- What is important to you about what you experienced designing with LS this week?
- What meaning are you drawing?
- What assumptions did you make or hold about LS or teaching/facilitating with LS?
- Do you notice any patterns or themes?
- What conclusions are emerging?
The community around learning and praciting LS is the bomb! Distributing facilitation l and challenging top-down leadership is powerful.
But many contexts I work in aren't top down- they grassroots, volunteer networks.
So I'm not sure about LS as inherently liberating- still pondering. So many of the group experiences that have felt deeply transformative to me have happened in Indigenous-led space: talking circles with no time limits, and deep listening with no immediate responses as an example.
Looking through the menu I see structures that feel off to me i.e. was looking again at Heard, Seen, Respected (so many traps in telling a story like this in a work setting. The counsellor in me cringes.) WINFY is another one I always look at and reject. I resonate with the purpose but doesn't fit my instincts.
There's a repetoire of LS I use regularly and love, and others I doubt I'll every use. Some of my faves for online facilitation- Impromptu Networking, Troika, 1,2,4 all, User Exp Fishbowl, Celebrity Interviews, Appreciative Interivews. Many of those are riffs and variations on practices I've always used. But it's so helpful to have it all described in one place.
I really take the timing as a loose guideline depending on the group energy. But I find the principles and design elements really helpful to think about in planning sessions.