fishbowl

Podcast summaries

• 0:36 - 37:24 - Recording conversations - The social and therapeutic benefits, and the logistics of the process. Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame
  • 03:21 - M > Yeah, yeah. Well, I can see why that question is a good starting point. And I'm also a little bit amused that this is a starting point, as well, because there's quite a number of recordings that I have with people -particularly in the very first conversation in which we were recording or perhaps even meeting- there's a lot of conversations that I have with people, where the the first part of the conversation is about how we're recording conversations. So you know, they're like, "Sure," and then they're like, "What's the deal with that anyway?" And I'm like, "Well..." [Laughs]. So this practice emerged in the cultural incubator that I spent the better part of the last decade living at in Waterloo, which has been known by various names -Upstart Collaboratory for collaborative culture design being kind of one of the longest running names and more recently, the liminal space agency. And we started doing this in 2016. Well, prior to that, we'd been recording our meetings. Like we would have a kind of weekly meeting that was this group practicing and talking about this new culture. But as we started to take things more seriously, particularly those of us who were living there, we would begin recording pretty much all of our conversations and the 'all of them-ness' came from how often we'd get halfway through a conversation, realize something really juicy was happening and be like, "Oh, are we recording this?" And so eventually, we just started having a really strong default to just recording everything. The mere act of recording a conversation changes it. Even if you don't have doing anything with the recordings, it gives a different feel to a few different dimensions of what's present. Like, there's the sense of awareness that other people might hear what you're saying, who don't have the context that the people that are live in the conversation have. And so that can create some different kinds of like contextual awareness. But in terms of the main reason why we started, it was that we were noticing that in terms of the group coherence that we were looking for, it made a huge difference to be able to give people a full experience of conversations they weren't in. And there's kinda a few reasons why that was powerful. So one of them is... if something important happened - somebody had a major insight, or a learning, or some sort of cool exchange happened, we could share that in full fidelity with people. There was also like, the experience of like re-listening to yourself and being able to notice, like, "Oh, yeah, that was the point in the conversation when I suddenly got really angry. What was going on for me there?" You know? You could basically use them therapeutically and in the Coherence Therapy Work I've done in the last year with a therapist, we've used a kind of just memory based technique called "Rewind," where you go into the situation where you had some trigger come up or whatever, and you just try to rewind the tape until right before the trigger. And so I've had experiences of listening -already it's occurring to me- I've had experiences of listening to recordings and literally re-listening to a particular minute multiple times [and wondering] "What's going on there for me?" And like, "What do I think was going on there for this other person?" So that's really cool. And then another big piece is basically... I'm going to say something really obvious which is, you don't know what it's like when you're not there. Like, you don't know what a conversation is like when you're not in it. And this is more obviously true for somebody as loud and boisterous as I am, but even even in general, you don't you don't know what how people talk, when you're not in the room, you know. I've never been in a conversation of all women. I can't be. It wouldn't be a conversation of all women if I were. But to have the experience of being able to witness those conversations, not just among actors on TV, but among the very people that you're usually in conversation with, can be very powerful. You can notice the moments when... I mean, for me, for instance, it's very obvious when I'm listening to a recording, and there's a moment when, if I were sitting there, I almost certainly would have jumped in with some comment. But I'm not there, so I didn't and then I get to find out what happens when I don't.
  • 14:17 - T > When I first talked to you about it, and also now, I got sort of a sense of a principle that if you record your conversations, that you can't know in advance which conversations are going to be important. But if you record it, you're just going to have it recorded and it might be extremely useful in the future to have it recorded. Does that seem fair to describe your experience of that?
  • M > Totally. Yeah. And so it's to be expected that a large fraction of them don't end up getting used. That's kinda necessary in order to get a large fraction of the ones that do need to be used, because you can't know in advance. I mean, you can sometimes know in advance that a conversation is more or less likely. And there's obviously conversations where it's sort of like, you know it's going to be historical, right? Like, in some way, you know... these people meeting for the first time or whatever. One important caveat, because people have been confused about this before, is that the culture there is not like Bridgewater. So Bridgewater is, I guess, a hedge fund or something like that. Some investment company that has itself a really interesting and weird culture, which was profiled in Robert Keegan's "An Everyone Culture" book. And they record all of their meetings. I don't think they record Hallway Conversations, which is itself interesting. But they record all of their meetings, and those recordings are, I guess, either automatically [transcribed], or maybe they even have people hired to transcribe them or whatever. And anyone who was mentioned in the meeting gets notified about that. So it's sort of in principle, there's no secrets. I think that is risky, in a certain sense. I mean, maybe fine in a sufficiently corporate context, maybe. By corporate, I don't actually mean corporate, maybe Finance is a sufficiently technical context. Because if you don't actually have the psychological safety needed to have no secrets and you try to impose no secrets, what you instead get is 'secret' secrets, right? Like you get people actually, in fact, having secrets, but sort of implying that they don't exist on a deeper level, than is ordinarily done with secrets. And that seems, I don't know, that seems stressful. And certainly, when doing the sort of collaborative culture research and development work that liminal space agency has been doing, and that I'm doing now with Eric and Sarah, you kinda need to be able to have conversations with some person without immediately sharing it with the other person. Because that's part of how you can just even make sense of what your what experience you're having. Like other people might have blind spots, or frames, that make it hard to speak to them about something that they're doing that's bothering you. I've noticed that sometimes people become kind of stupefied when they try to tell somebody about... like if one person's holding a really strong frame and the other person tries to give them feedback, they'll end up feeling dumb. And I mean dumb in both senses of the word, like unintelligent, but also mute. Like, it's just hard. Because when you're trying to tell somebody something, you're implicitly modeling, "how are they going to receive it?" and if somebody has got a blind spot about something, and then you try to point at that something, then the act of modeling how they'll receive, it makes you unable to think. And so there's something really important about being able to think outside of that context with somebody else, like, "What is this thing going on with this person and this thing they keep doing?" And like "Do you have that experience too?" It's like, "Well, I see what you're pointing at, but I see it more like this." And you can kind of triangulate what's going on and get a sense of, "Oh, I'm seeing something real here," which you wouldn't get if you tried to talk with the person themselves about it, because they'd be doing some frame thing that would make it hard to notice that you had a thing to say. And that's everybody. Like, people do it to greater and lesser degrees, but this is true of everybody - we all have blind spots, we all are hard to talk to about our blind spots, that's part of what makes them blind spots.

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

July 17th, 2021

• common assent - common knowledge / fishbowl thing

leadlag learning system

• So it's like similarly, if we have #fishbowl conversations about Jean's health, the people watching the #fishbowl are going to get activated, right?

• So I'm seeing the #fishbowl form as an opportunity for that! Where any frustration or fear or confusion or anything that surfaces is like, immediate opportunity of like, okay, cool, you know, everyone watching the #fishbowl have a little notebook, write down the things that scare you that come up.