Quotable Quotes from the Balaton Group Meeting

The annual Balaton Group Meeting, featuring from 8-12 fascinating speakers in the morning formal programme, and anywhere from 15-25 parallel afternoon sessions in the Open Space portion of the meeting, is always full of provocative ideas. I captured a number of them here, made by some of our speakers including Dennis Meadows, Bert de Vries, Ashok Khosla, Kevin Noone, Tim Jackson, Jorgen Norgaard among others:

• (On change) People and institutions are only willing to give money (for external research, projects, etc.) when they are no longer open to significant change.
• (On resisting change) "Astroturfing" - When companies pay local people to fight their government over decisions that the companies don't like.
• (On coming discontinuities) Global society will change more over the next 20 years than it has in the past 100.
• (On thinking globally) Global sustainability problems will still be experienced locally.
• (On time horizons) A far-sighted dictator is better than a short-sighted democracy and neither works.
• (On equity) Are we really living together on this planet?
• (On economic growth) A primary anxiety of a firm is around capital mobility - that money will fly out of the firm if it does not innovate.
• (On alternatives to economic growth) Here is a global dilemma - growth is unsustainable, and de-growth (decroissance) is unstable.
• (On carbon emissions) We need an economy that takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
• (On a service economy) There are also limits to a service, or amateur, economy - you can only take care of other people's kids 24 hours a day.
• (On decoupling) Where does environmental impact come from if not from economic activity?
• (On the coming changes) These things take longer than you think.

Each idea, fascinating, and often bucking conventional wisdom. That's what the Balaton Group Meetings provide each year for the 50 people who attend them. For a little history and more on this years meeting, see another Balaton Group Member's Blog: Dormgrandpop.

Balaton Group Meeting 2009

Each year for 28 years, the Balaton Group has met on the shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary to discuss sustainability issues, systems dynamics, and global change.

This year's meeting is focused on "Frontiers of Sustainable Development" and I have decided to try to blog the various meeting inputs. These follow...

Can't Do Another Visioning Process?

Vision fatigue? Many groups involved in change processes over time claim they just can't do another visioning process. They have done it so many times. What is a creative way to engage this kind of group?

Instead of trying to design their process, why not design an inquiry process where they do the fundamentals of design?

You might start with attention grabbing questions (group or individual):

• If I were going to send you an email inviting you to a visioning process, what would it have to include for you to enthusiastically say "Yes!"


• If you were going to participate in a vision process that really energised you, what would be some of the features of this process?


• If you were going to participate in a visioning process that created a profound vision, who would be doing something differently at the end? What would these people be doing differently at the end? What would you be doing differently at the end?


• If you were going to say that the visioning process created lasting change, what would be some of the necessary conditions to make this vision stick?


• If we were going to give this process an innovative name, what might we call it?

This inquiry process doesn't focus people in on their past, potentially less-than-satisfactory visioning exercises. It focuses them on the positive future and involves them in creating it and answering questions about what it will take to make it work (differently) this time. The energy that these kinds of questions creates is very different than that from a problem-focused approach, and just may get people to the table with a different attitude and intent, and that might make all the difference.

If Trainers Designed Training Centres

Imagine you and another trainer got together and could dream up your perfect training centre. What are some of the things that you would avoid, that have driven you crazy in the past, in various hotels and conference centres around the world? Heavy or fixed furniture, poorly lit rooms, carpeted walls, struggles getting one more flipchart at 11pm, getting internet connections for speakers - you name it. What trainers and facilitators want more than anything is flexibility. How might you design a centre for maximum flexibility?

This morning I had the pleasure to visit just such a training venue outside of Geneva called Ecogia. It is the main training centre for the International Committee of the Red Cross. And in fact, it is the manifestation of the vision of two trainers, Christiane Amici Raboud, now the Director of Ecogia, and one of her ICRC colleagues, also a trainer at the time. They seemed to think of everything and built up a delightful learning environment for both their peers, and the participants who spend time at Ecogia.

Each meeting room is the ultimate in flexibility. Everything is on wheels, the tables, the chairs, the projectors - there are even mobile units that people can wheel around after them to hold their materials and documentation (with handles at the front and perfect height for humans as opposed to smaller mammals). Each of these items has a very small overall footprint and weight - the tables quickly fold up into slim objects that look like flipcharts, the chairs are very light, the projector is in a trolley (and the cables are in the floor) so you can use any wall as a projection screen.

Even the lighting is flexible. In the main room, the projector is linked to automatic blinds and dimmers, so when you are ready to go, you push the button and the lights immediately go off and the blinds down; when the off switch is pressed, everything lights up again. No fumbling around in the dark looking for blinds and switches.

There are plenty of break out spaces, and to make it easy for groups to move around with their work, many walls are magnetic, and flipchart headers with strong magnets on them, filled with paper, are easy to take off one magnetic wall and into another room. Meeting rooms which have wall paper (the Centre was originally an 18th century orphanage, with modern additions, and has kept its charm), there are full length magnetic strips or clip in strips for flipcharts.

Of course there are many great training centres in the world, frequently very expensive and exclusive, often the domain of private sector clients. However, Ecogia, which has the majority of its clientele with the ICRC, also rents its meeting rooms and sleeping rooms to other organizations, all at compassionate cost-recovery rates, in keeping with the ICRC's community values. It also offers simplicity in both reservation, and an all-inclusive equipment etc. package. No negotiating late in the night with a junior manager who doesn't want to part with that additional flipchart or projector because it is not on the reservation. Also surprisingly included - all the bedrooms and many small meeting rooms have internet-accessible computers, are connected to printers and have free phones!

I must say, I was impressed. And I could clearly see, as Christiane kindly showed me around, the care and thought that had gone into every aspect of the centre. I love the idea that some trainers got together and tapped their learning about what works in training spaces, and then used it to make an innovative new place that uses learning for learning.

Visiting the Systems Zoo with Alan AtKisson

This morning I am helping to team deliver a day-long systems thinking module as a part of this week's Isis Academy (AtKisson Associates), a leadership programme for sustainability practitioners being held outside of Stockholm. Systems can be complex for some people, so we are starting with an introduction by Alan AtKisson, sustainability expert, author and song writer, on the "systems zoo". Listen to the Systems Zoo song here.

The Systems Zoo, a concept originated by German systems thinker Hartmut Bossel, has been translated into a sing-a-long song by Alan. As he walks them through the concepts, the participants don't know yet. At the moment, Alan is introducing the basic concepts, telling stories about them, and having the group say each word (he says they are onomatopoeiac, that is, they sould like what they are.) The words are:

• Sources
• Sinks
• Stocks
• Flows
• Oscillations
• Delays
• Rates of Change
• Nonlinear Effects
• Feedback Loops
• Na-na-na-na-na (well this is a part of the song, but not actually a systems concept)

To make some these concepts easier to grasp, Alan is using "rumours" as a story example. Rumours have a source, someone starts a rumour and tells it to someone else. And eventually, the rumours stop somewhere (like an internet archive, or a blog page, or in your head). In between, the rumours just flow around as people tell them to one another. Of course, along the way they stop, and potentially accumulate in a stock, like in your head while you desparetely try to not tell them to someone else. And then perhaps at some point after too much accumulations of corroborating evidence for the rumours, you just can't help it and you tell someone else, and the rumours flow again until they finish up (hopefully soon) in their sink.

The song is followed by an introductory presentation on modelling, being done by Piotr Magnuszewski, from the Centre for Systems Solutions (Wroclaw). It has now quickly gone into systems modules, with stock and flow diagrams, bathtubs, fishery models, and an introduction to Vensim. Much more complicated than the concepts seemed in the song and the rumours example, but that was a good familiar introduction to a way of thinking that is not familiar to everyone. Jay Forrester , one of the "fathers" of systems dynamics, was attributed as saying, that people's minds had not evolved to think about solving non-linear differential equations. That's for sure!



Note: The Centre for Systems Solutions website is in Polish at the moment, but they have an interesting new multi-player game in English on climate change negotations called the Climate Game.

Cross-Cultural Collision Caused by One Word

A major cross-cultural collision occurred at the end of a recent multi-stakeholder dialogue I was facilitating.

The offending word: Report.

In the final feel-good stretches of a dynamic multi-sectoral, heretofore generative dialogue, progress screamed to a halt when this six letter word was uttered. The precipitating question, expected to be purely rhetorical – Can we issue a “report” from this meeting?

The room was immediately divided between loud answers of absolutely YES, and absolutely NO. Faces contorted, side conversations bubbled up around the room (ok, maybe I am being a little melodramatic, but not too much). Confounded, I took a quick poll. We found that the private sector representatives weighed in heavily on the NO side. But what about transparency, the NGOs said?! Transparency is fine, came the business answer, the problem is we didn’t DO anything to report on. (Chilly silence, after two long 10-hour days.) But, we spoke for 2 days on lifecycle improvements, made some agreements and got some great ideas, claimed the NGOs. But we set no targets, have no deliverables or budget figures, countered the business partners, let’s work together now and issue the Report in a year or two. A year or two!! The NGOs were mystified…

Ahhh, the penny dropped. Report, I thought, that’s the problem. In a company, a Report (with a capital “R”) means End of Year Report, Annual Report, Shareholders Report. They involve hard figures, money, progress, dates and demonstration of concrete targets met. For us, NGOs, however, we write activity or process reports (with a small “r”) all the time, for communication purposes among our wide and varied constituencies, to keep people abreast of issues and activities often while they are happening, as a means to engage our staff and partners in ongoing consultation. Very different notions of that word “report”.

OK, let’s try this again. I asked the group, “Can we send out a meeting summary after our workshop? “ (No R word this time). Unanimously approved, collision tidied up, traffic flow back to normal.


(Note for my Facilitator record: Sometimes I expect and prepare for cross-cultural differences when I am working with groups that include two or more national (or sub-national) cultures; I might not expect the differences that can occur between institutional cultures. These can be as strongly adhered to, and incredibly different, as working with international groups, and present surprises for a facilitator such as the one described above.)

Re-Learn Something "New": Testing the Depth of Those Neural Pathways

I wrote a post in March about learning through repetition, versus intense bursts of learning - so the benefits of 15 minutes of Spanish a day for 2 years versus the same amount of time in a one-month intensive each summer. This apparently deepens your neural grooves and helps you really learn something (See para 2 of Golden Nuggets from the GTD Summit - notice also Michael Randel's comments about the timing piece).

Well, I checked that recently when I did two things that I have not done for over 25 years. I picked up my silver Stradivarius Bach trumpet and played a high school fight song, and caught four nice largemouth bass on a rooster tail spinner (albeit not at the same sitting, or standing, as it were).

I had no idea that this intrinsic knowledge was still there. It made me wonder what else there is still sitting in there waiting to be used, or re-used?

Indeed, 25 years ago, I played my trumpet nearly every day over a seven year period. I was in the marching band, orchestra and in a jazz band. I even got to leave school from time to time to play taps for military funerals in our small town. (Because I was paid for this I got a lifetime of confounding responses to the workshop icebreaker game "2 Truths and a Lie" -no one ever believes that I was a Professional Trumpet Player - it almost made standing in the snow behind a tombstone half a mile upwind from a 21 gun salute worthwhile.)

I probably played that particular fight song thousands of times. Any one Friday night football game, win or lose, would have produced dozens of opportunities to do so, not to mention the practice drills, and the end of every single, daily 45 minute band practice. I picked up the music for that song two weeks ago, looked through it and played it without hesitation, the second time from memory. My kids were amazed, they couldn't even get a non-frog sound out of the instrument and they'd never seen me and a trumpet in the same room together.

Bass fishing was a similar experience. Over the years I have had a few opportunities to drop a worm on a hook into a farm pond and pull up a few bluegills. However, casting for large mouth bass with a spinner takes a little more than watching the bobber go under in shallow water and pulling up the fish. Although I found bass fishing again - getting the lure just where you want it and reeling in at the right pace - after decades of not casting, nearly as easy as that. I could even strike so that the bass were lip caught and could be happily released instead of having to practically surgically extract the hook, which never bodes well for their continued longevity as anything other than turtle bait.

Fish filleting also came with the memory package (the bluegills my boys caught), as I got to bring back those specific skills to create lunch. This was not like buying fish in the supermarket and taking off the skin, this was like taking the shiny excited fish out of the bucket of water and making it into tiny lunchable boneless, skinless filets. Something that as I get older and perhaps more sympathetic to vegetarianism, I find harder mentally to do, although I could do it almost mechanically and of course did it all the time without hesitation when I was younger and living in a rural community.

It seemed so easy, it took so little time and those abilities were back. It made me want to remember what else I have really learned in the past, perhaps long forgotten, that I could bring into service now. And somehow reapply - my guess is that trumpet playing and bass fishing might be hard to integrate into my current line of work. Although if one of my goals was to meet some new people in my local area, and perhaps work more at the community level, I can assure you that I never thought of joining the fanfare (local village bands notorious in Switzerland for playing long sets after speeches at national celebrations, and before the drinking starts.) But maybe I should.

And I'm sure that I could come up with multiple parallels between bass fishing and leadership learning if I tried, it might make for some good learning anecdotes - at least for me.

Venue Checklist: What You Want to Know Before You Go

Imagine you are using an amazing venue for an upcoming, interactive conference of around 200 people (or any number for that matter), and you are visiting it for the first time. What would you want to know? Imagine that the venue is not a purpose-built conference centre, but something like a World Heritage Site, a venue that models the content of your conference in some way, but might not have the systems in place as professional conference centres do. That makes it even more important to ask the right questions the first (and second time) that you visit. Here are a few things that I would want to know prior to putting the final touches on the design of any event:

Access:

1. How do people get there? Do they have maps and directions available?


2. Is it accessible by public transport, and is there parking for those who come by car?


3. Is there a preferred taxi service serving the venue? What is the contact information?

Set-up:

1. Do they have staff to set up the venue and individual rooms the night before? Can the organizers get in there early (e.g. the day before) to check room set up and post signs?


2. Can the staff change the room set up during the day, or must the morning set up last for the entire day? If so, how long does it take to change a room?


3. What kinds of tables do they have? Round, rectangular?


4. What kinds of chairs do they have? Fixed to the ground? Fixed together in rows? Movable? Can they be moved by the workshop organizers during the day for small group work, etc., if they are moved back?


5. Can the organizers post signage for the workshop? Or does the venue have its own signs and post them? What are the rules about posting signs (if any)?

Meeting Rooms:

1. Are there any limitations to room set-up formats? If so what are they? Can the venue take a suggested set-up format from the organizers (such as cabaret style for breakout groups) and use that, or do they have fixed set up formats?


2. What are the capacities for the plenary room and breakout rooms, in theatre style, cabaret style, etc?


3. Does the venue have enough chairs and tables for simultaneous set up of plenary and breakout rooms so there is no delay in set up?


4. Can flip chart paper and other posters be put up on the walls? If so, is there a preference for fixation (blue tack/sticky stuff, masking tape, etc.)


5. If nothing can be fixed on the walls, do they have ample flipchart stands, and possibly pinboards (with pins), for the workshop organizers to use?


6. How are the acoustics between rooms? Can you hear people speaking in the corridors? In the neighbouring rooms? What if microphones are used?


7. If common spaces are used for workshops, how are the acoustics in the common space? If people are clapping, or talking amongst one another, does that sound travel to other corners where potentially quieter conversations are being held? Are there live barriers (plants, etc.) which might be used to divide common spaces?


8. If organizers use interactive exercises, or games in their workshops, are there any limitations to using open or common space for these?


9. Are markers provided with the flipcharts, or do these need to be brought in by the organizers?

Registration and Welcome:

1. Is there a registration area that can be used to greet people and provide them with their documentation and badges? Where is it? Can it be set up in advance? (the night before?)


2. If there are any VIP needs (special access/doors), security, or separate waiting areas, what facilitaties are available?

Food and breaks:

1. What kind of lunch is served? Sit down, served, buffet? If the lunch break in the agenda is short, how can the venue assure that people can eat quickly?


2. Can all 200 people eat at the same time, or do they need to eat in smaller groups? If the latter, how long is one sitting and how many people can be served?


3. Where are the coffee breaks served? Can they be outside the meeting rooms to minimize noise?


4. Can the whole group break for coffee at the same time, will there be a back up at the coffee area? Or are there multiple stations that can serve people quickly, so that 15-30 min is enough for every one to have coffee?


5. Check the menu options for lunch and coffee breaks-what choices are available? Can they serve special diets (vegetarian, caffeine-free, lactose or gluten-intolerance, etc.) Do people need to notify of special needs in advance? How much in advance?


6. Is there water available in between breaks and meals?


7. Is there smoking in the venue? If not, is there a designated smoking place?

Communication and Equipment:

1. Does the venue have internet access or wifi? Is it free? Is there a code? Are there capacity limitations (e.g. number of people connected)? If so, what are they?


2. Are there printing or office facilities available for the organizers, for last minute copies, etc. Or for speakers with last minute changes to their presentations?


3. Are there any cell phone restrictions or limitations in the venue?


4. What are the cell phone numbers of the key venue service people? Can we have a list of who to call for service, technical, or other issues during the conference?


5. Does the venue provide equipment such as PPt projectors with laptops (connected to the internet), overhead projectors, video projectors (as needed)? How many of these are available? Are there technical people to help with set up?


6. Is there a sound system for the plenary, is there a technical person for set up and monitoring?

Breakdown and closing:

1. What are the organizers expected to do prior to leaving the venue, in terms of venue breakdown, clean up, etc?


2. Can anyone at the venue answer questions about return transport, flights, train schedules, etc. or help changing or getting bookings?


3. Is there a place where participants could leave or deposit feedback forms prior to leaving?


4. Is there a place where participants can leave their luggage on the second day prior to leaving? Is it secure? How do people get things out again if they leave at different times during the day?

No doubt there are more. These are just things that I have seen over the years in conference centres (both things I liked and things that impeded our process because they were not available or there were limitations that we had not been aware of in advance of our meeting.) No doubt there are more. I like to say that we (facilitators, trainers, organizers, and participants) can work with anything as long as we know about it in advance. Sometimes you get a real test, but I can tell you that there is nothing like a freaky parameter to get your creative juices flowing!

Using Systems Thinking: How to Go from 140 PPt Slides to 2

What kind of motivation does a trainer need to liberate herself from an unweildly PowerPoint slide set? What about the above - might that work for you too?

Last Wednesday in London I delivered a systems thinking module for LEAD Europe Cohort 14 (I was the Director of Capacity Development at LEAD International for 6 years). For several years at LEAD I delivered a systems thinking training module that had 5 heavy PPt files which contained over 140 PPt slides. People generally liked the module, and it was always a bit of a marathon and rather overwhelming even in its one day version.

Last week I delivered the module with the same learning objectives (common archetypes, goal setting, Behaviour Over Time graphing/Reference Mode diagramming, and introduction to Causal Loop diagrams), in half the time, and with only 2 PPt slides! Even with this incredible dematerialisation (literally and figuratively), people found the module incredibly useful and perhaps even more deeply so.

What could get me to break my dependence on that pile of carefully crafted slides, and get me closer to the point in half the time?

I knew that in the amount of time we had (4 hours) there was simply no way I could run through those slide sets and do the exercises. So I decided to change the format, and have me be the medium for content delivery rather than the slide deck. As a result, people really got more of me, the trainer, as I went through the steps with them of the various games and exercises, helped them identify their own examples for application, and coached them as they tested the two diagramming tools on these examples. Because they were interacting with me instead of the slide set, I got more immediate feedback, which gave me more confidence in what I was delivering, which in turn helped me to resist hiding behind an enormous slide set.

Here are a few other practical things I did to reduce my need for slides:

1. I wrote the schedule on a flip chart and used it for signposting and transitions, instead of slides. This was for myself as much as participants. I also wrote up the short hand of the overall sequence and narrative of the module and carried that around with me so I could make and remake the key points for people, and never lose the plot that was so carefully constructed in the slides.
   
   
2. I learned the game briefings by heart and gave them orally with a physical demonstration to help people follow (rather than the rules on a slide and a picture of the action);



3. I took out ALL the examples. As heretical as that sounds, it helped quickly contextualise the tools for this particular group, as they came up with stories related to their collective knowledge based on past discussions. For example, I gave people the archetypes (like "better before worse"), with a cartoon which illustrated each one, and asked people in pairs to come up with the examples of these archetypes from their discussions together that week, as well as from their own life and work. These were then used to breathe life into the generic structures (rather than my generic examples).



4. My only 2 slides described the anatomy of the two diagramming tools, which I put up to talk through briefly. Then I took them down. I had photocopied these and put the tips on the back, (e.g. for selecting good variable names, or for assigning polarity on a CLD), and handed these out, so that they could be used as a reference when they drew their own diagrams.
   

Overall it was an exercise in getting to the essence of the learning. Deriving the most critical points, and having people do all their learning through application. It was such a success, I will probably never use those 140 slides again!

My Point? To Be a "Story" There Must Be a Point

A week or so ago (time marker), I spent the day in London (place marker) with Shawn Callahan from Anecdote, an innovative storytelling group from Australia, in a full day learning session called "Storytelling for business leaders".

Let's say I wanted to tell you about my day. I could write down a list of things I learned, but that wouldn’t be a story. I could give you my opinion of the day, but that wouldn’t be a story either. If I was going to tell you a story about that day, I would need to start with a time, date or place marker, add an unanticipated event, and even more importantly, I would have to have a point - the reason for the story. (This might sound obvious, but if you think about it, how many so-called stories do you hear where the point is far from clear? )

Why do we need a point? In our workshop we talked about this. Stories aren’t just for entertainment; they give us a repertoire of captured patterns. And matching patterns (e.g. our past experience, with a new situation) can help us with decision-making (see Gary Klein on naturalistic decision-making). Having a strong point, not only helps your listener tag your story, but helps you do it too, so that it is easier to remember and therefore more meaningful, which makes it easier to use the information and learning in the future.

This point was made for me experientially by a sequence of activities that followed in the afternoon of our workshop. We were asked to craft and tell a story to a partner who would then reflect back to the storyteller what their story told them about that person. We told the first iteration of our stories. Then we were given some tips for improving our story – making it human, keeping it simple, using the unexpected, making it concrete and credible - and we saw some amazing YouTube video examples of storytelling, from Geena Davis at the Golden Globes to Obama "Fired up and ready to go" on the electoral trail. Then we were asked to work on and tell the same story again, better this time.

I worked on my story, based on a recent experience about learning from mistakes, tried to make it more concrete, and brought in some of the real life drama and emotion of the situation. Then I retold it. And in the feedback discussion the same thing happened – my partner told me as my previous partner had, that he enjoyed it, gave me plenty of reasons for liking it, and then asked me gently - what was my point?

Slightly crushed, I asked myself – what was my point? It's not enough to be an impressionistic storyteller - I had a general feeling of where I was going. But how do you get there? Do you need a point first and then find a story – or do you have a great story and massage it to make a point? Either way, I was clearly missing it. Even with an entertaining narrative. This is the real art of storytelling.

I need to go back and rework it; that story has potential, and must always remember to ask myself before I start to tell a story – what’s my point? I said that many storytellers we hear are rather unclear as to the purpose of their stories. I might have been one of those perpetrators in the past - are you? If so, help people learn more from you, and you from yourself, by upping your game in storytelling.

Structure, Chaos, Confidence: The Workshop as a Social Construct

I’m facilitating a Partners Assembly today in Brussels, and I’m awake early going over my agenda – the flow, the segue ways, the objectives and outcomes that we want overall and from each of our sessions. I need to know this agenda inside and out, and I realise that this is a lot about confidence.

Agendas for workshops, training courses, meetings, even work days for that matter, are just words on paper. They are words that a potentially large number of people share (we have 60 today but you might have 250 people), and they depend on strong group norms for people to follow them.

So the agenda says that the opening is at 09:00 and coffee at 10:30, or the discussion question is this or that – people could actually easily do whatever they want, not follow the little numbers or words on that paper called an agenda, and simply do their own thing for your 8 hour day (and sometimes people do, as we know.) But the fact that so many people actually do stand up at 10:30 and go for a coffee, and come back at 10:45 for the next session, depends a lot on confidence. Confidence that the agenda makes sense, that the topic and time spent is worthwhile, and that someone is in charge of what might otherwise be an 8 hour free-for-all.

So when you are leading such a workshop, as facilitator, what you are doing is giving people that confidence as the leader of the group in that particular context. It comes through your voice, through your body language, your level or organization, your complete knowledge of what people are doing at any given moment (must not get caught with your pants down not knowing what room Working Group 2 is in) and why (and you will be challenged over and over about the rationale for x or y). And of course you also need to be flexible, because as the group develops over the day, you will want to gradually hand over the invisible programme to them, so that the confidence that started with you, transfers over to the organizers and the participants, and they become the masters again of their process and the outcomes, and ultimately the application and follow-up.

But at the beginning of the day its me, so back to my agenda, and building my own confidence in proposing it and making it happen for a group of 60 people willing to donate 8 hours of their time today to the International Year for Biodiversity 2010.

Thought for the Day: On Tolerance

It is ok to be intolerant of intolerance?

An Appetite for Experiential Learning

Can you go too far with experiential learning? This is learning by doing, as opposed to learning by more passive means (listening to a speaker, watching TV, etc.) Experiential learning has the potential to get deeper, be more memorable, to create an experience or a learning moment that you can draw on or act upon in the future.

The (all too) oft-quoted Confucian saying, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand," argues for this more interactive approach to learning. So how can we make, or take, more learning opportunities outside of formal learning situations - into the informal learning environment. What about this…

I am a member of a thoughtful book club which is just about to finish reading The Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle. It is a powerful book about inequity, humanity, and the poverty/environment interface. In the book two families live within 500 meters of each other in the outskirts of Los Angeles, one on a fragile hillside in a makeshift hut of stolen pallets eating domestic cats and thrown away produce, all by-products of the incredibly affluent (in relative terms), gated, chardonnay- and smoothie-drinking estate which sits downhill; only a 2.5 meter high stucco wall separate these two worlds. One is a family of illegal Mexican immigrants, the other can be characterised by their upper middle-class, double-income urban flight.

So before this sounds like a book review, to the point, and back to my book club and learning. We try to link the evening of each of our book club discussions to a meal. I see a potential learning opportunity here. Now, I am not eager to sacrifice either of our pet cats, so how else might I make this discussion of haves and have nots, of the extremes between poverty and over consumption, deeper and more personal - more experiential?

Might I ask my fellow readers, when they enter my house to pick a number from a hat? These numbers might determine their places at the table for our discussion and meal. Maybe the “1’s” will sit at the head of the table. They might have a table cloth, polished cutlery, a nice bottle of wine and a warm meal, with a starter, dessert and coffee. And what about our number ”2s”? Maybe their half of the table will feature a newspaper covering, tin cans of tap water to drink, a spoon, and a small bowl of yesterday’s beans and rice, barely warmed over, to share?

How might that make people feel? What kind of a discussion would ensue – would it be different? More congruent with our book’s message and therefore more powerful? Will we learn more than we would have from our usual discussion? And more importantly, how might we look differently at our food and drink at our next meal?

(Bonus question: Will people be happy to come back to my house for book club again?)

Is Progress Made By Making Mistakes?

Tonight I spoke at the Geneva Forum for Social Change on a panel called, "The Power of One: Individual Choices Affecting Environmental Change." It followed and riffed off of a film which was shown just prior to the panel discussion called, Garbage Warrior, about Mike Reynolds decades long fight to give architecture and building a space to innovate towards more sustainable living. I started my introduction with one of Mike's quotes from early on in his film...

"Mike Reynolds said that 'progress is made by making mistakes'. I would say rather that progress is not made by making mistakes, but progress is made by learning from our mistakes (and our successes for that matter.) Learning is not necessarily implicit in making mistakes. People make the same mistakes over and over again. So does society, we see it all around us.

Just two days ago, I filled up my diesel car's tank with unleaded petrol, from empty, right to the top. And that is not the first time that has happened. How did this happen? I was simply not thinking about my actions or the results, I was not fully present, I was thinking about what I was going to be doing in the future and not what I was doing at that moment.

For the last 19 years I have been working as a learning practitioner within the sustainability community, most recently as the Head of Learning and Leadership with IUCN. From this experience I know that learning takes work; it actually rarely just happens. They say you "Learn Something New Every Day", and you probably do, but don't notice it, its passive rather than active learning, and therefore don't necessarily deeply learn. To deeply learn you need to deliberately close your learning loop, particularly through building reflective practice.

Over the years, I have seen a shifting paradigm in adult learning from more centralised teaching, to facilitated learning which includes an important component on reflection: noticing, naming, capturing, sharing your learning, in order to embed it and make it more accessible for future use (for yourself and others) -so that you can really learn from your mistakes, and successes, and help others learn from yours and their own too. Can we be more present around our choices as consumers, voters, (petrol buyers)? Can we start to more deliberately learn our way towards more sustainable development?

A Poem for Gillian

Gillian, I decided to write a little poem,
To mark this time, whence from IUCN you are going,
To new bright and green pastures and beds,
That I know, for you, lie just ahead,
As you take to your garden with gusto and strength,
Whilst flourishing as Balaton Group President,
Sewing new seeds of learning,
As round each corner turning,
And taking inspiration from the toys and joys,
With your rambunctious growing boys!

Sad to see you go, we take heart,
That coming here daily in your little Smart,
You have changed much behaviour over time,
And set in place trends for a workplace better aligned,
To think about ‘process’ and the people who make,
Essential ingredients of the IUCN cake,
Using Strengths Finder to help us identify talents,
Getting Things Done à la David Allen,
Innovating with e-tools as part of your ‘flow’,
And challenging the status quo.

Now Alaska calls and into summer we step,
Remember us well. I’m sure we’ll be calling for help!
But more importantly, as friend, daughter, mother and wife,
Enjoy the next phase of your journey through life,
Keep up the ‘play’ and do write that blog,
So we can keep track of your latest inspiration from frogs,
Or whatever else is under the rock you upturn next,
As you strive to learn with twitter-ful zest,
We will miss you, but know that when islands separate,
We need only remember to - communicate!

Coconut Cracker: The Anatomy of a Game

This morning I was surprised with another Mother’s Day present - a game called “Coconut Cracker” which my 8 year old had created for me.

The essence of the game was that you had to toss a pencil onto a small piece of paper (a post-it note). On the post-it note were drawn nine small circles about the size of a marble. The objective was to get the pointed end of the pencil into one of the nine circles. If you got the pointed end in a circle, this first victory allowed you to peel off one of four pieces of cello tape which were holding a decorated paper cover onto half a coconut. The first three wins got to peel off one of the cello tapes. The fourth person to win would be able to uncover the hollowed coconut and get the surprise inside.

The game was fun! We were three players (my competitors were 8 and 6 years old.) The circles were just the right size, not too small and not too big, so that we had to try, test approaches, refine our pencil tossing skills, and then could succeed in the task. Each piece of tape lifted added to our anticipation, we got excited, we got a little sloppy. The final tape took us a full few minutes to get. And then someone won! We cheered, he peeled off the last piece of tape, lifted the coloured paper cover and exposed the contents of the coconut, which was confetti (hence the name, Coconut Cracker), and delightedly threw it all over the room.

That was a good game that he had created. It had many of the components of the kinds of games we play over and over for learning and recreation, including:

• Roles (we each had an action we needed to perform which was clear)


• Rules (these were introduced at the beginning and did not change, very important)


• Accounting system (we counted our throws, and the tape)


• Macro cycle (over all we were trying to uncover the coconut)


• Micro cycle (each round we were trying to get the pencil in a circle, and we needed to complete four rounds successfully)


• Props (pencil, post-it, coconut, confetti - this game was probably inspired by finding a coconut shell and thinking "what can I do with this?")


• Referee (well, we all did that, we might have needed a way to deal with disputes)


• Safety procedures (no one could put the pencil in his/her eye, or eat the confetti)


• Media for introducing or debriefing the game (here my son did it orally, we were allowed to ask questions)


• Name (something that does not give away the game, here Coconut Cracker was just on the edge, but since we did not know what was inside it seemed clever afterwards)

One further thing a more complex game has is a causal model, which governs between decisions and results. I would have to think about that one for Coconut Cracker, which is ultimately a game of skill.

At the end of the game, my son said that next time he might introduce more “levels” to the game – like having layers of paper covering the coconut, which when removed could become the next "game board" (e.g. post-it), each one a little more challenging, like smaller holes and further apart, so it would prolong the excitement and add to the skills development. I was amazed (very proud of course), and it made me wonder why we don’t create more games from scratch as adults. If we wanted to use them for something specific, like team development, or maybe as an entry into an innovation process, we could put more context into the frame.

There are some amazing people for whom creating games is a great art, one is Dennis Meadows, with whom I have had the great pleasure to learn over the years about games. He created wonderful sustainable development games like FishBanks, and STRATAGEM, among many others. Games that are both complex in their models and learning, and elegant in the simplicity of play (both are also computer supported.) I took my list above of components of a game and slightly adapted it from a workshop Dennis gave in 1998 about using games for learning. I am not sure he would completely agree with my assessment about Coconut Cracker’s merits, and my interpretation of the components. I took some poetic license - it was Mother’s Day after all!

If You Had to Choose: Using Your Web 2.0 Dashboard

So I just spent 2.5 hours on my Web 2.0 tools; it all started with 1 LinkedIn invitation in my Inbox ....

Then I spent some time reconnecting through LinkedIn with people that I met at the recent GTD Summit, and enjoyed reading their CV2.0s in there (even their titles are interesting - wonder what The Chief Innovator's day looks like? Sounds great).

Then I sent a Tweet on Twitter about it, and while I was on Twitter I checked out the #GTD tag to see what people were posting about that. One of the GTD Coaches said she was just in Mexico and was happy that she did not come back with "Get rid of Swine Flu" as a Project. Which reminded me of some of my Mexican friends while I worked at LEAD. That took me back to LinkedIn searching for them.

While I was doing that I got a message from a former colleague asking me to join her on Facebook. I resisted the impulse to open that account and inevitably spend time looking at photos and reading updates.

While I was on LinkedIn, I saw my last blog post there, and also I read through the blog feeds from some of my other LinkedIn connections. That made me want to write a blog post. When I went to my Blogger dashboard, I got a number of feeds from other bloggers I am following through my blog reader - including a few I decided to invite to add to my LinkedIn connections (back to LinkedIn).

All those interesting blog posts and links reminded me of my Del.icio.us social bookmarking account, which has been dormant for a while, although I do get daily notices through my Plaxo page (when I check it) about other people's Del.icio.us additions (which for the most part are very interesting-thanks to them for filtering part of the deluge for me). Must go and tidy mine up, but not right now.

OK, so since I was putting in links to this post (not that anyone and their dog cannot find these sites, just for good practice), I went to Facebook (FB) to copy the URL (big mistake) and couldn't help pausing to read some of my Friend's updates and to ask if anyone there is using Twitter.

Big circles and lots of time. Where is this getting me? So many people are using these Web2.0 tools - how many times do we reflect on what we are getting out of them? What are we learning? Here's some of what I'm noticing:

LinkedIn: I think this is useful. I started LinkedIn when my neighbour got a job interview with Google through his extended LinkedIn network. Although I have not yet had such an offer, it has connected me with some interesting people I did not already know. Mostly it gives me updated contact information and reminds me of interesting people I have met and worked with. As we move through many jobs, processes and events these days, it is a great way of keeping your professional network in one place and available from anywhere. It's also good to capture feedback and recommendations, giving a different voice and perspective to people's work (not just self-reported, although some recommendations are really OTT).

I like the new LinkedIn features of blog feeds, and short updates like in FB; however I can't seem to get into TripIt, or the Amazon reading function, that seems too FB (as in too much information) to me. The Groups have not yet worked for me either, I think Listserves are better, at least you can file them automatically. People seem to use the Group affiliations to beef up their CV2.0 by association, but I don't see lots of activity there. Someone write and tell me about a good Group experience on LinkedIn. Finally, it seems to have reached critical mass for my age bracket, whenever I search for someone on LinkedIn, I usually find them.

Twitter: This is my newest interest, although unlike LinkedIn, when I search I rarely turn up people I know, although apparently there are millions in there and more than Paris Hilton and her 47,000 followers. David Allen is Tweeting and, since I have met him, I enjoy that. Many techies are in there (Guy Kawasaki Tweets many times an hour seemingly automatically, so I stopped following him), and some interesting learning people are using Twitter to speed link to all kinds of news and research, like Harold Jarche. I know that my husband was keeping up with the swine flu spread on Twitter, which made him altogether too paranoid for a while as the number of flu-tagged Tweets soared by the second.

What am I getting out of it? Well, it is new, so there is the gratifying heatseeker thing. I also think it has some intesting applications for informal learning - I enjoyed seeing how interactive the Twitter Fountain made the GTD Summit plenary session, which I have blogged before. I feel that Twitter helps connect me to some people I admire who are doing good things for the world, like Hunter Lovins, Alan AtKisson and Alex Steffan at Worldchanging.com, and who are using it to share their thoughts 140 characters at a time.

Twitter also introduced me to making Tiny URLs (because you can't have your URL take up half of your character allocation.) As a result of this brevity it takes only a few minutes to read your Twitter home page, if you don't click on any of the links or search the hashtags (#something) which takes you to all the other Tweets with that tag. You can process it quicker. You can even add and delete followers and followees in a second if you want to. So can other people. Which seems to translate into a lot of spam. I had "Prime Minister Gordon Brown" sign up to follow me today on Twitter - clicking back asks you to sign a petition.

Facebook: OK, in the last 10 minutes since I posted my update on FB asking people if they were using Twitter, I have had 3 comments from people in London, Geneva and Texas. Whatever you want to say about FB, that is where the people are. If you ask a question, you will get some answers. That's not always the case with most blogs or most Twitterers. However, for me, like others, FB remains mainly social, and most of what I learn is about the value of keeping social connections warm. I heard one of my Communications colleagues say that our organization was going to move from putting time and energy into a FB Group to using Twitter for disseminating updates on conservation action, because people aren't searching for that kind of information on FB.

And there are so many more...So what Web2.0 tools are you using, what do you like best and what are you learning?

Brainstorming about Brainstorming

This week I was asked to facilitate a session on "Brainstorming" for the monthly meeting of the Geneva Facilitators Network (linked to the International Association of Facilitators which certified Lizzie and I last December as CPFs). It sounded like a relatively easy brief, however it proved to need some deeper thinking to make it interesting and a learning experience for the network members who would attend.

The previous week at IUCN we had hosted a Facilitators Demonstration and Learning day and one thing I noticed was that some techniques and materials cause some fatigue from participants from simple overuse. This poses a challenge when you want people to be brainstorming new ideas – if presented with a usual way of doing things, it might not add that extra stimulus to get people thinking beyond the easiest interpretation of the question.

So to start our brainstorming session I put cards on the table and markers and stood at the flipchart and asked the group to brainstorm a list of the “most common brainstorming techniques”. Without too much enthusiasm, they easily generated a list of about 7 of the techniques we all use all the time. The one I was using was the first mentioned (open question, call out, flipchart capture), the next was using cards or post-its (for individual work, collection, grouping, labeling, prioritizing), then came a few others (card races, autumn leaves, wall graffiti charts, a few others), and we had our list.

At that stage I had some rather rhetorical questions – which I asked myself first in my design considerations – why do the top brainstorming techniques get used so often? And if we want a brainstorming technique to help groups generate new creative ideas, what is our opportunity to model that in our brainstorming session? (After our intensive Facilitators Demo last week and some workshops I had run recently, I never wanted to use markers, cards or flipcharts again!)

So the next step of our sequence was to have a discussion around three questions related to brainstorming: 1) What are the most important conditions for successful brainstorming and what can hang up a brainstorming session; 2) What are the most important things a facilitator would need to consider to choose or design/adapt a new brainstorming technique for a group? And 3) What are the crucial next steps after a brainstorming session?

But I didn’t think that running a similar idea generation exercise would get us really thinking, so the groups got the following task:

1. We each picked a card which put us into three groups: hearts, diamonds and spades.
2. Each group had a place in the room (pre set up) with a table and a bag of items. On the bag was the Ace with their suite and one of the three questions (above).
3. Their task was to take 15 minutes to: Design a brainstorming session that would help the group answer their question, NOT using ANY of the common techniques that we had generated in the previous session, and using at least ONE item from the bag. They would have 10 minutes to run their session.
4. People didn’t know it in advance, but the bags had in them an eclectic mix of plastic dinosaurs, cows, balls, blindfolds, musical instruments, as well as the standard cards, tape, scissors and scrap paper.

So I timed out their 15 min and each of the groups had their 10 minutes to run their sessions – and what entertaining and unusual sessions we had!

The results were very thoughtful. The debriefing conversations which followed the three demos served to supplement the answers to our questions. This worked well because they were based on our shared experience of these brainstorming sessions, and as a result they were much deeper and layered than I imagine they would have been if we had simply stood at our flipchart and shot out ideas, or written them on cards for clustering.

In our reflection we went back to those three questions, and asked ourselves about our own process to generate the ideas as facilitators, and also our experience as participants. What did we see as the conditions for good brainstorming and what hung us up sometimes? (e.g. things like lack of clarity on the question or the process, although this generated quite a lot of discussion as some of the facilitators felt that broader questions initially might produce more creative left-field responses an not lead people in one direction or another and ). What did we take into consideration ourselves when adapting or creating new techniques for our colleagues (things like familiarity with the group, their level of trust and risk openness, etc.), and finally what needed to happen next after the brainstorming (here we went from the mechanical in-session follow-up like defining roles and reporting, to the softer side like commitment to action of the group, and celebration).

We finished with our take-aways as facilitators – which included my own – never underestimate the creativity of any group to take on an unusual task and make something interesting and useful for themselves out of it. As long as you hold the goals firmly and with respect, people are happy to trust the process and might get even more out of it than anyone expected. Which is usually one of the reasons groups engage facilitators in the first place.

Making Reflection a Habit: How You Know When You're There

I think I have finally achieved "reflection" as a habit. How do I know that?

When I've not had the time to pause and think about what I'm doing, write up some learning in our blog, or do my weekly review, it feels like I have not brushed my teeth. And then all I can think of and all I want to do is that. This week has been a blur of doing doing doing, and it really feels like I have had 3 days without brushing my teeth. Ugh!

You've got to try to get there, if you really want to embed something like reflection into your professional and personal practice. To get to the feeling of compulsion that having a habit brings - the little rush of endorphins from doing it, and all the unwanted things (from missing important things to bad breath) from not.

It's getting better now. Writing this blog post is like finding my toothbrush.

What Were Your Bad Habits: GTD Video Link

At the recent GTD Summit I attended, David Spark interviewed a number of people asking them about the bad habits that GTD (Getting Things Done) helped them kick. The video is just over 5 minutes, and linked here: GTD Summit - What Were Your Bad Habits?

I was happy to be one of the interviewees, and to have kicked that particular habit of the Life List. And I'm still talking about it. I spent this morning exchanging with my friend Alan AtKisson about GTD and applications for the sustainability community, and this afternoon showing my home system, which I am pretty proud of now, to one of my neighbours, who was complaining about losing things. There is just no end to the bad habits one can break...