Advanced Butterfly Behavior

[Justin T. Sampson]

On 8/15/06, Tree Fitzpatrick <therese.fitzpatrick at gmail.com> wrote:

> I recently attended the National Conference on Dialogue and
> Deliberation. Today, in my mailbox, I was invited to give
> feedback about the conference. To my puzzlement, I learned, in
> the survey questions, that many people reported that this
> conference, NCDD, was the best conference they had ever been to.

It was my happiest four days in a long time -- but then I haven't
been to many other conferences!

> For me, it was a draining challenge to endure it: many wonderful
> people (some of our own dear oslisters like Peggy and Lisa
> Heft!) offered excellent breakout sessions. The plenary sessions
> were thoughtfully and skillfully designed and, for the most
> part, well-executed. The organizers wove art and beauty into our
> days together. But I could not bring myself to go to any
> sessions. And when I did force myself to stumble into one or
> two,

Glad you did! I met you in one. :)

(I think it was the one about the Precautionary Principle. If I
remember correctly, you started alone at a table and invited me to
join you.)

> I felt bullied and bruised, although certainly no one was
> bullying me. Certainly, I was free in every single moment of my
> experience of this NCDD event to be a butterfly and, most
> definitely, I knew this.

I didn't feel bullied and bruised, but I did also find them a bit
draining/constraining. All the workshops I went to were in a
presentation/classroom kind of structure, with lots of interesting
information about methods of dialogue, but not much dialogue
itself, at least not that I was able to jump into. (Sorry Peggy,
yours too! But the imagery of evolutionary expansion and
contraction did stick with me and I used it again and again later
in the conference!) I'm pretty quiet anyway, so I need a lot of
safety to get my words going, and a presentation format doesn't do
that for me.

I was pretty drained leading into the "methods showcase" (five
15-minutes sessions in rapid succession) and frantically trying to
figure out which ones to go to, when out of shear luck the first
one I chose was EXACTLY what I needed at the end of that day, so I
stayed with it for all 5 sessions! I suppose that counts as a kind
of butterfly behavior. :) It was the National Playback Theatre,
which drew me into a completely different mode of connection and
helped me express with just a few words all my feelings about the
day, and to experience all the variations of feelings that others
were having.

> [...]
>
> Finally, after what seemed like an eternity to me, on the
> afternoon of the second day, there was a ninety minute OS. All
> day on that second day, I could feel the fresh air rising. By
> the time it finally came to open the space (which was done by a
> fine OS newbie Matthew Blom), I was feeling downright joyful and
> oxegenated. I was giddy. I was happy. I felt at home.

Interesting -- that snippet of Open Space doesn't stand out very
prominently for me in my memory of the conference, since it was so
abbreviated, and precisely because I had better butterfly
experiences outside of it -- including especially the Playback
Theatre session.

The last morning, none of the scheduled workshops in the first
timeslot was terribly interesting, so I gave myself permission to
really butterfly -- I peeked in a few sessions; I noticed that the
Illegal Art graffitti wall had fallen down, and fixed it; and
interestingly I kept bumping into one person in particular who was
also butterflying around, who I've been wanting to have some
one-on-one time with for the past year! We had lunch together, and
after eating, he started to get up but hesitated a bit, perhaps
not wanting to seem rude by leaving abruptly -- he said, "I think
I'll, ummm..." and I said, to let him know it was alright, "Go be
a butterfly?" and his face lit up and he said "Yeah! I like that,
'butterfly'! See you later!" :)

> [...]
>
> Did I have a great time at NCDD? Oh yes, yes, indeed. Because I
> found the butterflies. . . or, perhaps, they found me.
>
> I guess there is a place in the world for conferences like NCDD,
> to bring together 400 process activists who are striving to
> build both their skill base and their professionalism but if I
> had been allowed to hang out with those 400 people in OS instead
> of in boxes, gosh golly, I would have been truly bedazzled
> instead of just having fun with a few butterflies on the side.

Yay! That's what I said on the feedback form. :)

Cheers,
Justin

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