A week ago I spent the day with 16 staff and volunteers from 4 sustainability organisations that all share the same faith background. We came together to vision for a sustainable faith community here in the UK and possibly internationally. Having read and blogged about Donella Meadows paper on visioning in the run up I […]
Here’s a couple of quick links to recent posts with some useful ideas and resources: From Gillian at You Learn Something New Every Day, a compilation of posts on Making Meetings Meaningful. There’s a lot of stuff here I would never have got to without it being pulled together like this. And secondly some nice […]
So the group are clear on the topic of the discussion – they’ve checked out assumptions and have an agreed process for moving forward. Now the real work begins. If you remember back to our consensus flowchart the middle stages involve a broad exploratory discussion out of which we try to draw a proposal, a […]
We’ve already talked a little about what consensus is. We used phrases such as: “challenge oppressive behaviour, working for the common good over personal benefit…a pulling together of ideas to build the strongest available decision…a transformational process” All well and good, but let’s look in detail and make it a bit more real: why do […]
Take a look at You Learn Something New Every Day – Gillian’s post By The Numbers: The Power of Math in Group Processes makes an interesting read, and a timely reminder that we’re not always doing a group a favour if we bow to pressure for more plenary sessions. I’ve also found myself using maths […]
Consensus is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot: the United Nations reaches a consensus…. politicians or journalists speak of consensus emerging around some important issue or other. What they are talking about seems to be a significant majority view. What they’re not talking about is consensus decision-making as we at Rhizome understand it. […]
I spoke to, Richard, my co-facilitator of the recent Reclaim the Fields UK gathering today to debrief the experience. Amongst other things we discussed introducing the day’s agenda to the group. He asked for feedback, feeling it was something he didn’t usually do well. I don’t think he has much to worry about, but it […]
One theme that emerged out of Saturday’s Reclaim the Fields UK gathering was the dominance of meetings as the way of discussing and deciding. Unsurprisingly in a group of urban and rural growers there were a significant number of people who don’t find meetings a useful tool. They do. They don’t talk about doing. This […]
Saturday, I was co-facilitating a day’s meeting with the emerging Reclaim the Fields UK network. RTF exists elsewhere in Europe as a network of mainly young people trying to take back control of food production. Until Saturday there was no equivalent network here in the UK. 45 people came together from a range of projects, […]
I’ve been pondering what Training for Change call emergent design a fair bit of late – comparing it to what I do at the moment, wondering how much further I have to go to be allowing the flow of a workshop to be genuinely emergent. I often plan in detail. I have argued in the […]
