Subject: What we're learning together in the CIP
Context from which harvest comes: Learning Inquiry
Harvested by: Trudy Johnson-Lenz, 08/21/96 11:23 AM
Categories: Architecture, Cafe, Community intelligence, Conversation, Conversational Practice, Council Circle, Facilitation Agents, Groupware, Listening, Lotus Notes Release 4, Macintosh, Meaning, Open Space, Opening Ceremony, Orientation, Replication, Tools, Learning Inquiry
The Learning Inquiry has been our mid-course participatory assessment of everyone's experience to date of the CIP. It opened August 1 and was scheduled to end August 18, although it's still open for additional responses, comments, and conversation.
We asked six questions:
What are you learning? So far, what are you learning from your participation in the CIP: for your organization? for your clients? for yourself?
What's working well? So far in the CIP, what's working well for you? What have you liked best, found most useful, benefitted from, enjoyed, or learned the most about?
What's not working so well? So far in the CIP, what's not working so well for you? What have you disliked, found less than useful, or found frustrating or disappointing? What's missing? So far in the CIP, what's missing for you?
Comparing your experience of the Circles with the Open Space and the Cafe? We've engaged in four major activities so far: the Opening Ceremony with everyone's opening words, intentions, gifts, and practices; the Council Circles with smaller groups sharing stories and images of meaning and wholeness at work; the Open Space with its self-organizing topics; and the Cafe with its informal conversations. The Opening Ceremony and the Council Circles use a differerent conversational practice and supporting software than most on-line conversations, while the Cafe and Open Space are similar to other on-line forums and discussions. How would you compare your experience of the Opening Ceremony and the Council Circles with the Open Space and the Cafe?
Other comments or suggestions? Do you have any other comments or suggestions for making the CIP more effective, valuable, enjoyable, or meaningful for the rest of our time together?
The response has been very rich and powerful -- about 200 very perceptive comments! Many thanks for the quality of your reflections, your thoughtfulness, your candor, and your willingness to share your experiences -- pro and con -- with all of us. We all benefit greatly.
Not surprisingly, there is a lot of diverse experience and opinion. What works well for one doesn't work for another. We're all looking at this experience through our own lenses, filters, expectations, interests, and needs.
This Harvest
This Harvest weaves together participants' own words into a rich tapestry. In this sense, this Harvest is a collaborative expression of the many voices within the CIP. It includes responses received through August 20.
In a very few cases, small edits were made for clarity or so that particular organizations are not identified, but no substantive changes were made. I made every effort to be inclusive of all perspectives and experiences. Please let me know if you see any errors, omissions, or misrepresentations so they can be corrected.
Harvest Methodology
To integrate and harvest these diverse learnings, I read through every response in the Learning Inquiry again to get a sense of the whole.
Then I collected all the responses in one big electronic file and marked with color those parts of each response that I wanted to consider including because they stood out, made clear or strong points, or uniquely contributed in some way.
I selected the color-marked sections and cut and pasted them them into rough categories, such as Overall Learnings, Putting Learnings Into Action, CIP Design, etc. After the rough-cut categorization, I further refined my selection process so that major themes were represented but with little redundancy. Roughly 30% of the orginal text remained.
Within each category, I marked each response with a symbol:
+ for a positive experience or comment - for a negative experience or comment
o for an observation or neutral or mixed experience or comment
I sequenced the responses within each category to highlight the diversity of views. For all of this I used a combination of Microsoft Word and Lotus Notes. I saved intermediate versions of the files along the way so I wouldn't lose anything. All told, this took about 25 hours of work over a period of several days.
Then Peter and I reviewed the final draft to polish it before breaking it up into linked modules to put into the CIP Harvests.