How We Story

The Pacific concept of Talanoa

This week I learned about the Pacific concept of “talanoa”. This is storytelling that leads to consensus-building and decision-making. It is a collective or community intelligence process deeply rooted in the Pacific way of life.

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Storytelling and discussion during a workshop with secondary teachers, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. (March 2020)

With parallels to Australian Aboriginal yarning and Hawaiian talkstory, talanoa is a conversational mode of storying through which knowledge is developed, collected and transmitted. It is at home in Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and elsewhere.

When we story, we embody our social self and deepen our connections in a dialogical universe. We know we are in a safe space.

Talking about tok stori | DLProg.

The informal process starts with someone sharing a story, and then others in the group add to it. This continued storytelling helps build relationships, create empathy and understanding, and develop consensus. As the stories are shared, they also teach values, traditions, and customs.

Let’s explore how the concept and process of talanoa apply to leadership, learning and innovation.

Leadership

To lead effectively, you need to build relationships and develop consensus. You also need to be able to understand and empathise with those that you are leading. The process of talanoa can help leaders do just that.

It helps you build relationships, understand different viewpoints, and develop a shared understanding. This can then lead to effective decision-making and problem-solving.

Here are some helpful guiding questions and ideas:

  • How often do we share stories?
  • What do we need to stop doing to make space for storying?
  • What artefacts do we share that represent the story of our community?
  • What is your organisation’s story, and how do you use this to learn together?

Learning

Talanoa is a process for learning. It encourages collaboration and the sharing of knowledge. It also helps to build deeper listening, relationships and develop empathy.

It makes me think about narrative pedagogies and how story is a mechanism for learning. In the same way, we think of the facets of learning assessment (for, as and of), we can learn from stories differently.

We learn from stories; storying can be the learning process and the vehicle to reflect on our experience.

I am curious to apply talanoa and other storying mechanisms in my workshops.

Innovation

I have been supporting primary teachers as they navigate a practitioner inquiry that uses design thinking. Storying has emerged as a critical feature of their innovative work.

A couple of insights surfaced.

  • Stay connected to the story of problem-solving — who needs our help the most? Why is this important?
  • As you move through later phases of design, it is easy to lose touch with the origin story of the problem. What’s the problem’s origin story? What would be in the Season 1 recap?
  • As we gather feedback on ideas, share the emerging story of feedback so far. This feedback narrative helps our audience be more precise in their feedback. What is the story of feedback so far?

A further reflection is how stories and storying might help people access new ideas. Make sure you have a story to tell about your innovation — this will be critical for marketing and scaling your work.

Your Talking Points

  • How do we optimise for storytelling?
  • How might we use stories to generate new ideas?
  • What would be the impact of using talanoa in business and leadership contexts?
  • How might we create learning environments that encourage the sharing of stories and the development of relationships?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Complement this issue with some Atomic Essays:

Make Meetings Simple ⟶
How to create the ideal conditions for dialogue, creativity and feedback ⟶
Use This Question At The Start of Your Next Meeting to Increase Empathy and Connection ⟶

And some longer articles:

Dialogic Coaching ⟶
The Difference between Dialogue and Discussion ⟶
‘Let’s have a yarn’ — empower every voice in your group ⟶

Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett.

Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Togs on. I’m jumping into the swirling currents of Twitter chats.

Why

There is little in terms of coordinated Twitter chats about creativity in all of it’s wonderful complexity. I have decided to establish a new, regular Twitter chat for people to coalesce and gravitate towards.

#creativitychat

I want to help people become more creative. One of the ways I can do this is establish a chat that connects people, that inspires action, engagement and thinking about the subject. I hope the chat helps participants learn a little more about creativity.

For nearly ten years I have been using Twitter as my preferred tool for connecting with others and building a learning network. Whilst Twitter chats have their naysayers and their limitations, I still find them (and Twitter) a powerful and consistent way to organise a community, connect and learn from others interested in a topic.

When

#creativitychat will run every Saturday morning 7am-9am Melbourne time.

The inaugural chat is Saturday 29th Oct. Times below.

  • Melbourne / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 7am-9am
  • Auckland / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 9am-11am
  • San Francisco / Friday 28th October 2016 / 1pm-3pm
  • New York / Friday 28th October 2016 / 4pm-6pm
  • London / Friday 28th October 2016 / 9pm-11pm
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Have a look at this Worldtimebuddy link to add the event to your calendar.

I have decided to go for a longer chat because most chats I have experienced are just getting warmed up by the time their scheduled time finishes. With a couple of hours we give ourselves the best chance for meaningful dialogue.

Saturday morning in Australia, are you mad? Maybe a little, and certainly my younger self would have preferred a later time. This allows for family plans to still carry on and not to eat into a weekday evening after a long day of work either.

This is an international chat. I have always been lucky to have been connected to people on Twitter from across the world and so I wanted to go for a time that worked for the majority. Everyone will have a preference, I know, and which ever time I chose people would miss out. I think this gives us the chance to be able to share hemispherically diverse understandings of creativity.

What

Content

  • Weekly topics related to creativity.
  • Crowd-sourced set of questions and provocations, moderated (by me) into a short list.
  • Please send me a direct message on Twitter with your question or provocation suggestions.

#creativitychat / 0001 / Nailing jelly to a tree? Seeking a common understanding of creativity.

My background is in primary education and so I have a learning focus when I think about creativity. However there is so much to learn from others. I am keen for #creativitychat to have diverse participants.

We should encourage a broad representation from different fields. The chat should be a gathering of anyone thinking about how creativity impacts on our (professional) life.

Chat Structure

  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 100 minutes for reaction and dialogue about provocations and questions
  • Maybe some time to share next steps, what actions are we going to take? What have we learned during the chat? “As a result of the chat I am…”
  • 10 minutes for networking and sharing our own projects and blogs etc.
  • Close with the next week’s topic

I have been inspired by the #agchat founder Michele Payn-Knoper who outlined some of her lessons from running a Twitter chat over the last seven years. Thanks to Simon Owens for the great guide on running a chat, which outlines Michele’s thoughts. Highly recommended if you are looking to start something too.

A call to action

  • Check out your diary for the times above and consider joining me. There will only be one shot at being part of the first!
  • Share a tweet using the hashtag #creativitychat to encourage others to get involved.
  • Join and participate in the chat.
  • Direct message me on Twitter with your questions or provocations related to the chat topic (0001 = defining creativity)
  • Leave a comment inline or otherwise with any ideas or suggestions related to the questions I still have. I need your help.

More to consider

  • What is the most efficient way to archive the chat? Should we archive it? How much do people really use a chat archive?
  • I like the way readers can comment, highlight, and engage with content on Medium. Perhaps a summary post with questions / provocations and a curated set of tweets to continue the conversation.
  • How could we incorporate a slow chat element during the week, to allow others to participate?
  • What new ideas are we bringing to the Twitter chat arena? How are we helping to advance this way of learning and connecting? How might we connect Twitter with other tools to extend what we can do and mitigate against some of the known weaknesses?
  • Need to probably use the @creativitychat handle eventually. I have contacted the current account owners.
  • Find a merry band of buddies who can help moderate and facilitate.
  • Do we need some web property to gather resources, guidelines and ideas about the chat?
  • Develop some chat protocols and rules of engagement.

The “Interesting Ways” Series: A Milestone in Sharing

On Saturday I joined the TEDx community of presenters and gave a talk about knowledge sharing at TEDxNottingham, so it is fitting that the Interesting Ways has passed a milestone of sorts – a milestone in sharing.

Thanks to some great recent contributions the iPad resource passed 100 shared ideas!

To you this may mean very little, as we see a great many lists of this sort “100 Ways to Eat Fruit…”, “100 Different Keyboard Shortcuts…”, “100 Reasons Not to Use Compiled Lists”. But the key characteristic of these is that they have almost certainly been built quickly, sometimes by a few people, but more likely by an individual compiler.

142455033 49ce50a89bYou only have to look at a copy of Wired or other such magazine to see how much we are transfixed with the presentation of numbered sets of information or advice.

The Interesting Ways series is different. Firstly the list always starts at zero and although I have a hunch people will chip in and share, it is not guaranteed. Secondly they are built with classroom practice in mind, the ideas are shared by mostly practicing teachers. Thirdly the resources have many, many editors – you only have to scan through the Twitter names left as signatures on each slide to see that. And finally they are built over time – there is no rush to get a perfect multiple of 10 before they are published, they evolve at different speeds, sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly as the community learns.

I think the final point refers to the lovely imperfections of them – which is in direct contrast to the sterile multiple-of-10-perfection posts which drive traffic. These are evolving all of the time – the first resource for the IWB has been a publicly editable document for 5 years!

They’re a bit scrappy and some have had things moved around and deleted but that is to be expected for resources that are in the open and publicly editable for so long. I am always grateful to hear from so many of you who have noticed something is amiss, spotted any problems and either fixed it up or let me know – people care for these resources.

It would be interesting to know how you see it all, but I think there are a few reasons why they have proven popular/useful – (1) They are always changing (2) You can easily present them to staff and embed them in a webpage (3) One slide, one idea, one image seems to work (4) They are easy to contribute to, they have a low barrier to entry (5) they are owned by the community that have built them (6) We learn about our community through the ideas we share.

I always thought the idea might catch on, this milestone, of sorts, just reminds me of how far we have come and I am so pleased to help everyone build such great pots of ideas.

I genuinely think we can do more though and hope that we can all continue to share more of our ideas and expertise. 

Image: ‘Sharing

The School Filter Bubble

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It is good to question what we see, as all too often we adhere to the life script that everyone else is happily playing out – for me Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble helped me to once again question what we take as the truth, in his case the internet that is presented to us.

But what if there is a school filter bubble?

I am going to look at this as a parent and as a teacher.

My son is my favourite subject and there isn’t really any known limit to the amount I want to know about his day and what he is up to. He has been in full time school for just over a year and I still would love to follow him around for a day. But the message from school and what we find out as parents is only such a tiny fraction of what is happening at school.

We digest the presented message of school, of our children’s learning and the finer intricacies of what is taking place. The PR machine of school is crafting a message about the business of learning. And what a tough task that is because (a) learning is one of the most complex processes in the universe because of the number of factors that effect it and (b) the message is aimed at a (more than) captive audience – as parents we always want to know more.

It may come across that I am bashing school-home communications a bit – well the key thing for me – being a professional in the education sector – is that I know only a sliver of what is happening in my son’s learning life at school. Really only a fraction, the fraction that is communicated, shared at parents evening or in the odd newsletter or word at the classroom door. I don’t think that is enough.

Why should I just accept the school filter bubble?

How is it possible with all of the technology tools that build knowledge sharing, participation, crowd-sourcing, communities and overcome physical and social barriers to make connections, tools that side-step language and time differences and allow us instantaneous communication – that we still don’t have the true capacity to experience what is happening at school instantly, more easily, more quickly and more intuitively.

Well we should and one day we can make it happen.

Pic Cost savings in The Netherlands: Now you see it, now you don’t by opensourceway