Community Conversation: A Teleconference

These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.
Rabindranath Tagore

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Today we sat at a phone in my office to “participate” in a learning environment about community conversations. We learned MUCH (about what not to do). Here is what we learned:

1) Conversations are not passive;
The ironic thing was that as the two hosts were sharing this tidbit of information the rest of us were all on mute.
2) Engaging in conversations can positively affect your life, and they measured it;
We believe that participating in a conversation is a relationship for 2 hours that stimulates people, who can walk away and share with others. It is the ripples. To think it is measurable is …
3) They felt that leaders do not need to get smarter or work harder we need to have more conversations and keep having them over time.
We believe it is about communities make change and question where authentic power truly lies.

The two moderators shared their favourite conversation techniques:

1) Reflective panel: 3-5 practionners/leaders with an animator who participate in a discussion to 100 people in the audience. The first presenter speaks to the moderator’s question and then asks the next person on the panel and so on until it goes back to the moderator. The moderator then asks the audience who are at round tables. Each group discusses the question from the moderator and by the panelists. At the end of time, some one from each table reports back into the moderator.
(They worked with the panelists first to work out the questions.)

2) POP 100 exercise: Facilitator works with a group to identify 100 people that if they were in a room together and came to an agreement something in the community would change. They like to identify names across categories to have a full inclusion of perspectives in that one ideal conversation.

So we move away from this version of a conversation more resolute in our own approach.