Full Circle Associates

The riff from Dan, to the Onlinefacilitation list has landed now on Bev's blog, Em duas linguas: Leadership or lideran�.

This is interesting to me both on a process and content level. From a process perspective, it is really cool to see the linkage between a large, mostly-reader-only (few post) listserv on online facilitation and two blogs which address leadership and meaning across cultures (the broad generalizations are mine.) What is particularly pertinent to me is that the linkages happened because of people in each of the orbits associated with the lists and the blogs. It was not from tagging or folksonomy. People.

Second is the content - which to me at the core is about making meaning. The thread started from my wondering about how we often don't connect in more diffuse online conversations and I picked up a riff from Dan about talking "with" or "around". So I linked to his post. Rosanna then offered a different cultural perspective on his observations (on the onfac list) which Bev then picked up, adding more thread to the emergent fabric.

Here are a few snippets from Bev:

The poster's comment in the discussion was that the author of the blog about leadership was writing from an American perspective where people avoid showing their anger towards leaders. She suggested that in the Mediterranean basin, you get angry if you feel you can't talk openly to someone - and you would use that to your advantage if you felt that you could touch the insecurities of a leader.

I don't recognise that openness with anger in Portugal - a Latin Atlantic country - but, like her, I was struck by the assumptions in Oestreich's reflection on leadership. Frank and open conversations are good because they make me feel better.

(snip)

These words made me think about two unspoken assumptions. One is the taken-for-granted weight given to 'I', the individual rather than the group. The thinking begins from the needs and perspectives of one individual and to the solving of that individual's problems in order to solve his problems as manager, rather than starting from the problems of the group which may (or may not) be resolved by the manager being frank (or not) with the leader. Starting from the individual is a very culture-specific way of framing a problem.

(snip)

It's just that this conversation on leadership led me again to think of the many invisible taken-for-granted assumptions there are behind the words we use. The best that can happen is that I listen to what you say and transform it's significance to my own context. The worst is that the writing alienates me. Most of the flow of information goes from centre to periphery countries - and in English. Some of that information is transformed into other cultural contexts, while some of it has an alienating effect on people in many parts of the world. And I think we ignore this at our peril."

In a global world made accessible by online interaction, these questions rise large and important to me.