On Oct 8, 2008, at 5:35 PM, William Conger wrote:
If I have an obligation to verbally sculpt a solid notion to awkwardly fit (correspond to) Cheerskep's empty box for that notion, then why doesn't he have an obligation to refashion that empty box to accomodate my offering?
"Facilitation" is the newish performance art in which one person (or sometimes two) with a flipchart and marker ministers to the back-and- forth discussions in an institutional meeting of some kind. Most of the facilitator's work consists of "reframing" someone's comments, then "checking in" with that person to see if the facilitator "captured" the essence of the remark, and then going around the room to invite inputs and "test consensus" on the topic.
It is a truly annoying technique and, from my experience in several such endurance experiences in a university (one of them was on-going, meeting at least twice a month for nearly a year), almost entirely counterproductive. Very little of the natural flow of a working conversation could develop before thoughts were snatched out of the air, held captive on the flipchart, and then reviewed by one and all.
Shouldn't he do some of notion work too?
Evoking in my mind in an entirely associative way the memory of Ken Kesey's book (no, not that one), "Sometimes a Great Notion" (often misread as "nation," just as McLuhan's title is "Massage," not "Message," distorting the received superficial point of that book).
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
