The next meeting of our Sleuthing-for-Partners design effort will be Wednesday, February 14th from 1pm-4pm Pacific time. The meeting will happen right here. For details on how to participate, head to the bottom of the post.
For a summary and the video / audio of the first meeting, head to this post. That first meeting established grounding - getting to know each other as people, and making sure everyone has the context and history of what has led us to today.
With that as our starting point, Catalytic Thinking will guide us to come up with a plan to find true partners for our work. Here are the steps we'll be taking. (In Meeting #2, we will be working on #1 - Listening).
1) Listening:
We will begin where we always begin - LISTENING! We will consider all the things that people think about what it means to be a partner, about traditional funding, about "resources." We will listen to our experience, to the conversations we have all been part of. What are people telling us is wrong? And what would GOOD look like? What are the values at the core of that? What are the strengths in the people and systems that exist, upon which we can build these partnerships?
This is where we get to pivot from reacting to how it's always been done / what has gone wrong in the past / what could go wrong in the future / what we "should" do... and pivot to creating what is possible. We will listen to ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves about "how we've done it in the past." We will be mindful of the lens we are seeing through, mindfully noting the expectations and "shoulds" we are bringing to the conversation - just as we would listen to a friend or colleague, and just as we would want that friend to listen to us. We will then reframe and pivot to what is possible, through the lens of outcomes and strengths and values - the lens of Catalytic Listening.
2) High potential outcomes:
Having listened, reframed and reflected on those strengths, values, and desired outcomes, we will use those outcomes as the high potential for which we will be reaching in our efforts. What do we want our sleuthing / finding partners to make possible, not just for Creating the Future, but especially for those sleuthees and partners? For the world?
3) Conditions for success for our sleuthees / potential partners / for the world:
Because our ultimate high potential success is not about us, but about the world - and the power we have together with those sleuthees and partners to create change in the world - the ultimate and penultimate (and pen-penultimate, if that is a word...) pre-conditions for that success lie with them, not us. Our job is to help create the conditions for THEM to step into that potential.
We will therefore define what our sleuthees need to know / understand / believe / value / be assured of / feel / as we invite them to conversations and engage in those conversations.
4) Actions:
We will develop an action plan. That will include questions of "who to engage" and "what research do we need to do" and "in what order" and etc.
Refraining from asking questions of "how" at the beginning of the process, we will first have created the context of our "why" - the causality of conditions we intend to create. This is what moves us from reactive "how" questions, to creating what is possible. With our actions coming out of the conditions we intend to create, the actions will emerge, revealing themselves, rather than our having to struggle to come up with "how."
5) Internal conditions for success:
Finally, we will turn internally, to ask what WE need to know / feel / be assured of / etc. in order to create the conditions for our successfully taking the actions we line out in Step 4.
Through this effort, we will be answering all the myriad questions that were raised in Meeting #1. And we can trust that it will all work according to our values, because it will be led by Catalytic Thinking.
To watch and participate…
There are 3 ways to participate in our meetings.
- If your commitment to Creating the Future’s work is calling you to be actively involved in the meeting discussion side-by-side at our online “meeting table,” let us know, and we will send you an invitation to join us online.
- If you want to participate without being inside the meeting itself, watch the live-stream in real time right here at this post, and tweet your questions and ideas to us via the hashtag #CreatingTheFuture. We will read those tweets aloud during the meeting, bringing you into the discussion just as if you were there.
(Please note: We will only see your tweets if you use the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag. In addition, during the meeting, we will not look at blog comments here at this post. While we will check those comments later, during the meeting we will only be following the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag in the Twitter stream.)
- Lastly, if you want to simply watch, or you want to think about what you’re hearing and respond later – or if you will be watching the recording after the meeting happens – please add your thoughts into the comments here at this post. We will include that thinking into the mix of things.
We look forward to your being part of our discussion on Wednesday, February 14th at 1pm Pacific time (US).
Watch the meeting live right here at this post. If the video does not appear precisely on the hour, please be patient – we are probably just running a few minutes late.
Listen to the Audio
(To download to your hard drive, right-click {or click and hold on a Mac} on the link above and select "Save Target As".. or "Save Link as"... depending on your browser)