The Tao of Conversation, by Michael Kahn, Ph.D.
An excerpt: The Barn Raising
When a family in frontier America needed a barn and had limited labor and other resources, the entire community gathered to help them build it. The family described the kind of barn they had in mind and picked the site; the community then pitched in and built it. Often neighbors would suggest changes and improvements as they built.
A barn raising seminar begins when someone brings the group an idea or asks a question. The original idea may be barely fledged and not all thought out. It doesn’t matter. The community gathers to build the barn, to put together that idea.
Suppose you offer an idea in support of Lao-tzu. Your idea may be one I believe and support, or one with which I disagree, or a totally new concept that I’ve never thought about before. In any case, your idea now becomes my project, and I set about helping you build it, helping us build it.
After you’ve offered the idea, you have no more responsibility for developing it, defending it, or explaining it that anybody else in the group. If I have a problem with the idea, the problem belongs to the whole seminar, not just to you. Whenever someone sees stuck and can’t find any way to put a couple of bits of the architecture together, it becomes the task of the entire seminar to help him or her connect those two parts of the barn.
An interesting thing about the Barn Raising seminar turned out to be that people didn’t come out of the seminars with the same ideas they went in with. They learned, and they expanded their point of view. You may have heard the psychological principle that trying to persuade someone to accept an idea is a good way of stopping them from even considering it. What I will succeed in doing is entrenching that idea into my own head even more firmly. But if I make it my task to help build your idea, then my defenses are down, my creativity is mobilized, and the ground is fertile for learning. (Return to Enabling other to Lead)
When a family in frontier America needed a barn and had limited labor and other resources, the entire community gathered to help them build it. The family described the kind of barn they had in mind and picked the site; the community then pitched in and built it. Often neighbors would suggest changes and improvements as they built.
A barn raising seminar begins when someone brings the group an idea or asks a question. The original idea may be barely fledged and not all thought out. It doesn’t matter. The community gathers to build the barn, to put together that idea.
Suppose you offer an idea in support of Lao-tzu. Your idea may be one I believe and support, or one with which I disagree, or a totally new concept that I’ve never thought about before. In any case, your idea now becomes my project, and I set about helping you build it, helping us build it.
After you’ve offered the idea, you have no more responsibility for developing it, defending it, or explaining it that anybody else in the group. If I have a problem with the idea, the problem belongs to the whole seminar, not just to you. Whenever someone sees stuck and can’t find any way to put a couple of bits of the architecture together, it becomes the task of the entire seminar to help him or her connect those two parts of the barn.
An interesting thing about the Barn Raising seminar turned out to be that people didn’t come out of the seminars with the same ideas they went in with. They learned, and they expanded their point of view. You may have heard the psychological principle that trying to persuade someone to accept an idea is a good way of stopping them from even considering it. What I will succeed in doing is entrenching that idea into my own head even more firmly. But if I make it my task to help build your idea, then my defenses are down, my creativity is mobilized, and the ground is fertile for learning. (Return to Enabling other to Lead)