Apart from posting links, I’ve not been writing here much. Partly that has been through lack of attention, in part because I have been posting (occasionally) on my other blog, but there’s also been another factor – I’m busy with lots of interesting things at work, but have not felt able to write about them.
Neil McIntosh seems to be having the same problem:
Why the secrecy? Lots of folk write lots of stuff about this business, after all. Trouble is, the business of blogging about the intersection of technology, [and a particular profession] and social change is one that’s dominated by academics and consultants; people who make their living from advising. They’re free to discuss whatever they like and, indeed, it’s good for their business that they do, because they are in the knowledge business, not the delivery business.
It’s a seductive world, because it’s about ideas, not the more difficult business of implementation. The latter is less about the heroic individual, and more about the unglamorous world of meeting rooms, progress charts and compromise.
Some of things happening at work would have been good to blog here, not least because blogging is part of my reflective process, part of how I learn from action, but they are things which contain far too much information about what we are up to – sometimes nothing especially exciting, but as Neil puts it it’s frequently either too dull, or to messy, to expose.
I’ve tried anonymising by generalisation, but that is a lot of work, and usually takes all the impact away from the issue.
Perhaps the answer is one of focus – perhaps if I set a particular frame before work that I am looking for things that I can write about then the ideas will emerge?
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to join an evening of Dialogue co-hosted by Johnnie Moore, Alok Singh and Mark Hodge.
I’ve played a little with dialogue a few years ago as part of a (now defunct) group that was looking at how a group of independent professionals could develop a self-sustaining, learning, network – we had a few good results but the group dissolved. So I was very pleased to get the invite to “Common Sense – an invite to join a group dialogue into the possibilities for deeper connections within a group”.
In this short account I’ll try to give a sense of how the evening went, at least from a personal perspective, with a few thoughts about the flow, how to increase the chances of it happening again and some questions.
The experience
Ten of us gathered at the venue – an alternative business space called The Hub in Islington. This was slightly out-of-comfort zone stuff for me, but it rapidly became apparent that no-one knew everyone – for all of us at least some of the group were strangers. After some initial ice-breaking we sat in a rough circle of chairs…. and began to talk. Inevitably a little bit about the possibilities for groups to connect deeply to make things happen, but soon the conversation began to have a life of its own.
At first I felt a little self-conscious (others reflected back that they had similar feelings), but (reflecting from afterwards) it was clear that within about 20-30 minutes I was beginning to lose awareness of myself and become absorbed into the talk. It was from about this time that the group began to have long silences in between conversational exchanges. During the silences (which felt quite comfortable to me) I began to be aware of some of the feelings that I associate with being in a state of light trance, i.e. a sense of relaxation, reduced pulse and breathing, a feeling of being happy to follow the group wherever it went, combined with a feeling that if I had wanted to act in some particular direction I could have done so. Unlike trance there was no feeling of drowsiness – rather at those moments the sensation was one of awareness and concentration without effort.
These moments were fleeting, and within a few minutes we would be back into a flow of conversation – and to me these conversational interludes immediately after the deep silences often felt very much “in the head” as opposed to the grounded bodily feeling of the silences. However as the conversation went on, the silences became deeper and, almost at the end, there was a sense, hardly more than a fleeting glance, of the trance-like feeling carrying over into the conversation and suddenly it was as if we were dancing a piece we all knew. The nearest sensation I can describe where I have felt this before was many (many!) years ago when I used to do a lot of cycling, when occasionally a small group out on a ride would fall into a pattern of “through and off” without any kind of instruction, and with concentration keep it going for several miles.
And then it was the end. And something left the room, some energy suddenly wasn’t there.
In our final conversation, as people made their individual exits, I noticed, and commented, that I felt energised and refreshed. Although nearly two-and-a-half hours of intense listening and concentration had passed since I’d arrived, slightly late, somewhat frazzled by a rush-hour journey across London at the end of a full working day, I felt more awake at the end of the session than at the beginning.
Pre-framing
Clearly there were a number of factors that contributed to the success of the evening. Not least of these, in my opinion, was that we were a self-selecting group who by the very fact of being there had an interest in experimentation, probable prior experience in working in ad-hoc groups and an interest in Dialogue. Secondly, the invitation had pointed us at three specific pieces of reading: the original David Bohm Proposal On Dialogue, Alok’s own paper on The Group Unconscious and The Conditions for Thriving Conversations by Kathia and Alexander Laszlo.
Some questions
I think many of us would want to repeat the experiment. Some of the questions that go through my mind in regards to this:
- How quickly could we start creating the group trance / dance next time?
- What difference would it make if the group membership were a little bit (or a lot) different?
- What else could we do to encourage the rapid forming of group flow?
