Design for 3hour scientific panel and community dialogue process

[Ria Baeck]

copied from the emaillist:

Hello Artists,   
I have been following this ethereal group since taking part in an Art of Hosting Water Dialogues training with Chris Corrigan and Tatiana Glad last spring. I have been frequently moved and inspired by the conversations, and would like to move towards being more active in this learning environment. So I am taking this opportunity to invite suggestions on an upcoming event.  

I am hosting a dialogue in my community on the important issue of the health of one of our lakes, which is recently plagued with heavy algal and cyanobacteria blooms that threaten human health and generally make the lake unappealing. A number of attempts to restore the lake have been made, but without great success. Now some more serious and expensive options are being discussed by decision-makers and community groups, but there are many different opinions on what would be effective.  

Speaking with lakeside residents one-on-one this summer, many of them said they would like to know what experts have to say about the lake, to get some information that they can trust. The local water council has raised funds to host a public meeting next weekend, December 1st, and experts on lake health from two universities and the community will join the event, as well as some local decision-makers.   

The purpose of the event is to support the community to care for the lake, through better understanding and through dialogue on what can be done next.  I would like to make the most of the three lake-specialists who will be visiting, ensure that all burning questions are responded to, and harvest ideas of what the community wants to happen next.   

We have scheduled 3 hours, and a preliminary design for the event looks like this:        - Welcome, introduce lake-specialists, plenary check-in responding to statements about the lake by standing along a spectrum, with participants invited to make statements for the group to respond to 
- Presentations by the three lake-specialists, with questions (50 min)      
(Coffee break)     
- Small groups invited to identify their burning question for the panel    
- Questions harvested, and panel of specialists and decision-makers respond to questions   
- Small groups invited to discuss, "How can we best care for our lake?" "What is the next step?"   
- Harvest the suggestions from the groups  
- Everyone votes with stickers on preferred next steps     
- Share with your neighbour what you will take away from this event, invite a few to be shared plenary  

After Ursula's email regarding the event with Ina May, I am wondering if a fishbowl would allow for a deeper conversation, and still allow for everyone's questions to be answered.   I feel that presentations may be the best way for information about the lake's health and how lake ecosystems function to come through at the start of the event, but I would be happy to hear other ideas about this.    

A warm thank-you for all of the sharing through this list,  
Katherine Trajan 
Salt Spring Island, BC Canada
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Katherine…  
Love this…  

Getting expert advice into the room is important, but how to do it without recreating a top-down process?  The challenge here is not to make this a "presentation and answer" set up as that sets up an adversarial kind of format… bad behaviours crop up there.  

What if instead we used the principle of "thinking together?" 
 
I like collective story harvest for this… although I haven't tried this design myself, what I would suggest is to go with a flow that looks like this:  
Welcome and gather in small groups, with experts out in the crowd with everybody else… and a quick cafe on what are the questions we are holding about our lake?  Perhaps three quick rounds of 10 minutes with a 20 minute harvesting round to see what questions are in the room.  Use a collective mind map process to harvest and cluster the questions.  these question clusters become harvesting threads to hear from the experts.  

Have the group then breaks into smaller groups with people committing to taking on one of the questions threads.  In small groups they can meet for a few minutes to talk about how they will listen to the experts.  

Then have the exerts make their presentations as if they were telling stories (they are!) and have the collective story harvest unfold.  Have groups present back what they have learned and identify good information and maybe some next level questions that people can engage in together.  

Return to cafe format to think about what next steps we could suggest based on everything we have learned and choose some priorities if you still need to make decisions together.  I haven't timed this out, and perhaps it is too ambitious, but with a smaller group of 30 or so, you could go through this relatively quickly.    

Chris
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Dear Chris,  
I know this isn't my question, but what a great design to create the opportunity for thinking together.   

I work in a place where everyone is an expert and so top down is not questioned in the culture. Thank you so much for this rethink. It will assist me greatly in my work in this space.  

And thank you for your generosity. I love the way this group works,  

Best wishes,  
Jill
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Chiming in from Japan…  

I like the design you're suggesting Chris.  I would add a couple of points outside of the design.  

What i think is really important here, is the coaching you do of the experts before they come.  

For a couple of years now I've been playing with a construct called "Sacred Outsider." The sacred outsider differs from the expert outsider in many way.  A primary one is that  they show up with great respect and deep listening.  From their listening, they find questions to ask and sometimes suggestions to make or observations to share.  But their primary gift is their listening.  

All around the world we need to access knowledge beyond the immediate boundaries of our community or system.  We we work from the principle that "the knowledge and resources we need are already here,"  one critical piece of knowledge is that we need to know more than we know.  But knowledge from the outside needs to come in to community in new ways. It needs to be drawn in from inside of community rather than simply spoken with the outside voice of expert authority.  The outside experts must arrive with empathy, respect and curiosity -- not just the answers they are absolutely sure of.  They must transcend from their expert role to become sacred outsiders if communities are grow and learn.  

I've just spent the last two days in Iwate Prefecture with people from two towns here.   This dance of how to bring in outside expertise is very real to me right now.  If the future in a community is built with only its own knowledge, it's insufficient.  Take housing.  If the only knowledge and vision available is from housing of the last fifty years -- housing dependent on water to remove waste, purchased energy to meet needs, complete, separate self-sufficiency of each housing unit, etc.), it perpetuates many of the limitations of housing design of the past.  But simply having the expert come in and say "you should be building co-housing with shared facilities for cooking, eating and bathing, you should be using composting toilets, you should be installing solar panels, etc." much of what is said falls on deaf ears.  We need to learn how to co-stimualte our imaginations and awake a hunger to learn more from others.  

I think this is such an important area of inquiry and practice…  
With respect,  
Bob  
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Chris, Jill and Bob - thank you for your thoughtful responses to my question about the scientific panel. I am delighted by the larger questions you have opened up about how to include "outsiders" and "experts" in discussions about a specific place. 

Chris - I love your design. I pitched it, and was turned down, but I am taking some of its spirit into the discussions that we will have after the presentations, inviting all of the experts and community members to think together about the questions that are still held, and what next steps can be taken by the community. I will look for more opportunities to explore collective story harvest !!

Bob - you have given me inspiration for the conversations I will have with our "Sacred Outsiders" before the event begins. I look forward to this!

with pleasure, 

Katherine