Written by Linda Ellinor and read by her at the beginning of the call
Welcome Everyone to the 2nd Live Virtual event we are holding through the end of January.
First, I’d like to go over the Formal Purpose of our overall inquiry along with our intended results:
Our purpose is to explore the calling question”What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?”
The intended results include:
1. To engage in deep dialogue around our calling question.
2. To connect to build community and share resources, information and strategies.
3. To elicit inspiring, actionable possibilities and support the emergence of collaborative teams to work together on bringing them forth in the coming year.
4. And, to have the inquiry process itself be a prototype that can be iterated upon in service for systemic transformation.
Let me now go over some history of how we come to this moment:
This inquiry began last fall at the bi-annual convention of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. Tom Atlee’s question on the NCDD list-serve, challenged our D & D field to think about how we could apply our collective wisdom to the many complex social, political and environmental issues that are challenging our time. During October and November, close to 50 people participated. That original NCDD inquiry included lots of passion and rich content.
I may have been the first person to respond to Tom’s original list-serve question. I had been thinking to myself during the Conference just how far the D & D community had come. I first got involved in the early 90s with David Bohm’s Dialogue. In the early years of 2000, NCDD was formed. Now we have over 2000 members and another 30,000 who receive postings. What fuels this growth is the very reason we are here today. How can the conversational practices of our field, lead to social and cultural transformation? If applied wisely and strategically, we can make a critical impact on our world.
In December, Tom Atlee, Ben Roberts, and I had a series of phone conversations. We decided to bring the list-serve conversation into a larger container which includes live modes using communication technologies such as Maestro and teleconferencing. We also wanted to create an online space for continuing our conversation as well as for capturing all that is being shared from our live conversations. That is why we are using HackPad during and between these live calls.
On December 15, we held our first World Cafe on MaestroConference with about 26 people. As we debriefed, we felt called upon to open our invitation to other aligned communities. We decided to bound this phase of the conversation through the end of January. We now have over 100 people registered.
Going forward we are offering 3 more plenary sessions: In the next two weeks, we will be offering 2 two-and-a-half hour Open Space events. During the last week of January, we will be convening a final World Cafe. In addition, we are offering 3, 2-hour Bohm Dialogues. These Dialogues will allow us time to go deeper, and will help us integrate what we hear from the plenaries. The first Dialogue is this Friday. Please remember to sign up since space is limited to the first 15 people. And remember that the conversations we are having as a community are available to you on HackPad 24/7. We are already looking past January for what may want to unfold. You can see our thoughts on this as they evolve on the“About” section.
What is drawing many of us into this conversation is the general question of‘what might be possible’? "What if we could discover where in the existing society certain conversational interventions would most likely have the most profound leverage and impact?" Many of you have shared inspiring thoughts on“what’s possible” via hackpad already.
We’ve heard, for instance that these conversational approaches, are by themselves, pathways to social transformation. What if we were able to find avenues for making clear the principles underlying Dialogue and Deliberation and how they can be used at every level of society to affect the world we collectively want to create: a world that is sustainable, is based on principles of collective partnership, and takes the importance of the commons into account, What if we brainstormed ways to help organizations at the front lines to be more effective in addressing the political, social and environmental issues of our day?
What the hosting team has noticed in this inquiry is the incredible passion of the moment and sense of urgency that many of us feel. It comes from how much is needed to be done, with seemingly little time. Also, the complexity of the problems we might become involved with and the need for whole systems thinking. As we review our experience, we are amazed at the rich level of ideas that are emerging from our inquiry together: Ways of coming together to extend and expand our inquiry, perhaps regionally with each other. Ways of collaborating that might offer our D & D services in much more impact-full ways than offering them only as individual practitioners. Emerging inquiry threads are: “How might we increase the level of coordination and communication across the various sectors of society by employing our D & D skills?”“Or, how might we host public inquiries that is publicized and held with cross sector experts, might lead to novel ways of addressing the change in society that is so needed.
Through our on-going conversations with each other, we are also sharing resources about who else is doing what that we might align with. We are building community among ourselves which includes supporting each other in our respective work, and using Dialogue to take deeper dives around our calling question.
As I and my co-hosts are beginning to see, the question of the moment‘is how do we lift our field up and make it one that is strategic and able to meet the many challenges confronting our world? How do we become who we are?
I’d like to leave you with a quote that one of our participants left on the HackPad that comes from Martin Luther King’s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"--"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."