Health Circle Design Team Meeting Notes

November 19, 2007 Conference Call

II.  Web-based Conference and Call: How did it work as a tool for engagement?  What Next? (Claire and Deborah)

      See Synthesis Health Call Synthesis.doc and Feedback/Evaluation Call feedback.doc

Claire reported that essentially, the web-based conference and call was successful. There were about 30-35 people participating on the call. There was a great deal of planning and preparation that went into insuring that the session went smoothly. The Center for Creative Leadership (who provided the technology for the web-based convening) had recently been awarded a contract from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to put together and evaluate a Community Leadership Program, and used this as an opportunity for a Consultative Session.  The clarity of what was covered on the call was too broad as CCL was still in the early stages of the process. 

Claire suggested the following as potential future opportunities for the Health Circle participants: blog posts; and WebEx to conduct realtime survey(s).  How do we make the experience more valuable to participants?  What are the strategies that can help us to move more deeply?  Claire expressed this challenge: How to align what we are hoping to do/accomplish with the call and what technology can actually allow us to do?

Deborah though people participated because of 1) topic; and 2) the opportunity to use new technology and explore how it might apply to their practice.  The added value here was another component to skill building.  She also thought that there was not enough time to do the Consultative Session with some depth; however, thought that Consultative Sessions were a good model.  She acknowledged Claire, Tracy and Elissa and their work in putting the WebEx and Conference Call convening together.

Deborah suggested, as a next step, to hold another Consultative Session via WebEx around Alumni/Sustainable Networks and invite Odin Zackman.  She suggested a session take place sometime in January.  Claire asked, if we did do a session on sustainable networks whether we would want to present a case study.  Deborah thought it could focus on some of the big themes, i.e. What are the ways programs are using peer learning?

Claire raised the question of how we can better support knowledge and resources of the circle participants: i.e. create profiles of participants and programs? Survey tools to map what people want to learn and the resources they have to offer and share?  Circle participants to learn who has what and where?  Deborah asked what the technologies are that we, as a circle, can pilot and test out and that can be used by programs to engage the participants of their programs (i.e. WebEx) - tour site and orient how to do profiles and connect resources, etc.  Joel recommended checking out the site www.wiserearth.org as a good example. 

III.  Health Circle Retreat

• Review attached extracted minutes from last Design Team call (March 2007 Health Circle Retreat: What worked well? What should we do differently next time? Who was missing?) March2007ExtractedMinutes.doc
• Initial Planning for 2008 Health Circle Retreat

          1.   Do we want to us a similar retreat format?  Would our goals be similar?

Stated Aspirations from 2007 Retreat

Foster Relationships: We believe in building relationships across organizations and issues.  We will spend time exploring the ways in which our visions, values, and leadership work converge.  We will make use of structured vision and values activities along with unstructured time to foster trust and sustainable connections.

Skill Building: We hope to introduce participants to new and useful tools to support the work we do together as a group and that will have value to participants in their own work.  At this first meeting we will draw on new tools and methodologies.

Knowledge and Resource Exchange: We have begun the work of mapping our skills, assets and needs.  We will discuss how to share resources and create a system that better supports the exchange and utilization of our resources.

Learning Agenda: We will identify those common areas of question, concern, and innovation that we can collectively pursue over the next couple of years to push the edge of our leadership thinking and practice.

            2.    Who might we want to invite as an "attractor" and to offer the value added piece of leadership                                 development?

         3.    Are there clear topics or themes we may want to pick up on the work so far?

         4.    What should be our design process?

         5.    Do we have new targets for our outreach and how do we want to implement the outreach plan?

Is there an opportunity to build a collaborative agenda with the community?  Connie thought if we could build on the stated aspirations from last year, we would be on solid ground - the Design Team agreed.  What is the shape, value added, attractor, content focus, and methodology(ies) that might help/support the work on the stated aspirations.

• Deborah liked the idea of soliciting, in advance, what the big issues might be; consultative sessions - do we want to have a content theme that links the work (disparity, policy); do we want to do something more structured as we did last time around positive deviance, but engaging participants more actively; Rachel's work around the U-Process and work with youth.

• Connie said that the feedback around the work last time on positive deviance was that it did not go deep enough - go deeper using positive deviance.  Open Space was a real highlight - fostering connections, etc.  Build some opportunity for Open Space.  Consultative sessions and then follow up with Open Space of folks who want to go deeper with some of their ideas.

• Deborah liked the idea of going deeper with positive deviance and asked if we still needed a "bridge" person to seed the conversation - thinking about how this applies to our everyday work.

• Joel asked how much we needed to bring someone in; and to what extent we use the resources we already have.

• Deborah suggested putting out an invitation asking if people are having a breakthrough in their work, etc. and then have the group engage in a deconstruction process.

• Joel asked if positive devience had to be the only model.

• Elissa asked about the ways in which we might connect the last web-based convening with the retreat's content.

• Deborah raised that one of the hazzards of making the retreat about positive deviance only is that it would make it difficult for new participants to come in.  Deconstruct and then - positive deviance? Asset based? etc.

• Claire thought it might be helpful to identify who might be catalytical for the retreat.

IV.     Next Steps

• Case Study or use technology to engage people in conversation around problem solving?

• Good idea to go ahead with web-based convening sometime in January

• Invite the community to lend their expertise around content and design of retreat

• Review earlier survey, and in addition to content, what are the interesting things being done?  Innovations?  New ideas/catalyst to approaches?

• Retreat at same venue in late March or early April.  If provide equity fund, should resolve issue of West Coast venue again.  Additionally, if convene here in late March, early April can also have some sort of follow up meeting in Boston.

• Bella will poll DT for retreat dates.

• Send a "Save the Date" along with query to circle participants.

• Announcement to go out with January web-based call date announcement - build momentum.