Session Two

Learning Lab Synthesis from Session One - This document summarizes the learning from the first session and serves as foundation for the work in session two

Resources and Contributions -Resources submitted by Learning Lab Participants

Roving Conversations -See the results of our interactive roving conversations

Three group questions

Group One - The Hopeful Georges

How to create and sustain a learning community culture?

Two - The Hopefuls

How do we balance individual needs and differences with common purpose at a level that consistently supports synergy?

Three - The Problem Posers

What is the shared vision and purpose that gives us energy to connect, build trust and create exchange of knowledge? How does this vision and purpose create a culture that allows for us to look at what we don't know about ourselves and our communities?

Open Space

Question One: What is our tolerance for accommodating people who are entering on a continuum of readiness to fully commit and participate in a learning community? What is gained or lost by including people for the sake of inclusion or excluding people for the sake of continuity? How do we hold this balance?

Question Three: What is the self-organizing capacity of learning communities and when and what type of direction and support is most helpful? How do we develop higher tolerance for chaos and trust that order will emerge? Are we being influenced by traditional reward systems that are not aligned with organic processes?

Open Space Aha's

• Holding the space for challenge and chaos to happen. Not protecting folks to the point where they can't or won't engage in the difficult discussions and explorations that will develop and further their learning and leadership.

• The idea of learning communities as successes or failures and its weddedness to our results oriented culture.

• Learning communities are a mangagement style

• Creating the conditions for learning communities to thrive takes time.

Full Group Reflections

• Not linear and enjoyed evocative intuitive structure
• Not sure how or if will connect with and/or influence own day-to-day work.
• Vision and Purpose more abstract and have less content, would have like more examples of what we meant
• Challenge for LLC is the shared purpose/challenge.
• Sixth branch - clearly defined evaluation/feedback loop strategy, structure for the learning piece/dissemination
• Roving conversation process very diffuse
• Content felt like it had been grayed or sort of lost its passion since last week

Closing Ahas

• Elements that need to implement
• Is it the responsibility of the learning community to connect theory and practice that will mobilize the learning to transformational change? Or do we bring the people together and they decide/further that piece of the work.
• Chaos was uncomfortable
• Recognizing interdependence - other communities outside are not necessarily separate.
• Useful model for learning process and appreciated modeling of vulnerability
• Openness of agenda without losing purpose
• Value chaos
• The learning can always be furthered and extended with fresh perspectives and questioning
• Valuing every experience as a learning community

Opening and Closing Quotes

For fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them….The notion that all of these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.

-David Bohm

This is the setting out.

The leaving of everything behind.

Leaving the social millieu. The preconceptions. The definitions. The languague. The narrowed vision. The expectations.

No longer expecting relationships, memories, words or letters to mean what they used to mean. To be, in a word: Open.

-Rabbi Lawrence Kushner