Harvesting

A pattern that popped up a few times in the conversation on 16 May was the "front-burner/back-burner" pattern. What we pay attention to shifts. We noted that there are domains or areas of practice that come onto the front burner and we pay attention to them and get inspired and co-creative with them. And then they move to the back burner as other practices and events claim our attention instead.

Duri spoke for us all when he said "Yet I am longing for the possibility of giving sustained attention over time to those practices for which I resonate with and for which I see that there is a field, like the harvesting. So I would love to be able to not forget about it for a couple of months or a couple of weeks, like when we were in a conversation about this when we started. That was an intensive moment. When we discovered things. And then I couldn’t touch it because some other things happened. But what would bring us together in a space of sustained attention to our baby over time?"

This field will develop best if we can bring our collective, sustained attention to bear for a long enough length of time. What conditions would need to be in place for that to happen?

I posted this over on the AoHoAoH forum, but it really belongs here.

http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/682#comment-951 

Received from Juanita on the AoH listserve: 

"Hi everyone...

We just received a beautiful reflection from Conrad Tiu, a wonderful reflective graphics practitioner and school principal about
his experience of harvesting within a World Cafe context.  It's a bit long, but he and I thought it might be useful in this
broader conversation around harvesting and collective intelligence. Here are Conrad's reflections..... What are your additional thoughts?

Listening, as I said, is the most important aspect of the harvesting process for me as a graphic recorder, and it is a special kind of listening.  For me, it is meditative, attaining a kind of flow, an emptying and a cleansing.  Then whatever comes of the moment, comes, and I record it.  It is being present (and not allowing any internal critics or voices to get in the way of the listening) and attending to every moment and everything that emerges in the room. Every recorder has their own style, emphasis, etc. What is truly important is that the work produced enables the participants to anchor their experience and relive it in a meaningful way.

The graphic recording  is not about the drawings.  It is about harvesting the experience in the room. I have personally seen art teachers get frustrated after trying on what I do.  Nothing in their training prepares them for the paradoxical focused and open attention this kind of process requires.  My observation was that their artistic skill actually got in the way of the recording.
 The World Café is a divergent process. It is one of the best out there, because it is so natural, organic and feels so human.  The reason why harvesting  (in this case, reflective graphic recording) is so important is because, the harvest provides the "content" that will make up the structure for any action plan, convergent process and common ground boundary-making that may be needed as the work unfolds.

 Sometimes the World Cafe sharing both at the tables and later, in the whole room, behaves like a strange attractor, seemingly random and unpredictable, then when it is almost over, one stands back and voila, the pattern reveals itself.    The sharing and ideas "harvested" are not lost, but are recorded publicly, right before peoples eyes, in the room, as well as on the tablecloths.  Later when they see the relevant charts taken out again, displayed in the hallways, or in other meetings for comment and enhancement, and iteratively used, reused, and grown and referred to over and over again, they see that the process of harvesting is not only valuable but integral to the work.

 In terms of inquiry, much of the harvested material are questions, many of which cannot be answered by a "yes," "no," nor research, nor fact-finding committee, but only through the ambiguous, uncertain, experiential willful groping forward (the bottom of the "U?") together to an uncertain future.  The Café and the hosting of other dialogue modes foster the open-mind, open-heart and finally, open-will spaces to let the future come and for those insights to be harvested.  From where I stand, all the best "programs" that I see speak of the same things, are synchronic, and work from the same principles, some emphasizing one trait more than others.  I usually pick from the plethora, those that would fit, and those that would move the work forward in my particular context.

Warm best wishes,

Juanita

From Patricia; Dec. 9th 2006: 

Reading your harvest on harvest, I am riding the vertical evolution of information train :) ... and digging it.

Yes.  As in life.

Imagine the possibilities ....the evolution of consciousness held in the remembering our cumulative and collective learnings as we let go, sense and realize in each moment. 

It is there.  All of it.  and maybe even always.  It is just getting out of the way and removing distractions and forgetting.  I like how the harvest moves forward in the next invitation; in the next question.

How do we re-generate and integrate the harvests of our collective and cumulative moments into questions and invitations that allow the evolution of what is already alive?

Grateful for your harvest and invitation into conversation.

Patricia

Recieved in an email from Chris Corrigan on Dec. 9th 2006: 

Hellow folks:

Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately.  When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest.  Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.

I have made all of these notes at my Flickr site.  When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page.  Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along.

Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle: (see photo's here).

Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning.  This was based on a conversation I had with George: photo

From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration: photo

That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance: photo

Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording.  Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest: photo

I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question:

What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?

Cheers,

Chris

From an Open Space session in the AoH in Belgium, out of a conversation of Monica and George came these notes.

I hope both of them can add comments about it, but it relates very much with my previous comment (see below)!

From Chris Corrigan:

I agree, and I feel somehow that harvest is critical to both the Art of Hosting as a practice and to our inquiries on conscious evolution.  For me simply shifting my consciousness to "everything I do is a harvest, and everything else is in service of the harvest" is a powerful frame for me.  in the flickr photo you can see that iterative path that to me holds much power.  Shifting eyes and seeing to the pattern of action, back to the harvest needs and then into the design of process is fantastic. 

So let us think about a pixie book of harvest tools, great power and potential translated into some basic approaches.

Chris

Chris Corrigan wrote on Nov. 23:

Here is the flickr link for notes on a session that Monica and I hosted at AoH Boulder on harvesting:

The session covered a lot of ground for me personally, and there is more to harvest from this than what is on this photo.  However, I'd like to offer that we could try annotating this photograph with notes and use the comments feature of the flickr page to continue the conversation.  When I have a moment I will photograph the mind map we made on Bowen and we can do the same with that.

You both may need to sign up for a flickr account to be able to add notes. 

In the longer term I'd like to look for a good piece of open source software that would allow us to make longer and more detailed annotations on photgraphs that can somehow be included in static reports.  I think this would be a good way to add meaning and still heavily use maps like this in reports of conversations.

One project I am excited about is to harvest higher level and simple principles of harvesting - the hobbit tools of harvest.

I am currently thinking through a couple of them, that we tossed around in Boulder:

Harvest is actually everything.  You are planning a harvest, not a meeting.  The meeting design serves the harvest.  In this way the harvest becomes the highest and deepest holon of the change process, living in all phases of an engagement with a client.

Know the expectations around harvest and ask what else?  Is there deeper learning, is there another form?  Use our list of harvest modes as an ingredient book to cook up new and deeper ways to harvest.

Have somewhere to go with the harvest.  I was speaking with a client yesterday who was convening a conference which aims at giving life to a ten-year old government report on First Nations issues.  She wants to see her conference move that report to action.  Her plan for the harvest of the conference simply had us producing a set of proceedings that would e released to the world with no follow up.  I suggested that this would have the same effect as the inactive government report itself.  And so we discussed a simple but solid strategy.  She committed to finding five places that the conference proceedings could be used to start an inquiry in the year following the conference.  She is going to line these up and announce at the conference that the results of the work will be used in these five places, and that the five places are waiting for the best wisdom.  We will then harvest in a way that makes the conference results very a live for these five forums using video, audio and other media.  My client described this insight as "very, very helpful."

This is a very fun and signigficant inquiry.  I am glad to be in it....  Let us move towards some concrete ideas and then invite others in the AoH community in at some point.  I am feeling no rush to expand the conversation at this point. 

Much love, 

Chris

I'm wondering what harvesting really is. What is the difference between taking notes and harvesting?

One thought occured this morning in the car: the harvesting as it is done in the big mural graphics is:
- making the shared meaning visible; and
- making the connections between the different elements visible, conscious

Once George told me that the art of harvesting is making an artefact that brings the event and its core meaning to live again; by adding beauty, art and different forms of 'memory'.

My intuition says that there is much more at the core of harvesting, but I guess I/we will need  a deep dialogue about that.