Request for Ideas

[Wendy Farmer-O'Neil]

Hi Tenneson!

 

What a great list you have already generated.  What about also addressing
some of the needs of learners with non-dominant styles—the emotional
learners and the kinesthetic crowd.   Emotional learners can be challenging
to accommodate in a traditional conference, but you could create a
reflection room where folks could go to quietly reflect on how they feel
about what they are learning and also to make notes in their journals.  If
you provided some exercise balls as alternate seating for the regular
settings, this can help the doers in the crowd. Also a toy or play table
with some art supplies for drawing or painting or cutting.  Things like that
which support non-dominant modes and left-right integration.

 

And in terms of deepening relationships and learning from others, is there a
way to introduce a random element? I have found that introducing a random
element can really support folks in getting out of their usual patterns.
For example, generating random pairings of participants and inviting them to
believe that they have something very important to learn from each other
over the conference time.  They don’t have to go around together or
anything, but it can support folks in stretching their antennae a bit
farther and noticing and wondering more.

 

Cheers,

Wendy

 

  _____  

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Tenneson
Woolf
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 9:19 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Request for Ideas

 

Hosting Friends,

 

I am shaping the design for a conference hosted by my university
organization, The Dyer Institute for Leading Organizational Change
(www.dyerinstitute.byu.edu <http://www.dyerinstitute.byu.edu/> ). The
conference, April 4-6, 2007 is focused on leading organizational change –
more specifically, on themes of leadership and engagement. In many ways,
this is a conference with traditional formats – couple of keynotes,
concurrent sessions, Q&A. The audience we expect is 100 – 200, (60%
practitioners, 25% MBA students, 15% university faculty). The conference is
offsite, at a resort hotel in a nice mountain setting.

 

I am working at the edges to add as much non-traditional formatting that
really cooks the learning possibilities. I’d welcome your suggestions.

 

What deepens relationships, learning, and capacity to act in a more
traditional conference format?

 

A few of my ideas:

- learning wall, self-organized for post-it note questions, learnings,
observations

- offerings wall, self-organized for people to name where they will be for
given topics outside of the conference program

- participant created resource table

- conference journal to encourage reflection and learning that happens in
hosting self

- learning cafés (you’ve heard a bunch of stuff, now let’s turn to each
other to make sense of these ideas)

- conference blog for people to harvest questions, insights, next steps for
them

- video recordings (Thanks Tatiana at WC Stewards), Dyer TV to harvest
stories, key challenges, endorsements

- support for each presenter to facilitate group work and interactive
presentation

- an open learning room, for those who want to self-organize (not open space
but open space)

 

Please, join me with your ideas, improvements, stories of hosting the middle
spaces in non-hosting environments.

 

Piece and peace in the middle
.

 

Tenneson

 

 

Tenneson Woolf

 

The Art of Hosting

tenneson at berkana.org

www.artofhosting.org <http://www.artofhosting.org/> 

801 376 2213

 

Dyer Institute for Leading Organizational Change

tenneson_woolf at byu.edu

www.dyerinstitute.byu.edu <http://www.dyerinstitute.byu.edu/> 

801 422 2665

 

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