit again in a few months as things start to roll out. Many kudos to making such visionary work practical and tied to real-world problems, generating tangible results.
Note: Snowden is spending much of his time working with governments on the public policy aspects of this work, such as "weak signal analysis" of existing information flows looking for terrorist signals. Intelligence agencies in both the US and Singapore are engaged in this work.
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[SoL] Dave Snowden and Cynifen Centre
September 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | SoL
This was the most interesting plenary session for me, and also my most interesting parallel session (see next post). I am planning to attend a training course on this material later this year or early next. I found it a very exciting blend of quantitative analysis and phenominological source material.
"Open source Consulting" and "Noble Networks" When you join the network (by attending training and then entering a mentor program) you have Creative Commons license to the software and process models the group is developing. It's more complicated than this, but that's the gist of it.
He drew a distinction between discovering new knowledge vs. discovering existing knowledge. Academic research vs. understanding and acting on what's present.
Magic quadrant of where they're working:
Computational | Cynefin
Complex Complexity | Sense-making
Output "simulation" | "ecology"
|
--------------------|-------------------
|
Simple Process | Systems
Output Engineering | Dynamics
"machine" | "organism"
|
Simple Complex
Input Output
Similar to how many people confuse correlation with causation ("which is rampant in management consulting") many people also confuse simulation with prediction.
Three ways of sense-making:
The way things are (ontology).
- Ordered: Predictable cause and effect
- Complex: Cause and effect retroactively coherent
- Chaotic: No cause and effect at unit level
The way we know things (epistemology)
- Explicit: Documentation, databases
- Narrative: necessary ambiguity
- Experimental: How do you ride a bike?
The way we perceive the world (phenomenology)
- Information processing
- pattern processing
- Ideological patterning
Gave an example of a radiologist, who has learned ~40,000 typical possible patterns of bone breaks. They scan the x-ray, and use a "first fit" data match. They are "satisfying," not "optimizing."
Hard to label the next two quadrants, but basically I think he's showing the move from the "input" of sense-making, to the categories of sense-making.
COMPLEX | HIDDEN
UN-ORDER | ORDER
C & E coherent | C & E are
in retrospect | discernible
|
----------------------|-------------------
|
CHAOTIC | VISIBLE
UN-ORDER | ORDER
No perceivable | C & E are
C & E | ordered
COMPLEX | COMPLICATED
probe | sense
sense | analyze
respond | respond
|
----------------------|-------------------
|
CHAOTIC | SIMPLE
act | sense
sense | categorize
respond | respond
An example from the book, "The Geography of Thought:" Here are three words. Which one in unrelated?
- Cow
- Chicken
- Grass
If your ancestral roots are from one region (I forget / didn't write down the regions) you will answer "grass" because it is not an animal. But if your roots are from another region, you will answer "chicken" because the cow and the grass have a relationship. FWIW, I choose chicken.
Four aspects of narrative work:
- Storytelling: Communication with structure and form
- Resonance: Does it fit my existing patterns
- Displacement: A mechanism for sharing failure without blame. Story forms evolved to tell of our failures so others wouldn't follow.
- Ambiguity: precise vs. partial
Oral history and ethnographic research. Fascinating, not least because a recent client project of mine used virtually the same process he described, which he called "pre-hypothesis" research. The role and position of the "expert" influence the study. "Knowledge portals" fail, but storytelling works. Emergent meaning and serendipitous search. Problems to avoid: more than two interviews per interviewer (to me this seems really hard or expensive to avoid) and auto-suggestion (which is solved through training and in-the-moment discipline.
Snowden and Cynifen are trying to bring understanding to complex systems, going beyond simple or complicated systems, and avoiding trying to understand chaotic systems (which generate red herrings). In the parallel session the next day they did a case study of a significant project at a bank in Australia and New Zealand applying these techniques. All in all, a thrilling integration of quantitative and qualitative work. Cutting edge thinking on managing complexity in the real world.
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[SoL] Comments on the de Vulpian Presentation
September 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | SoL
Following de Vulpian's talk at the SoL conference, we heard remarks from Anne Murray Allen, the director for Knowledge and Intranet Management at Hewlett-Packard, and Arie de Geus, a former Royal Dutch Shell strategist and SoL co-founder.
HP is an interesting case study for what I call The Web as Organizational Mirror™. In the 1990's HP shifted from a decentralized website to a centralized website, to present a unifed face to the world. This, just as the world was discovering the joys of decentralization. They once had a decentralized team culture too, now they are trying to get it back. The web changes foreshadowed the organization changes. I salute HP for being a corporate member of SoL, and I wish them all the best – at one time HP was one of the most important scientific organizations in the world, like Bell Labs – but, like Bell Labs, I fear the financial engineers have taken over, and the best may now be historical.
HP does appear to be doing some interesting things with regard to internal social networks. In particular, two things stood out from Anne's talk. First is that they are trying hard to measure ROI on social connection systems. This is valuable work for those of us who work in the field, who have to make decisions or recommendations for clients. But, as mentioned above, the fact that you have to justify ROI on the value of sharing information with colleagues indicates that the finance types have run amok.
She also mentioned the idea of "finability" as an important aspect of the ROI work that they are doing. I perhaps misjudged the tone, but I got the sense that this was presented as a new idea, perhaps even one that HP invented. I am going to assume I misinterpreted this, because "findability" has been in regular use within my online circles for years. It might have even been mentioned in the O'Reilly information architecture book from 1996.
de Geus pointed out that people change and they change society which changes people..... This sounds obvious, but taken to the end it says that you cannot directly control the direction of societal evolution. Societies change very slowly, and the rules are set by legislation, which is sometimes referred to as today's writeup of yesterday's solution to the day before's problems. This slow wavelength change also has important impacts for corporations (some of which de Vulpian mentions in his article).
Also of note: Only people in a society can change a society. You cannot change a system from outside it. Outsiders have no possibility, and perhaps no right, to make changes to the systems of others. Another way of stating this is, Learning has to be done by the learner.
de Geus then went on to talk, of all things, about cooperatives as a mechanism of distributing power to the "ordinary people." He talked about Mondragon (wikipedia entry) the largest worker-owned cooperative, and about how the most successful management consulting firms (Booz Allen, McKinsey, St. Lukes) all created new mechanisms of power and profit sharing different from the traditional partner hierarchy. Visa International is the ultimate example of this, fully documented in Dee Hock's book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age." (Dee Hock and Arie were both instrumental in the foundation of SoL.)
There was a short table discussion that followed, around: What one question do we want to ask the presenters? Our list was:
- What are the failure modes or danger signs for societies?
- How do we change corporate governance? The vested interests have no incentive, and the "common good" has no truck today.
- How do we represent who holds power?
- Is there a limit to personal satisfaction? Or, perhaps, should there be limits? Or is society simply the sum total of all individual personal desires?
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[SoL] Alain de Vulpian on the Process of Civilization
September 21, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Governance | SoL
de Vulpian provided a 25-page paper, "Listening to Ordinary People," in advance of the conference (Word doc). It lays out the main arguments of his book, "A l'ecoute des gens ordinaires. Comment ils tranforment le monde," (Paris, Dunod 2003).
Here is one of the introductory paragraphs from the paper:
I have reached the conviction that we are in the epicentre of a developmental process of civilisation that is carrying us elsewhere, transforming western culture in depth and possibly preparing the way for a worldwide civilisation. What do I mean by a developmental process of civilisation? Norbert Elias, the great German sociologist, gave body to this concept of a "chain reaction of chain reactions" that involves power holders, institutions, organisations, communications, ordinary people, manners, customs, the social fabric, technologies that are emerging or becoming established, and so on. It transforms a civilisation and gives life to a new society. No-one has designed, desired or piloted this chain reaction of chain reactions. It has occurred spontaneously, it is continuing and is now spreading to other regions of the planet.
He goes on to discuss four major areas affecting civilization in the 20th century:
- Ordinary people become more autonomous and in touch with inner resources.
- An extremely complex social fabric is self-organizing.
- Scientific and technological innovations synergize with other transformations.
- New forms of governance begin hesitantly to emerge.
He looks at each one of these in depth (summarized in the paper, complete exposition in the book), and wonders if we are engaged in a new stage in the evolution of man and society. I will quote the final paragraph of the paper:
There is an opportunity for human progress whose birth we can try to facilitate. But it is very clear that nothing is yet decisively acquired. Our hypercomplex and living society is also, like all living things, the seat of pathological processes. The therapeutic procedures, regulators or immune systems that are spontaneously developing are not yet properly effective, in particular because many governments and old-fashioned but still powerful enterprises are not playing the game of a living society. They display ideologically partisan, hierarchic or predatory attitudes, rather than therapeutic, interactive ones, and accumulate mistakes and maladaptations that encourage the appearance of perverse effects. Instead of participating in concerted, adaptive regulation, they throw oil on the fire and accentuate the turbulences. Beyond a hypothetical (because unmeasured) threshold of turbulence, the entire anthropo-sociological process could bifurcate into disastrous directions.
This work deserves a significantly longer treatment than I have energy for at the moment. Perhaps even a study group to digest the main ideas. In short, he surveys 50 years of social science and develops the main threads of societal changes that have occurred. He summarizes several different societal aspects that I had noticed, but hadn't named. He describes societal shifts that have affected both my work and my family. He provides a hopeful scenario, which I had not been able to generate based only on my own observations.
I highly recommend the paper, though with the caveat that I don't read much sociology, so I don't have much context for the work. I found it engaging, insightful, and worthy of discussion.
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[SoL] Opening Session
September 21, 2005 | SoL
Notes from the opening session of the Society for Organizational Learning Global Forum 2005, Vienna Austria, September 13, 2005.
Table discussion: "What question lies at the heart of your work?"
- MJ: How to turn pattern observations into action in the world?
- Tony: How to make learning as accepted as knowing?
- Georgie: Where will the energy come from to make our public institutions value public input?
- Fred: How to make a world where you are what you do?
- Anna: How to learn together in ways that heal each other and the world?
- Glenda: how to transcend the divide of theory and practice?
- Tuija: How to bring entrepreneurial spirit to young people?
Otto Scharmer, via video, discussing the U-theory outlined in Presence. The basics of the U-theory were a shared understanding for most people at the Forum. If you haven't read this, you can skim the diagrams from the book at a bookstore, or here is an introductory excerpt (pdf) from the forthcoming book.
MJ note: Otto is a good German scientist, and he doesn't seem to be winging it. The U-theory was developed from 150 interviews with scientists, artists, and innovators in many different fields. The goal was to understand where 'new ideas' come from, and why some people are particularly good at generating them. It seems to boil down to an ability to tune into the future, that is, not "see" the future, but to "harmonize" with the gestalt or zeitgeist and act in an appropriate manner. This is my interpretation – if you have a deeper understanding please use the comments to help!
What does it take to access our deeper knowledge and experience? How do we shift the social field? Apply your tools to cultivating "culture." Think about the soil in agriculture; need to dig into it, not just put things on top of it. Work with the intersection of the visible and invisible.
Move from To
this: this:
Visible field || || /\
\/ || ||
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/\ || ||
Invisible field || \/ ||
MJ: Reminds me of why I was interested fractals – they define the boundary between real and imaginary numbers, and have infinite length (perhaps depth).
The invisible social field is the place from where attention originates.
What's the leverage point in social fields? Our capacity to see and shift the structure of our attention.
Follow-up: Read the Brian Arthur HBR article. Brian was one of the significant learning points for the U-theory.
Two types of cognition:
- Download from someone or otherwise acquire, and apply our existing framework. So-called "learning." Profound innovations do not arise from this process.
- The other type (I missed what he named this. Might be "Seeing" or "Sensing." Might be "Generative.") a. Observe, observe, observe. Immerse yourself in the situation. b. Retreat & reflect. Create silence where knowing surfaces. c. Act in an instant. Create a microcosm where you can explore/discover the new without reverting to downloading your existing patterns/habits/memories. Profound innovations tend to happen "in an instant" after a long period of observing and reflecting.
Three thresholds "on the way down" (down the U):
- Open Mind. Move from where our perception is going to outside. From downloading to seeing. Open the "open mind." Use precise observation. Shut down the "VOJ" – Voice of Judgement, a term used by Stanford creativity expert Michael Ray. In Presence, this is referred to as "suspending." Diagram of a circle with a dot in it. Our attention is the dot, and the circle is the curtain of our habitual perception. "projecting thoughts onto the curtain."
- Open Heart/Sensing. Begin to access a different source of intelligence, including the heart. Perception begins to happen from a different place. When you are truly listening with empathy you can apprehend what they are about to say. Diagram of a circle with a dot on the edge of the circle. Our attention is now at the edge of our typical perception, looking outward. "Open the curtains to see outside."
- Open Will/Presencing. The word has from two intents. Sensing: Connect with your higher future potential. Pre: Access sensing in the present. Diagram of circle with dot outside. Our attention is now at another place, looking at our own mind in the field of all other objects. [MJ note: Worth re-reading Kegan's subject/object theory again – "In Over Our Heads" or "The Evolving Self" – to tie to this.]
Ottos's video is done. It was a short segment of a longer piece. I wonder if we can watch the whole thing anywhere. I wish he would finish his book to read more of this material!
Final notes from opening session:
- Listen to the motivation for the words, not the words themselves.
- Connected listening requires the body to be present.
- What I wrote was: Listening is harder than listening. I wonder what I meant. Maybe: Empathic listening is harder than listening.
- Suspend answers and stay with questions.
- Hold humility and set an intent to receive.
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Transformative Questions
September 14, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | SoL
This morning I and three colleagues (from Singapore, Denver, and Boston) presented at the SoL Global Forum. The topic was "Extraordinary Leadership; Shape-Shifting and Transformative Questions as a Genesis for Change." The session was held inside the Leopold Museum, and it went well. Just over 70 people attended, out of 400 conference participants, and with ten other parallel sessions held at the same time!
Here is a panorama of the group reflecting on the characteristics of transformative questions (full-size):
Here is another panorama of the group in world cafe discussing their reflections (full-size):
When I get the session notes written up I'll post them here.
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MuseumsQuartier
September 13, 2005 | Arts & Culture | SoL
I have posted three pictures from the conference site (1, 2, 3). From their website:
The MuseumsQuartier Wien first opened in 2001. It now features almost 50 different facilities for contemporary art and culture and is one of the ten largest cultural complexes in the world, attracting some 2.7 million visitors each year.
This is an absolutely amazing facility. It is a mix of galleries, event halls, dance studios, and art museums with significant holdings. It is a public space, so the conference-goers mix with a diverse population. There are restaurants, bars, an outdoor courtyard. You can see from the interior shot that even the main hall has a capital-D design. It is far removed from the typical beige hotel ballroom that hold most of these functions. An inspiring space to hold a big-think conference. I'm sure I will post more photos from here.
