Day: November 17, 2008

Innovation: the human flip chart

I love reading Gillian Martin Mehers’s blog, You Learn Something New Every Day. Now there is my kind of person! Recently she posted about a facilitation challenge that I related to: going to a gathering venue and not being allowed to post things on the way. As I’m fully into flip charts and graphic recording/facilitation, I always ask in advance if I can put stuff on the wall, and if not, I arrange for pin boards or some alternative. However, Gillian and her team came up with a new one – human flip charts. Tight Parameters = Opportunities for Innovation.

There are two things I appreciate about Gillian’s improvisational response to a challenge. One, it is creative. Two, in engages and involves everyone in the room in the solution. The “problem” isn’t just the facilitators’. It is the challenge and operating conditions of the group.

Where we are able to give over both control AND responsibility, I find we get greater engagement.

Edit: a few hours later, I find this picture of CIFOR’s annual meeting Open Space Marketplace — one of the more innovative ones that I’ve seen!

The Book of Love

I have written in the past about the power of love. Keith Olbermann gives a tour de force editorial on why this culture is needed in the world as a response to the passage of California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage. You can see it, and see the transcript here –>  Olbermann: Gay marriage is a question of love – Countdown with Keith Olbermann- msnbc.com

At the end of his comments, Olbermann said:

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

“I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam,” he told the judge. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all: So I be written in the Book of Love; I do not care about that Book above. Erase my name, or write it as you will, So I be written in the Book of Love.”

Edited Later: See also this video from the weekend march in Seattle from Ashley and Thomas
http://vimeo.com/2259354. Again, the theme is Love.