I am now in Illinois at a lovely resort where a bunch of women are gathered to look into various ways of facilitating conversations among groups. We used "appreciative inquiry" yesterday and today are doing something called "world cafe."
We have been sitting around talking about how to help our organization value our diverse membership and their disparate perspectives. It was so exciting when, after hashing out many variations of "valuing each other" or listening, or whatever, we finally came to a pithy, short summary of hours of conversation. We decided we can facilitate change and honor diversity this way:
All important conversations occur in the open
Why? Because so many issues are ONLY raised in the hallways, or in our rooms after hours, or in private email lists--which means there ends up being lots of "elephants in the room." If we could create more opportunities for this sort of thing, MAYBE conflicts could turn into constructive conversations...
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