Tue, Apr 20, 2004
ChiliPLoP, Day 4
#
Last Friday was the last day of ChiliPLoP. OfraHomsky?, JoshRai,
LindaRising, JoeYoder, and I met at our usual spot outside of the
dining hall for our morning kickoff. We had two items on our agenda:
workshop the patterns we had
discussed the day before and that Josh and I had
written
up, and discuss next steps. (1DF)
Stone Soup (1DG)
We started with Collab:StoneSoup and decided to temporarily combine
forces with the GivingSpace
group,
which had independently come up with a pattern of the same name. That
experiment resulted in some constructive feedback but was
short-lived. The most important lesson was that "Stone Soup" was a
completely inappropriate name. (1DH)
The pattern had arisen from a point I had made the previous day about
faith in process. I stated that people about to participate in a new
process had to demonstrate a certain amount of faith up-front;
otherwise, they risked subconsciously hijacking the process. You want
to give the process the chance to succeed or fail on its own merit. (1DI)
Joe suggested calling this pattern, "Fake It 'Til You Make It." Ofra
was reminded of a story, "Stone Soup," which went like this. (1DJ)
A weary soldier discovered a village in the desert and knocked on every door asking for food. Everyone turned him away. (1DK)
Undaunted, the soldier took his pot, filled it with water and a large, round stone, and put it over a roaring fire, constantly stirring and tasting. (1DL)
The curious villagers came out of their houses and watched, until finally, one of them asked how it tasted. The soldier replied, "It's good, but it needs some salt." So the villager went inside her home and brought out some salt. (1DM)
She again asked the soldier how the soup tasted, and he responded that it could use some carrots. So another villager brought some carrots. The process repeated itself until eventually, there was enough tasty soup to feed the entire village. (1DN)
During our group writing exercise, it quickly became apparent that we
all had slightly different understandings of the pattern. Mine
focused on the point of view of the participant and on adopting new
processes. Everyone else seemed centered on initiating new
collaboration, setting up enough structure to make the collaboration
seem real, at least until the collaboration became real. (1DO)
When I started refactoring and combining our work into a single
pattern, I decided that there were multiple contexts for the same
pattern, but that the solution was the same. I also decided to call
it, "Stone Soup" instead of "Fake It 'Til You Make It," mostly because
the former was a noun phrase. I had reservations, however, and our
final day's proceedings confirmed them. When we combined with the
GivingSpace team, it became clear that there were at least three
different versions of the Stone Soup story, each with different
morals. (1DP)
After we split with the GivingSpace group, my team continued giving
feedback about what I had written. I picked up lots of good advice
and promised to incorporate their comments into a revision. (1DQ)
I was happy when Josh willingly took on the Collab:KickOff pattern,
because I didn't think we were close to SharedUnderstanding. That
said, Josh's work on the pattern helped us make that leap. (1DS)
Originally, we called the pattern, "KickOff? Meeting." I had asked
whether the KickOff? meeting was, by definition, the first meeting.
Ofra and Joe had said that it was not. However, as we started
fleshing out the pattern, it wasn't clear to me what the distinction
was. People were mentioning a lot of things that supposedly happened
at KickOff? meetings that I felt would happen regardless of whether or
not a meeting was designated, "KickOff?." The key distinction, in my
mind, was whether or not those things would happen well. It wasn't
clear to me that denoting a meeting "KickOff?" was enough to make those
things happen well. (1DT)
Josh's work on the pattern made some of those flaws apparent. Having
something concrete to work from allowed us to quickly zone in on the
vital piece -- benefits from the ritual celebration of initiating a
new project. We decided to remove "meeting" from the name. (1DU)
In the end, this made perfect sense to me. We had defined
collaboration as needing shared, bounded goals. We had also cited a
pattern, Grand Finale (discussed in Linda and MaryLynnManns's upcoming
book). It made sense that we also had a pattern for the beginning of
a project as well. (1DV)
Next Steps (1DW)
One of the things I made clear to the group was that I considered this
workshop to be the KickOff? to BlueOxenAssociates's ongoing
PatternLanguage effort. One of my broader goals is to do an ongoing
series of workshops involving philanthropic foundations, nonprofits,
and a variety of other organizations. These workshops would involve
telling stories, mining for patterns, capturing those patterns,
reinjecting them into the conversation, refining them, and so on. (1DX)
In the meantime, I plan on further developing the language that began
forming at our workshop with the help of our
Collab:PatternsWorkGroup. I also plan on submitting some patterns to
the PLoP conference in September. (1DY)
I had an exceptional time at ChiliPLoP. Lots of great people were
there, and Arizona is warm and beautiful this time of year. More
importantly, I was fortunate to have a great group of participants.
Ofra, Josh, Linda, and Joe brought a tremendous amount of experience
and enthusiasm to the process, which made the process both enjoyable
and productive. I'm looking forward to the challenge of continuing
what we started here, including another date at next year's ChiliPLoP. (1DZ)
/blueoxen |
Posted at 3:09pm
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