wicked questions invitation

[Raffi Aftandelian]

From the WC list...

best,
Raffi

Dear World Cafe friends,





Would you take a few minutes now to respond to this request for your best,
most perplexing and juicy questions?





You will probably among my most provocative and stimulating helpers in the
search for the most important questions in the world today, questions we
will use during the Conversation Week dialogues at the end of March. People
like you will submit questions by February 10 which will be winnowed to the
top ten by a global survey process. If you want to skip the rest of this
explanation and simply go to the page where you can submit your 1-3
suggestions for CW questions, go to:
http://conversationcafe.org/.surveydocs/Create_the_Conversation_Week_Question.html





Dana Meadows, coauthor of Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits, famously
offered a hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. All of them are
important, but the first 8 were adaptive tweaks while the final 4 were
transformational - stepping outside the system to observe and wonder about
it. Citizen dialogue at its best is transformational. It seeks to awaken
people to the structures, goals and mindsets out of which arise our daily
struggles to make our personal and collective lives more sustainable. The
effect of such dialogue is unpredictable because they don't produce any
sustained shared activities. Participants return to their lives, bringing
their new insights and increased will to make change. They also bring with
them an experience of how inquiry, respect and open-mindedness produces
better conversational results than assertion, reactivity and certainty
you're right.





Key to quality dialogue that can make a difference is a good process and a
good question.





Conversation Week is Conversation Cafe's an annual global dialogue about
questions that matter most. Small hosted groups, using the CC process, meet
during that week face to face (and this year online too thanks to our
partner Global Mindshift) to consider one of the 10 selected questions - and
report their findings via a website. It's a chance to hear ourselves think
together globally.





Dialogue experts and big thinkers are invited to submit questions for
consideration. The deadline for submission is February 10. The submissions
are winnowed to the top 30 and a survey is posted on our website so that
thousands of people can engage in picking the top 10. The final CW2008 group
of questions will be posted by March 1, right when hosts are being trained,
finding their cafes, publicizing their events and getting ready for the
March 24-30 event. The very process of thinking about, crafting, and
selecting the "most important question in the world today" is part of the
dialogue process.





Would you be willing to offer us some of your best questions? The ones that
perplex you are especially good - the ones at the leading edge of your
understanding of how systems change, how life works, why bad things happen
on a good planet - however you express your own curiosity.





Please go to
http://conversationcafe.org/.surveydocs/Create_the_Conversation_Week_Question.html
and and write your questions on the form on that page. While you might be
tempted to just hit reply and give me your questions, but we are hoping to
get many submissions from around the world and using the website to offer
your questions will really help our wee team of 2 to sift through for the
most elegant, exquisite ones.





I write this as the sun rises in my small village by the sea on an island
near Seattle. I hope you also as you read are held by natural beauty, good
friends and good work.





best wishes,

Vicki

P.S. - If you know a big hearted thinker who'd enjoy submitting questions,
feel free to forward this to them.

---------------------- Vicki Robin Box 1501, Langley, WA 98260 360 221 2251
206 769 3424 cell

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real
work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our
real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded
stream is the one that sings." --Wendell Berry 

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