Another troublesome distinction: Design/Organize and/or Implement.

In my desire to have viable and REEEE Dialog and Deliberation sessions, I started to design and organize for them, initially by myself. However, I quickly realized that I needed insight and feedback from others, so meetings were scheduled. These others were usually those for whom I was attempting to design/organize D&D sessons.

These meetings were to be preliminary to the better designed Dialog and Deliberation sessions, but they usually just shifted over into being those sessions - which did not go so well because we were not explicitly attending to those factors essential for success. Often, we would have successive Desiging and Organizing meetings and never actually implemented a Dialog or Deliberation session that was designed/organized to succeed.

I realize now, while writing, that I never made distinct the function of the meeting facilitator and myself in attempting to teach or lead. This is probably a well established rule for group facilitation.

I believe that there will be awesomely astonishing differences in what happens in a D&D sessions that have been properly designed/organized and competently facilitated -- than from what usually happens without this Augmenting Scaffolding.

I am NOT calling for sessions where the behavior of participants are programmed, where participants have scripts to perform (although some powerful D&D could occur in the context of script performance). Indeed, I believe that subtle and powerful programs emerge in most spontaneous gatherings, programs that often inhibit creative sponteniety and fluid dialog. I seek a creative mix of competent facilitators AND Augmenting Scaffolding (that engage the attention of participants as they talk, move, gesture, and make things -- including via input to monitor screens from intelligent interfaces).

I realize now, as I write, that my attempts to constuct Augmenting Saffolding was over ambitious. The participants in my gatherings needed more traditional dialog to prepare them for the Deliberation sessions where the Augmenting Scaffolding would be designed, constructed, and tested. I was premature in calling for a Lewin-style Action Research process.

I feel that truly successful sessions must break the tyranny of time succession. We need ways to seamlessly implement Time Weaving. For example, to have the whole process recorded so moments can be returned to and responded to in alternative ways -- eventually weaving these alternative threads.

I plead ignorance of the many ways session organizers and facilitators work, and they are the vanguards of the processes we seek. Yet, from within this ignorance (which I define as "knowing OF our potentials) I stronly sense that we have a way yet to go to achieve that threshold of synergy we seek. There are probably brief moments in D&D processes where the threshold is temporarily achieved, and miracles manifest. But we have yet to learn how to sustain it, let alone catalyze it.

by Larry Victor 07/11/2004