Dear Design Team Members,

Odin and I met for lunch last week to talk about facilitation.  Our 'facilitation' conversation really became a larger discussion of what it means to integrate our distributed leadership across the days to collectively hold the whole.   One of our approaches to this questions was to ask what are the most important questions we should deal with as a collective and how do we create an integrated experience for participants.  We came up with a couple of ideas to share (and Odin I trust you will be editing this to preserve the essense of our ideas)

• Facilitation and collective leadership:  My first approach to the discussion of facilitation with Odin was to try and find a public role in the facilitation for every member of the design team, in the spirit of demonstrating/modeling our collectivity.  On further reflection, I think that collectivity is best expressed through our collective leadership to the design and that the community does not need to see every person in a public role to trust our process.  My concern is that we sacrifice the benefits of a core facilitation team that would give participants the visual sense of continuity and confidence in the strength of the meeting structure/container to support a high level of participant engagement without becoming a free for all.  I favor the idea of two (or three at most) key facilitators who would anchor us and weave the participation of a larger team of contributors throughout the three days.  I had a discussion with Elissa that moved my thinking more in this direction about the role of introducers, e.g. who will introduce Donna, Alain, etc.   I thought of conferences I have attended where you have a string of folks being introduced to introduce others who will introduce others, etc.   While this is often a mechanism of distributing the limelight it reinforces hierarchy of expertise.  Elissa explained that the role of introducers referred to in our design was one of integration and making connections to our framing questions.  As I considered this I thought it would be most helpful and integrative to have a small group playing that role as core facilitators throughout the 3 days. In this vein, I asked Odin if there was agreement among the team if he would be willing to play this role, possibly along with Omi if she had the time.  I am certainly open to other suggestions as well.
• Integration Content:  Its easy to slide into a coordinating/logistics walkthrough of the days (yes, this is important) and miss the bigger integrative questions.  It struck me after the call that day 3 folks, because we were working on the meaning/making and evaluation, took on a large role in creating/drafting framing questions for the whole of CS.  We did not actually spend a lot of time lifting up which questions might be most important to integration.  I think it would be helpful to have all of us look at how these questions may or may not serve the work of our days.  We also do not have a closing ritual which seems like important integrative work for the team. I think this would be a good topic for all of us as well.  We have been talking about one last call. It might be helpful if everyone could take one last look at the design with the integrative lens.
• Collective Decision Making:  In a collective endeavor it is important to establish some decision making authorities.  Since we do have to work within a economy of time,  we need to figure out what decisions require the best collective wisdom, and which need to be delegated to staff in the interest of the team's time and other responsibilities.  I was recently translating our design work into a participant agenda.  In past CSs, participants have expressed concern about 'insider' language so my primary focus was on this type of translation.  Then I found myself musing over the Day I Theme and wanting to change the language from "Establishing What We Know and Opening to Learning" to "Surfacing What We Believe and Opening to Learning".   I was unclear whether I had the latitude to make this change to Day I's work.  I am going to resort to the wiki for this type of work since we have not worked out these types of authority.  I will post the proposed Agenda today and hope that in the interest of time we can get feedback on the language from all who would like to have a voice in this by Wednesday.   For our next, final and hopefully short call of whoever can make it, perhaps we can clarify our home stretch decision making processes.