[Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Guernica & Conversation Roots & Shoots

Thu May 3 19:19:50 PDT 2012

Well, the “not ours alone” is relative.  We really have no idea how far we permeated the global culture “back then”, and how many of these “similar sounding” methodologies may have actually come from our early experiments across this earth and it’s people and cultures.

During the time I was working in Bosnia, my staff would, from time to time, get discouraged because they could not grasp with both hands the results of what we were doing.  I would encourage them to be patient because this kind of transformation doesn’t happen in a day, but also I would tell them, “If we are doing our job right, in 10 year’s time we will not be able to  discern more than remnants of our influence, because those we are working with will, by then, have taken our methods and shaken them up in a bag with other things they’re learning, and they will have made it all their own.  Now THAT would be real success for us.”   It’s like Hesse’s Journey to the East, where he kept seeing things that seemed familiar but couldn’t quite come clearly into recognizable focus…

Susan

From: oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of LAURELCG at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2012 12:04 PM
To: Oe at wedgeblade.net; dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Guernica & Conversation Roots & Shoots

Can no longer resist jumping into this stream. John's observation that this conversation method isn't "ours alone" is so right. My bilingual education mentor, Alma Flor Ada, whose mentor was Paulo Freire, called her version of the methodology Creative Education. Its four phases are Descriptive, Personal Interpretive, Critical and Creative. I shared this material with Jo Nelson when she was writing The Art of Focused Conversation. You can find more about it on page 24 of that book.

Matthew Fox's description of the fourfold path of Creation Spirituality also takes one on a deepening journey: Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa.

I'm taking an online course, Integral Enlightenment, with Craig Hamilton. Quite intense. The response of the thousand-plus participants around the globe reminds me of how some of us responded to RS-1. The evolutionary spirituality movement, with its call to be "pioneers on the point of evolution," has a familiar feeling tone. On my third reading of Evolutionary Enlightenment by Andrew Cohen, I'm charting it, rather laboriously, as I tend to do things. I think it brings Kaz's Spiritual Exercises into the 21st century with a rather practical application.

We're living in exciting times.

Blessings, dear colleagues,

Jann McGuire

Illness as Initiation: An Unlikely Heroine's Journey at http://booklocker.com/books/5100.html

http://jannsjewels.blogspot.com

In a message dated 5/3/2012 8:22:01 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jlepps at pc.jaring.my writes:

Colleagues:

Since this stream has involved a bit of ORID-bashing (or de-sanctifying if you prefer) I’d like to say a little on its behalf. 

O-R-I-D is simply the sequence in which the mind works. We perceive something, we react to it, we make sense of it, and we act appropriately. When a facilitator sequences conversation questions in that order, the dialogue flows naturally. The “depth” to which it goes depends on the subject and the group and, to some extent, the facilitator. 

We recently presented this “method” to a group of judges in Singapore and invited them to try it with a scripted conversation at their 5 tables. The topic was “mentors.” The bottom dropped out; All five table conversations went deep, and awe filled the room. On reflection, the people gathered said the reason it worked was the sequence of the questions: they flowed naturally. Often that type conversation yields pious or abstract characteristics of mentors; this one was specific and based on experience of group members. As an outside observer during this conversation, I thought it became a spirit conversation under the category of meditation. 

ORID, though belonging to the ToP suite of methods, is not “ours” alone. I attended a workshop at an IAF meeting in Germany in which the workshop leader (from the UK) presented a conversation method entitled 4-F (facts, feelings, findings, future). The leader had never heard of ORID. 

When you see what passes for group conversations in most situations, having a sensible sequence that considers how the mind works is a major step forward. How “deep” we let it go depends on how well thought-through our questions are at the “I” and “D” levels – and what is our aim in conducting the conversation in the first place. 

I look forward to your responses.

John Epps

At 05:06 AM 5/3/2012, you wrote:

Steve,

I revere the "art form" methodology as much as and appreciate its contribution over the years to our "knowing."  However, in more recent years I've arrived at a slightly evolved understanding of knowing, having not so much to do with clarity, awareness, consciousness and all of that as we used to define those words.  For me knowing now has more to do with "metanoia," what the late Willis Harman called "mind change," which I take to mean seeing the world differently to the extent that one revises ones stories of reality and as a result, lives life differently.  The NT translation of "metanoia" is "born again," and it can occur again and again in the course of a lifetime.

To allow this to happen, I'm finding conversational approaches like Bohmian (physicist David Bohm) dialogue to be more effective.  It is much less structured than ORID, and therefore more open-ended and less prescriptive about desired outcomes.  It is more of an art than an art form.  The conclusions arrived at by the individual participants are less important than the communal bonds established in the process, built not on the basis of having arrived at a common mind (read "consensus") regarding the subject at hand, but on the foundation of discovered and acknowledged interdependence and shared destiny, i.e., community.  ORID, which still has a valuable role to play in our work, depends more on the discipline of the facilitator.  "Dialogue" seems to me to depend more on the discipline of the participants, with a skilled facilitator way over on the side.

I think generally we ICA types need to loosen up a bit, occasionally put away our work sheets with prescribed outcomes, and acknowledge that good things can happen, and are happening, without our having to engineer them--in the midst of which we can be participants with meaningful contributions to make in our role as partners.  

Randy

"Listen to what is emerging from yourself to the course of being in the world; not to be supported by it, but to bring it to reality as it desires."
-Martin Buber (adapted)
From: steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com>
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
Sent: Tuesday, May 1, 2012 1:08 PM
Subject: [Dialogue] Guernica & Conversation Roots & Shoots

Regarding Wayne's assertion: "The basic phenomonology of the conversation method has not changed. It has always been oriented toward the ontological. If it isn't, it is some other method - put it that way."

With respect, I'm afraid I disagree with Wayne's assertion that the basic conversation method has changed. What has changed is the the emphasis of the conversation. 

In the Art Form method the conversation is "for" being. It is ontological-existential and ethical. In the ORID format [as articulated in ToP] the focus is knowing and sharing something inside the context of a facilitator-client agreement with a particular group of participants. the conversation is "for" knowing i.e epistemological.

Brian Stanfield's wonderful book of Focused Conversations really highlights this shift to the client-consultant workplace -which was a new field of engagement in which to practice conversation making. 

Reading Brian's workplace conversation models is like reading the music scores for Bach's Well-tempered Clavier. Publishing those models really did change the conversation focus in my view. Of course there is other music to score and play besides Bach's and there are other conversations to model besides conversations for knowing [epistemology].

 JWM's NRM monastic  distinctions are really powerful:  Knowing | Being | Doing are actually phenomenological distinctions for sorting out the internal and social experiences that open up in conversations and dialogues. 

A conversation "for Being" [ontology]  is an entirely different score and it creates an entirely different kind of conversational "music" that has a much wider and deeper expression - like the original Guernica Art >From conversation did or like the Tombstone conversation did. In these conversations, you get to declare something, you get to take a stand and say what you value. The questions can reveal personal character, what was lost, what was gained, who you are being in this moment as a human being. The conversation can be profoundly existential i.e. ontological. It can also contain varieties of ontological language like mythological and religious expression.

There are 2 wonderful "Tombstone Conversations" for being done recently by Charlie Rose in commemorating the death of 
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12297 and Christa Tippitt Contemplating Mortality 
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/contemplating-mortality/ 

A conversation for Doing -using JWM's NRM phenomenology is Largely unexplored in my opinion. John Epps wrote some brilliant and new Other World in This World conversations in 1996 which I found in the 6th floor Archives last summer. last summer we tried some over skype. Bruce Hanson gave a wonderful talk using the other world charts and Hoksai's pictures to describe an Appreciative Inquiry assignment at Hitachi Company on the outskirts of Tokyo. He talked about himself as being a navigator on an otherworld trek.

In my view the Jenkins's book on the 9 disciplines is a clearheaded translation of the old monastic categories. What remains is to see clearly the Knowing Being and Doing phenomenology in practice and in roles like the role of a facilitator and the new roles of pedagogue, story maker, coach, navigator

So in sum, the point wasn't to jump on Wayne's good thoughts. The point is to make some new distinctions about conversations that freshen the wind and hear new music...

Steve 

-- 
Steve Harrington

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