Also, my colleagues and I had a great session in which we walked through end-to-end convening design. I’m wondering whether an open discussion about convening design–at some point, maybe in December, with other Bootcampers–may be useful to us all…
Updates from October, 2013 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Jessica
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Jessica
Hi team! A few thoughts / updates, apples and oranges but run with me here:
1. For a really useful report on meeting design, check out my colleague’s recent publication: GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convenings (http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-center/gather-art-science-effective)
2. #failforward is back in play! Let’s use it!
3. Really interested in hearing how it went Marie… keep us posted:-)
4. Eugene, I’ve been considering using the 100 questions (or a variation) in a convening I’m designing for work. Brief, I’m thinking of having a “peer assist” that starts with the 100 questions to help reframe / crystallize the challenge. My question to you revolves around what might follow the 100 questions exercise (or something similar) when you’re in a group setting… Any thoughts?
Jess-
Eugene Eric Kim
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and links, @jessausinheiler! As I noted in my most recent post, I’ve started collecting links posted here into one document, which you can access in Resources in the main menu above. I’m going to respond to most of your other points in separate posts (other than to echo your sentiments about @marie: let us know how it went!).
Regarding integrating your 100 questions exercise into your convening: I’d like to open this up to the other bootcampers before making my own suggestions. What questions and advice do you all have for Jess?
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Eugene Chan
I’m the biggest tag in the tagcloud.
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Eugene Eric Kim
Yes. 🙂 No need to tag yourself (unless you really want to). If you click on anyone’s names, you will see their posts.
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Eugene Eric Kim
Okay, due to popular demand, I’ve added a feature that lets you subscribe to these posts via email. You can subscribe by filling out the form in the right sidebar. Let me know if you have any questions.
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Brooking
Just now realizing this had me no longer receiving emails letting me know of new posts so I’ve missed all the juice of this last week! catching up…will adjust my settings, you might want to let others know they have to do that too.
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Brooking
Hey group – quick check in re: Tuesday’s meeting… What I got is that each of the three topics we talked about in a rather quick way are deep arts unto themselves, and the reminder that things that seem obvious are actually the core things that make a good facilitator/meeting designer and all too often forgotten and can be explored endlessly.
In particular, I am left with a curiosity about goal setting… It seems really understanding how to create clear and useful goals is something of an art unto itself – when are you done? e.g. when is a goal good enough and clear enough to move forward? How do you tell when the goal is not quite right or not sharp enough? Does anyone have any resources on this topic?-
Eugene Eric Kim
I don’t know the answers to your questions. What I do know is that people (including me) generally do not pay enough attention to getting clear about goals and intention, and that we will never learn those answers unless we commit to this as a practice. I’ve imagined a more intensive version of bootcamp where we spend much more time developing our goal muscles.
Here’s a blog post I wrote recently on this subject: http://eekim.com/blog/2013/09/be-intentional-but-hold-it-lightly/
Would love to hear other people’s thoughts!
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Eugene Chan
@brooking blew my mind with this.
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Eugene Eric Kim
Cool concept. Basically taking Pomodoro and turning it into a game by adding a notion of levels. I like it. Let us know how it goes!
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Eugene Chan
It’s a little rough around the edges, but I had a similar reaction.
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Brooking
Yea the developer is a friend of mine and is SUPER open to feedback and really passionate about it. He’s a productivity coach and has been living and breathing this game for the last 6 months, and is in that classic developer mode of building it out with the budget he can and looking for investors/ways to have the time to build it out more and still provide for himself materially in the mean time 😉 I find it really helpful for those days when it’s hard to get myself focused – the action game is a great way to get started. It’s also fun to do ACTION PARTIES which are co-work days based in actions (just did one Wednesday in Oakland), which are great because you work and then get to chat with friends/dance etc for 5 minutes every half hr….
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Eugene Chan
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Eugene Eric Kim
Hilarious. And awesome. But no Android!
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Rebecca
I use coffitivity!!
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Dana
Hey ya’ll,
I am looking forward to our bootcamp today! Yesterday Brooking and I had a makeup session around what it means to be alive at work and we shared specific examples. The part I liked most about the exercise was finding a stranger to interview re: tell me about an experience where you felt alive at work, what made you feel alive. I enjoyed listening to a stranger’s perspective (who had no time to prepare an answer- just gut reaction). It was also fun probing to see how his perspective matched/ didn’t match with my own views.
head/ heart: Feeling alive!
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Eugene Chan
I missed last week’s bootcamp–which looks very interesting and am sorry that I did.
Relatedly, I ran across a paper published by Aspen Institute on “POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy“*
It’s always dangerous to quote things without *fully* reading them, but this part of the summary paper struck me. Joi Ito, head of MIT Media Lab, offered these principles for education reform.
- Resilience over strength.
- Pull over push.
- Risk over safety.
- Systems over objects.
- Compasses over maps.
- Practice over theory.
- Disobedience over compliance.
- Emergence over authority.
- Learning over education.
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Rebecca
It feels like these could apply well beyond education reform. Thanks for sharing! The other Eugene and I did a project a few years back around connected learning and ed reform. This is reminding me of what great, cutting edge thinking is happening in that world.
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Brooking
Enlivening (make-up) session today with Dana and EEK about the muscle of engagement. EEK focused our session on a question that was relevant for both of our projects: what makes you come alive at work? This was very relevant for me as I have a huge personal passion and professional interest in this topic, so it was super fun and valuable for me to dig in with Dana as thought partner and EEK as observer of our process. I was really aware of the need to manage my own enthusiasm when working in groups – i.e. not dominating with my thoughts and ideas and consciously allowing space & pauses for others to chime in with their contributions!
In addition to that practice reminder, I got a few more great reminders/ponder notes I was pleased to have as take-aways:
- remembering the power of simply reframing your original question to help generate new ideas – e.g. how can the question “what does it feel like to be alive” elicit different responses than “what does it mean to be alive”?
- relatedly, I have a strong background in somatic awareness that is a form of diversity off view that I can bring to a lot of my professional conversations. takes a little courage but trusting that there’s real value…
- don’t forget the generative value of eliciting & reflecting on personal experience and stories (what I call “the weeds” as opposed to the high level view/theory building). developing more conscious facility with moving back and forth between theory and the weeds and knowing when to be in which part seems a key part of this craft…
- when note-taking, there’s another key balance point between writing down what others say and interpreting/synthesizing. care not to over-synthesize and really take time to represent what’s said in the group.
Good stuff! -Brooking
Eugene Eric Kim is discussing. 
Brooking is discussing. 
Eugene Chan, and 
Rebecca and 
Eugene Eric Kim 3:35 pm on October 28, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m interested!
In the resources section, I posted a link to the broad overview of the Groupaya design process (which they may no longer be using): http://groupaya.wikispaces.com/Design+process
I’ve also been gathering templates and checklists that I use for designing convenings. My basic Google Docs templates are available at: https://fasterthan20.com/toolkit/meetings/templates/