Using the Group Pattern language card deck, pairs shared about the applicable meaning of selected cards for relevance to DwD practice. The sharing dialogue was sketched to reflect the meaning of its relationship to DwD:

Actions to Continue, Stop, or Start new filled the whiteboard after group reflection on actions and new directions for 2013.

We haven’t synthesized the design plan and next steps from the recommendations yet. The intention with sharing the artifacts here is to share with the whole community the ideas, interests and new directions supported by core DwD members.

Look for the following changes in 2013:

• Revamp the DwD brand and synch with its support network and communities (OCADU, KMDI, Overlap)
• Publish the pipeline of upcoming DwD sessions and collaborations – invite the entire DwD community to participate in creating and facilitating sessions
• Revise the website to enable bidirectional communication and posting
• Share on the website the individual work we do as a result of learning: Inspirations and facilitated engagements that draw from DwD practice
• DwD for Designers to create dialogue processes
• Invite non-designers to DwD, increase variety and diversity of participation
• Promote visual storytelling, metaphorical design, and embodied practices
• Spinoff DwDx (as TEDx) by supporting non-Toronto affiliates
• “What’s inspiring you lately?” section on website
• Create movement and dance-inspired DwD sessions

Greg Judelman is a facilitator, designer and innovation consultant based in Toronto. Through his firm The Moment, he works with the conceptualization and facilitation of collaborative design workshops and innovation processes for organizational and community transformation. From 2006-2011 he was a senior designer at the globally recognized Bruce Mau Design, where he led creative teams on identity, web, experience and strategy projects for clients ranging from not-for-profits to universities to public associations to multinational corporations.

Discovery

Discovery explores the best in our experience, sharing and learning from our past and bringing forward the positive values to be honored in the inquiry. Paired shares led to whole-group expressions of valued experiences and impressions from Design with Dialogue in the 2011 season.

Visual reflection of DwD 2012 by Patricia Kambitsch.

Dream

Dream envisions what might be, and generates a multiplicity of possibilities for the group to reflect and decide. Individuals generated their ideas, shared in triads to review and add more, and posted and clustered in a harvest sheet. We organized and labeled clusters in a following session, resulting in a document shared with participants. The original harvest appeared as follows (not the full image):

Design and Destiny

In concluding the review and vision, people expressed their own hopes and encouragement for the 2012 season. People added their personal commitments to their proposals, which all ensures a rich, diverse, and heartfelt community in 2012.

• Have continuity between sessions, with blogging and conversational support.
• Have workshops to explore the nature of inquiring systems (of which AI, DwD are representative)
• Evaluate the impact of learning from dialogue. Observe and evaluate the forms and outcomes of design. Relate the learning and observations to academic impact.
• Inquiry into experiential modeling and experiential learning. What contributes to enhanced perception in dialogue?
• “Listening sessions”  How to best share what we are learning in listening?
• Continue with “sessions on what’s going on right now.” Capturing relevance as its emerging.
• Holding new types of experiential dialogue sessions (e.g., Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects)
• Continue to connect with conferences and academic groups
• Consider interim DwDs that provide continuity – Hold special interest groups for hot topics
• Develop the practice and “rituals” of dialogue:
  Save 30 min at Pre or Post for continuing topics
  Provide coaching / video in basic facilitation and process skills
  Start Web conferences or online sessions

The purpose of DwD was to create an ongoing venue for practice whereby we could develop established and emerging methods of dialogue and structured group engagement for community and social design. As the community has grown, we have a total group of about 150 past and present participants, and we’ve explored, hands-on, everything from Art of Hosting to Sensemaking. We’ve gone from just learning methods to inventing them, from trialing new practices to conducting them as live facilitation in community engagements.

It’s clear to me that DwD is having an impact on cultural change. People in the community are actively entering into new conversations with community stakeholders and clients to introduce more effective ways of social learning and action.  And while our monthly community sessions are extraordinary experiences, the lasting value shows up in how DwD informs our work and everyday lives. This is where culture starts to change around us.

We now have a Stewards Council of 6 regular, committed leaders that share a vision for a higher-impact DwD learning and practice community. And we have never made requests on the community before for a commitment, other than those who have graciously offered to present a session. But we’re not going to reach these goals on our own, we would love some more volunteers. We promise that you will get more from participating than you put into it.  I know this is true of all this work, a learning community that changes culture and eventually helps everyone we work with.

We need help in the following activities:

• Two new programs getting started (KMDI and a Master’s series)
• help setting up and striking down the gathering space
• video and photo documentation at sessions
• posting documentation and session follow-ups
• Blog (DwD.com) management and posting relevant things from other sites
• posting session invitations on dwd.com
• toolkit development and management (for online methods resource)
• outreach (help us find and connect to other leaders for masters or methods sessions)

We have action teams for Community, Communications, Programming, and other functions as well.

Please contact me, or Greg, to let us know you’d be interested. And how you would like to help.

Can strategic dialogue - a process for informing decisions – also include open dialogue? Are they mutually opposed in practice?  How do we move from collective inquiry to decisive action?

What are the conditions that grant authority to frame the inquiry initiating dialogue?

What conditions enable authentic inquiry and co-creation?  What dialogue structures empower leaders to make decisions?

Case studies of our own examples of dialogue in action will be elicited from participants in the open dialogue.  Stories will be captured visually in sketches and harvests. Café groups will break out to explore action scenarios, closing with a group discussion on the dynamics of organizational co-creation and authority.

The Little Book of Practice for Authentic Leadership in Action chronicles the principles, people, and practices that have come together to create ALIA’s unique approach to actualizing authentic leadership and transformational change.

Download the free PDF ebook: Little Book of Practice

Printed copies are available for purchase at ALIA.

One person endowed with PASSION & PURPOSE can make an ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE , we are looking for 38. … Now consider spending three years of your life at a school located in Denmark… together with other highly motivated people who want to make a difference.

From an interview with DR. Michael Gardam, UHN:

One of the things we do here is a program called TRIZ, where we ask people to design a system where you would spread infections to every single person in the hospital. How would you design that? And within about two minutes health care workers will yell out, “Don’t clean your hands,” “Don’t clean the room.” They all know exactly how these things are spread. But then when you talk to them about washing their hands, the answer is “Sometimes.”And from HIROC health news: Positive deviance refers to encouraging a hospital’s front-line staff members to develop methods for controlling superbugs in healthcare settings.

More from www.positivedeviance.org:

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.

The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.

START TIME 7pm:
This month’s session only will be 7pm so folks can attend the Torch lecture next door in the auditorium if they like.

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DwD is the same time 6-9, second Wednesdays of every month.

The DwD session will introduce the principles and the practices of PD, and will invite all attendees to try out the PD tools and consider applications in their own communities.

Register at EventBrite for this session

Facilitated by Erika Bailey:  Human Systems Consultant with a decade of facilitation and teaching experience. Her extensive expertise and practical skill in leadership, individual and organizational change, and organizational development (OD), her impressive academic background, and her proven skill in designing/facilitating large and small group processes has made her an in-demand facilitator in engagement projects across the GTA. Erika is a coach in the Canadian Positive Deviance Project and is a faculty member of the Safer Healthcare Now! New Approach to Controlling Superbugs Initiatives.

The Public Engagement Principles (PEP) Project was launched in mid-February 2009 to create clarity in our field about fundamental components of quality public engagement, and to support Barack Obama’s January 21, 2009 memorandum on open government.  A set of core principles were developed collaboratively with and through NCDD, found here as the 12-page Core Principles for Public Engagement document. These include the following:

The Core Principles for Public Engagement

These seven recommendations reflect the common beliefs and understandings of those working in the fields of public engagement, conflict resolution, and collaboration.  In practice, people apply these and additional principles in many different ways.

1. Careful Planning and Preparation
Through adequate and inclusive planning, ensure that the design, organization, and convening of the process serve both a clearly defined purpose and the needs of the participants.

2. Inclusion and Demographic Diversity
Equitably incorporate diverse people, voices, ideas, and information to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic legitimacy.

3. Collaboration and Shared Purpose
Support and encourage participants, government and community institutions, and others to work together to advance the common good.

4. Openness and Learning
Help all involved listen to each other, explore new ideas unconstrained by predetermined outcomes, learn and apply information in ways that generate new options, and rigorously evaluate public engagement activities for effectiveness.

5. Transparency and Trust
Be clear and open about the process, and provide a public record of the organizers, sponsors, outcomes, and range of views and ideas expressed.

6. Impact and Action
Ensure each participatory effort has real potential to make a difference, and that participants are aware of that potential.

7. Sustained Engagement and Participatory Culture
Promote a culture of participation with programs and institutions that support ongoing quality public engagement.

There’s a real need for this. Remember the healthcare town hall meetings across the US? Even though these principles are guidelines for larger-scale public engagement, they apply equally well in organizational settings and problem solving workshops.