Circle Practice
Principles of Circle:
Rotate leadership among all circle members.
Responsibility is shared for the quality of the experience.
Rely on wholeness rather than on any personal agenda.
Practices of Circle:
Speak with intention and note what has relevance to the conversation in the moment.
Listen with attention, respectful of the learning processes of all members of the group.
Tend to the well-being of the group, remain aware of the impact of our contributions.
World Cafe
World Café is a great way of fostering interaction and dialogue with both large and small groups. It is particularly effective in surfacing the collective wisdom of large groups of diverse people. The café format is very flexible and adapts to many different purposes – information sharing, relationship building, deep reflection exploration and action planning.
When planning a Café, make sure to leave ample time for both moving through the rounds of questions (likely to take longer than you think) and some type of whole-group harvest.
Principles of World Cafe:
Create pleasant and hospitable space
Explore questions that matter
Encourage each person’s contribution
Connect diverse people and ideas
Listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions
Make collective knowledge visible\
Open Space
Open Space Technology is useful in almost any context, including strategic direction setting, envisioning the future, conflict resolution, morale building, consultation with stakeholders, community planning, collaboration and deep learning about issues and perspectives.
Open Space Technology is an excellent meeting format for any situation in which there is:
A real issue of concern
Diversity of players
Complexity of elements
Presence of passion (including conflict)
A need for a quick decision
Open space can be used in groups of 10 to 1,000 and probably larger. It’s important to give enough time and space for several sessions to occur. The outcomes can be dramatic when a group is uses its passion and responsibility and is given the time to make something happen.
Principles of Open Space:
Whoever comes are the right people
Whenever it starts is the right time
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
When its over its over
The four principles and the law of two feet work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.
Design for Wiser Action
The purpose of Design for Wiser Action (D4WA) is to design real projects and campaigns with help from a group, based on the assertion that ‘it is kind to ask for help’.
It is similar to Pro Action Cafe although it allows for a project group to work together on the same idea for a period of time, rather than people moving between groups. It can be used as a short process over a couple of hours, or over a number of days.
Storytelling
Storytelling is familiar to us all. We use it to convey morals and information, to carry on traditions, to entertain and to communicate. In a group, storytelling can be a great way to build trust, to deepen listening and to share experiences and learning. There is a simple method that we can use to support storytelling in a group setting. Create a core theme or question that forms the basis of the storytelling. Invite participants to volunteer to share a story if they feel they have something that meets the theme or question.
Provide the storytellers with a brief - how long they should speak for and what the purpose and format of the session will be. Allow them time to prepare. Meanwhile, create 3 or 4 questions that the audience can listen out for. This is an example of collective harvesting. Once participants are seated, explain that they are each going to listen out for information relating to one specific question. You may ask them to choose which question they listen for, or evenly distribute questions among participants.
Triads
Triads simply means working in threes. Using some of the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, we can get to the heart of the matter by working in a group of three to dig deep into an issue. Each person takes a role: storyteller, listener and observer/time-keeper. Using a powerful question, the storyteller tells a story of an experience relating to the question. The listener has a number of questions that they can ask to encourage the storyteller to go deeper, although their main role is to listen. The observer is a witness and keeps time. Once the time is up, the group swaps roles and starts again until each has had the opportunity of storyteller. The three can feedback their insights as a group or individually. Works well in situations when you want to discover what would need to be done in order for more of a good thing to happen.
Chaordic Model
The term chaordic refers to a system of organisation that blends characteristics of order and chaos. It was developed by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa. The chaordic principles have been used as guidelines for creating organisations. We are beginning to understand and treat organisations and communities more like living systems than machines (see worldviews, page 7). The chaordic path is the story of our natural world where change happens at the edge as chaos meets order. An example is the edge of a woodland where the meeting of two habitats creates much diversity and difference. When we work between chaos and order, we are blending the possibility and new ideas that are contained in chaos with enough order to turn these ideas into action.
Principles of Circle:
Rotate leadership among all circle members.
Responsibility is shared for the quality of the experience.
Rely on wholeness rather than on any personal agenda.
Practices of Circle:
Speak with intention and note what has relevance to the conversation in the moment.
Listen with attention, respectful of the learning processes of all members of the group.
Tend to the well-being of the group, remain aware of the impact of our contributions.
World Cafe
World Café is a great way of fostering interaction and dialogue with both large and small groups. It is particularly effective in surfacing the collective wisdom of large groups of diverse people. The café format is very flexible and adapts to many different purposes – information sharing, relationship building, deep reflection exploration and action planning.
When planning a Café, make sure to leave ample time for both moving through the rounds of questions (likely to take longer than you think) and some type of whole-group harvest.
Principles of World Cafe:
Create pleasant and hospitable space
Explore questions that matter
Encourage each person’s contribution
Connect diverse people and ideas
Listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions
Make collective knowledge visible\
Open Space
Open Space Technology is useful in almost any context, including strategic direction setting, envisioning the future, conflict resolution, morale building, consultation with stakeholders, community planning, collaboration and deep learning about issues and perspectives.
Open Space Technology is an excellent meeting format for any situation in which there is:
A real issue of concern
Diversity of players
Complexity of elements
Presence of passion (including conflict)
A need for a quick decision
Open space can be used in groups of 10 to 1,000 and probably larger. It’s important to give enough time and space for several sessions to occur. The outcomes can be dramatic when a group is uses its passion and responsibility and is given the time to make something happen.
Principles of Open Space:
Whoever comes are the right people
Whenever it starts is the right time
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
When its over its over
The four principles and the law of two feet work to create a powerful event motivated by the passion and bounded by the responsibility of the participants.
Design for Wiser Action
The purpose of Design for Wiser Action (D4WA) is to design real projects and campaigns with help from a group, based on the assertion that ‘it is kind to ask for help’.
It is similar to Pro Action Cafe although it allows for a project group to work together on the same idea for a period of time, rather than people moving between groups. It can be used as a short process over a couple of hours, or over a number of days.
Storytelling
Storytelling is familiar to us all. We use it to convey morals and information, to carry on traditions, to entertain and to communicate. In a group, storytelling can be a great way to build trust, to deepen listening and to share experiences and learning. There is a simple method that we can use to support storytelling in a group setting. Create a core theme or question that forms the basis of the storytelling. Invite participants to volunteer to share a story if they feel they have something that meets the theme or question.
Provide the storytellers with a brief - how long they should speak for and what the purpose and format of the session will be. Allow them time to prepare. Meanwhile, create 3 or 4 questions that the audience can listen out for. This is an example of collective harvesting. Once participants are seated, explain that they are each going to listen out for information relating to one specific question. You may ask them to choose which question they listen for, or evenly distribute questions among participants.
Triads
Triads simply means working in threes. Using some of the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, we can get to the heart of the matter by working in a group of three to dig deep into an issue. Each person takes a role: storyteller, listener and observer/time-keeper. Using a powerful question, the storyteller tells a story of an experience relating to the question. The listener has a number of questions that they can ask to encourage the storyteller to go deeper, although their main role is to listen. The observer is a witness and keeps time. Once the time is up, the group swaps roles and starts again until each has had the opportunity of storyteller. The three can feedback their insights as a group or individually. Works well in situations when you want to discover what would need to be done in order for more of a good thing to happen.
Chaordic Model
The term chaordic refers to a system of organisation that blends characteristics of order and chaos. It was developed by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa. The chaordic principles have been used as guidelines for creating organisations. We are beginning to understand and treat organisations and communities more like living systems than machines (see worldviews, page 7). The chaordic path is the story of our natural world where change happens at the edge as chaos meets order. An example is the edge of a woodland where the meeting of two habitats creates much diversity and difference. When we work between chaos and order, we are blending the possibility and new ideas that are contained in chaos with enough order to turn these ideas into action.