{"id":4332,"date":"2011-01-30T11:32:53","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T19:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/discoveryfuel.com\/?p=4332"},"modified":"2016-09-26T12:34:10","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T20:34:10","slug":"our-future-and-the-mistake-we-continue-to-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/discoverycolabs.com\/vicsblog\/2011\/01\/30\/our-future-and-the-mistake-we-continue-to-make\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Future and the Mistake We Continue to Make"},"content":{"rendered":"
Taking action on our future is less about ‘what<\/em>‘ we know and ‘who<\/em>‘ is in the room, than it is about ‘how<\/em>‘ we come together to learn. We’ve had this wrong for a long long time.<\/p>\n Look at the photo below. This is a “climate action” conference. Observe how people in the room are positioned. Notice how one person is actively presenting to a large audience of folks, who are passively listening. The geometry of how they are all lined in rows and focusing on one person is actually how you place people if brain-washing is your goal. I know that seems a bit strong, but it’s actually true when you think about it: One person’s idea being obsorbed by many, with very little or no ability to interact with what they are hearing.<\/p>\n My point is this: The process and configuration that we presently use to learn in groups is the MISTAKE that will continue to drive inappropriate choices and unhealthy decisions about our future. <\/strong><\/p>\n Instead, conferences, meetings, and gatherings, need to advantage of the collective mind that\u2019s in the room by developing a vibrant, dynamic, life-generating, learning-exchange marketplace<\/a>. In this learning exchange marketplace, a collaborative design<\/a> process is used to shape an environment from which relationship-building and information-exchange is enhanced to a very high level. In this marketplace, information is traded and moved toward meaning, using a parallel collaboration process that allows for better choices to be created and thereby better decisions to be made. This process is called a CoLab<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A Colab taps into both a community\u2019s collective emotional state, as well as its co-intelligent capacity, to bring out a diverse head\/heart knowledge from people that rarely gets accessed in traditional group sessions. A Colab moves individual agendas into group-mind learning and reasoning by combining story-telling and metaphor-making as a key part of the collaboration process, thereby allowing for the intuitive brain to incorporate what the rational brain can not.<\/p>\n Furthermore, a Colab<\/a> will transform a stuffy-room full of authoritative egos into a dance-hall of fun-loving folks who are sharing a diversity of ideas, morphing them into a consensus of choices, and turning them into an intelligent, strategic plan that can be rationally assessed and moved toward solution-based action. All this is done in a fraction of the time of traditional approaches (as seen in the picture), with an increased density of content being shared, received, and absorbed more easily by the majority (rather than the minority) of folks in the room. The result of a Colab process is that – rather than folks feeling frustrated, adversarial, and dreading the work ahead, I have found that more people leave feeling charged, accomplished, participants that are ready to act. Now THIS is how to move ourselves into a future that works!<\/p>\n For more on Collaborative Design, see how to create your own Colab<\/a>.<\/p>\n +++<\/p>\nNote the chaotic nature of healthy interaction in this picture<\/h5>\n