BeautyDialogues

The WWW conference

As I prepare to attend this year's Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco week after next, I find myself curious about the possibilities (I still find the name Wisdom 2.0 extremely evocative and I guess I harbor the secret hope of having my mind blown at the conference and discovering hundreds if not thousands of "lost" members of "my tribe").

One of the pioneers of extraordinary gatherings is Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED conference, and apparently that was just the beginning of his ideas for super-human gatherings. His wwwConference in September 2012 paired particularly interesting duos, placed them on a comfortable couch in front of an exclusive audience (tickets were $16,000 - where's that Press Pass when I need it?) and set them loose with each other.

I have to say I'm impressed by Wurman's courage and his faith in the power of conversation. According to Dan Munro in Forbes, the results were truly inspired. I look forward to hearing these conversations myself and hope they will be made available, as one of the great innovations of TED was making those equally expensive presentations available free to the public.

Wurman's new ideas include Prophesy2025 in Spring of 2013, and the multi-generational Geeks and Geezers Summit in the Spring of 2014, which sounds particularly interesting.

Gathering 2.0

Does anyone out there remember PlaNetwork? It was a fabulously geeky conference that had a good run back a few years ago now. I loved its combination of high geekery and values-based idealism. I remember meeting someone through pre-event communications that I collaborated with to build a beautiful altar/centerpiece in the middle of the conference room, and dancing afterwards to music I'd never heard before under a projected screen of Electric Sheep images. It was that kind of "happening". Definitely a bit "hippie" and not slick by any means, but deeply sophisticated on many levels, not least technologically, and extremely satsifying.

There's another event that has sprung up in the San Francisco bay area in the last couple of years called Wisdom 2.0, and I've been watching it with great anticipation.

Death and Dappled Things

A month or so ago Deborah Goldblatt and I hosted a World Café out at Commonweal in Bolinas for a group of end-of-life practitioners. Leading up to that event everything I saw or heard seemed to relate to our subject in some way - perhaps unsurprisingly given my sister Karen's death at the beginning of this year and my friend Kay's passing in June.

To prepare, Deborah and I went to see Anna Deavere Smith's phenomenal Let Me Down Easy at the Berkeley Rep, which was obstensibly about the body and resiliance - and it was - but it was also about death and disease and how poverty (and wealth) effects people's access to health care. If that wasn't enough, the circle I meet with every week in Second Life began a 16 week journey exploring the subject of Death and Dying through the 8 directions of the Medicine Wheel.

Somehow the essence of my whole matrix of experience during this time is rendered immaculately by this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We heard David Whyte recite it on one of his many CDs, this one about "apprenticing one's self to one's own disappearance" as we drove over the sacred mountain Tamalpais on our way to Commonweal.

It's called Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

Innovation and Participation

I'm inspired and encouraged by an article in Fast Company called "The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again". The author, Warren Berger, describes a creative turn-around for TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, who is designing a new kind of conference that will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”

It sounds amazing, and I'm excited to see new creative thinking emerge about the ways we can gather online. Here's what Wurman's website says about the conference:

WWW.WWW will be a gathering of the greatest, most interesting & curious minds in the world engaged in immersive & improvised conversation. It will celebrate the 21st century while drawing attention to the new patterns & convergences affecting our health & that of our planet.

This attention to pattern and convergence sounds like it's right up our alley at the World Café, and perhaps what's most interesting to me is the app they are developing to "harvest" the event:

"The app will be a new modality, perhaps equal to the pivotal changes that have emerged in how we interact with information and each other. It will not merely archive presentations, as is currently the practice, but will offer a unique way to navigate, learn and understand information based on ones own personal journey and vast online resources."

Now all they need is interaction with their "audience"... That to me is the real revolution and innovation happening in the world of conferences. Imagine the possibilities if there was a way for people to really participate in the conversation at this event! Give me a call at weDialogue, Mr Wurman, and we'll set something up.

By the way, the Shift Network is getting wise to the value of audience participation and is bringing me in to host a World Cafe for their online Enlightened Business Summit with Chip Conley, on November 10th. This is actually a fabulous week-long series of free online sessions featuring people like Daniel Goleman, Daniel Pink and ... me! :-) Come join us!

The Art of Online Hosting

With all that's been going on lately I forgot to mention that a paper I co-wrote with the crazy and wonderful Adriano Pianesi was published in the March edition of Systems Thinker: "The Art of Online Hosting" (Download Onlinehosting).

The Times We Are Preparing For

I think I've mentioned that I have a fabulous women's group that meets in a sheltering cave in a mountain in Second Life. Every Thursday morning the five of us sit in circle and share the deeper levels of what's up for us.

In my case last week it was the final stretch of a long preparation period for the first event in the "Conversation for the 21st Century" series. This (material taken from our transcripts) is what I found myself musing upon:

These last few weeks have been so crazy that I am being forced to face how dysfunctional it is being this stressed. I am behaving in ways that do not serve me or anyone, even if I am getting a lot done. My impatience can be terrible. I'm not nice. ... well, not as nice as I can be anyway :-)

And it's ironic, because truly I think that's one of the most important things I could ever do; just be kind. Listen. To what people have to say, yes certainly, but perhaps more importantly to the stillness that is behind the words.

I have been realizing and valuing how important it is to be calm and clear and strong and unstressed, especially in these times when life seems to be moving faster and faster for all of us…

(William Yeats expressed the phenomenon so beautifully in his poem about modernism, Second Coming:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ..."

Those of us who can be the strong "anchor" or center points that CAN hold during these times are increasingly valuable. Sometimes I wonder if there is a role we're preparing for that none of us may even see clearly yet, but will turn out to be of far more importance than anything we could ever "do".

As of right now, there are over 500 people registered for the event I'm hosting tomorrow!! To me, that represents a responsibility as well as an opportunity...

To prepare for it - in the day I have between now and then - I'm looking for ways to create a sense of spaciousness for myself so that the experience of awareness and presence can enter my voice tomorrow and call it from others throughout the room.

As it turned out, it's a good thing I did...

The event was just wonderful - we had the most amazing conversation starters who conveyed real depth and wisdom about the subject (community), and the 200+ people who showed up to engage each other in conversation lept to it immediately as a shoal of flashing fish to water. Everything in the first hour and a half was all I could have hoped for ... and then... we had a massive breakdown in technology.

I've been using this software since November of 2009 and never seen anything like this happen before, but Tom Foolery was up to his April Fool's Day tricks during the last round of conversation when the 60-some small group conversations began to bleed into each other, causing people to hear others who were not in the room with them. Imagine how confusing that would be if your only sense perception was auditory!

It was definitely a test of equilibrium for me and my co-host Ben Roberts, as we managed to bring the situation back to center by muting everyone and trying to explain what was happening when we had no idea ourselves.

Luckilly they had been able to talk for 15 of the 20 minutes in that final round, but it was disconcerting nonetheless, and I really needed all my patience and presence of mind to keep the container of wonderful energy we had built up until then intact.

One of the things I drew heavily upon to do that was the positive intent in the room. Everyone there wanted to keep the energy alive and moving, too, so together we weathered the bumpy patch and moved into a wonderful harvest with full participation, and the rest of the event went smoothly.

These are the times we are preparing for.
May we all live into them fully, and be kind to ourselves and each other as we weather the bumpy patches.

Announcing Conversations for the 21st Century

I'm excited to share the launch of a project that my new company weDialogue has been working on for several months now in collaboration with the World Cafe. You are all warmly invited to participate, and I'm serious about that because it will take all of us...

weDialogue

Sneak Preview: I just finished the website for a new business I'm starting in association with the World Cafe and my partner Ben Roberts. It's called weDialogue and it's a virtual event hosting and consulting service with the capacity to engage up to 2,000 people at a time. As part of our offical launch early next year we're planning to host a series of free public World Cafe conversations on key 21C issues. Look for an announcement of dates, topics and our "conversation starters" (thanks to Heartland Circle for this term) soon.

Ben and I have already been hosting some fabulous weDialogue online events - yesterday we hosted a FourYearsGo training session with Lynne Twist, and a few weeks ago I had the priviledge of supporting a call for President Obama and one of his regional consituencies. This work builds on the sucessful online World Cafes I've been hosting for the last 2-3 years, and I'm excited to see where it will go.

Last night I spent a few hours obsessing over a Wordle for the front page of the weDialogue website. Here are a few of the candidates I considered (you'll have to go to the website to see the winner - hurry because the way this is going it will probably change again before too long!):

The Trap of Collective Folly

My dear friend and colleague Alan Briskin was the conversation starter at Heartland's Thought Leader Gathering in the bay area earlier this month, talking about his recent book, The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly.

This is not one of those books you skim through and set aside - you could profitably keep it on your nightstand and read it over and over, always finding something new and valuable. In fact, one of the basic lessons of the book stood out for me in Alan's talk as if I were hearing it for the first time: there is a point in many collective interactions where we have a choice to either ascend to a "higher place" together or fall into "folly". That point, Alan says, is characterized by disagreement or conflict. It's in negotiating problems where we are in danger of collapsing into either polarization (disassociating ourselves completely from the others' point of view) or false agreement, which is equally pernicious.

If in that critical moment of conflict, however, we are able to really listen to each other and find a way to accept our differences and continue to treat each other with respect, we truly have the capacity for reaching collective wisdom. I've been at this critical point several times since the TLG and remembering Alan's words - to listen more deeply, ask questions and make an honest attempt to understand another view - has made all the difference.

Now we just have to get the book into the US Senate reading list...

European Salon

Just 10 days or so ago I was in Reichenau an der Rax in Austria (an hour or so outside of Vienna) for a European Salon put on by World Cafe colleagues.

Stunned by the beauty of this lovely country, I was once again moved by the beauty of the human heart as we naturally and collectively answered the gravitational pull towards deep connection and the spontaneous expression of community.