{"id":1605,"date":"2021-01-04T19:46:58","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T19:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eho.zrs.mybluehost.me\/2021-1-4-movenbspbeyond-thenbspthe-explicit\/"},"modified":"2021-10-06T17:32:04","modified_gmt":"2021-10-06T17:32:04","slug":"movenbspbeyond-thenbspthe-explicit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/movenbspbeyond-thenbspthe-explicit\/","title":{"rendered":"Move beyond the the explicit"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a world that’s obsessed with data and measurement, it’s easy for our minds to be overloaded with the stress of targets and goals. In our image, The Tyranny of the Explicit,\u00a0the heroine is so overburdened with data, targets and analysis\u00a0that her body contorts.<\/p>\n

When we become disembodied in\u00a0that way, we lose a lot of the intuitive intelligence
\nwe rely on for survival. Our last newsletter\u00a0shared an article about embodied intelligence<\/span><\/a>, highlighting the need to bring movement and touch into meetings.<\/p>\n

And a new book,\u00a0The Power of Not Thinking<\/span><\/a>\u00a0by Simon Roberts, explores more of the power of embodiment.<\/p>\n

It includes a fascinating exploration of how we learn by practice, often\u00a0bypassing analysis<\/strong>. Although most of us can ride a bike, even expert scientists struggle to explain\u00a0how<\/strong>\u00a0we do it. We often can’t think our way to actions, we have to test, prototype, practice.\u00a0You will often hear us say “it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.”<\/p>\n

What we do as humans is fundamentally different from how computers process the world. Roberts describes\u00a0the challenge of designing autonomous cars as a way of exploring this:<\/p>\n

“Our perception\u00a0is not about the accumulation of piecemeal bits of sensory input but emerges as a coherent whole, which cannot be easily disaggregated into its component pieces for further analysis… It is like a piece of music: the notes get their meaning from being part of a whole, rather than the melody being built up of recognisable individual notes. It is the fact that we perceive the world as a meaningful whole that makes our powers of pattern recognition both powerful and hard to replicate.”<\/em><\/p>\n

This is why we’re wary of many models and five-step processes. They can be useful, but easily lure us into a simpler understanding of what happens in groups than is real.\u00a0This is even more significant online, when so many normal means of sensing each other are disrupted.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Das Rheingold\/Richard Wagner\/Berliner Philharmoniker\/Sir Simon Rattle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s not about the baton<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond processes, our performance – voice, tone, movement etc – influences the meetings we host, in-person and online. We loved this description of the conductor Simon Rattle:<\/p>\n

“Witness Rattle\u2019s face as he takes his orchestra through a piece of music and you will see that the baton almost seems irrelevant in his performance. As one music critic wrote, there\u2019s a correlation between his body language and the sound of the orchestra: \u2018Ease is also key to Rattle\u2019s musical language, and his body language reflects this. Rarely without a smile on the podium, he has an unmistakable enthusiasm to communicate his love for\u00a0the music in the making, and thereby creates a sound that is plush, confident and certain in human warmth.\u2019”<\/em><\/p>\n

There are great parallels for facilitators here: let’s not fixate on the baton, our knowledge and processes. We need to stay aware of all the ways our embodied performance can affect a meeting. And online, we must not\u00a0allow our bodies to quietly contract with the stress of screen and keyboard. At its simplest, we\u00a0need to get out of our chairs and move more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s not get stuck over-emphasising the measurable goals of our meetings. We need a more embodied experience in our meetings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1891,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1605"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1931,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1605\/revisions\/1931"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}