By Zakia Carpenter | Unending Conversations of Hope blog
This article appeared in the April 20-26, 2008 issue of the
Michigan Citizen and is reproduced here with the author's permission. Please
post your comments here.
I have noticed a breakdown in youth-adult functionality that I'm
just beginning to articulate. From what I have read about the
Millennial Generation (youth, like me, born between 1977 and 1998),
experts predict it will be more separate from previous generations due
to the technological divide. However, this is just one factor dividing us. Every generation has
ideas and values differentiating it from prior generations. Our
histories shape us differently. Essentially we are our own entity,
separate from those who gave birth to us. [ Read More]
Written by admin at The Great Turning
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Barack Obama’s speech to the United States and the world last week moved
me more than any political oratory I can recall. It wasn’t just the
content of the speech I found moving but the quality of human being
that he showed us—a man willing to take a stand for his convictions and
tell the truth about a subject that has been an ‘elephant head on the
table’ for decades. He will have my vote and whatever the maximum
financial contribution allowed is to support his campaign. I was also impressed by the fact that many of the most positive comments after the speech came from conservative pundits.[ Read More]
Written by admin at Leadership
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By Shae Hadden | Bio
The premise being that we CAN talk it through…
This is the question that epitomizes the possibility that the World
Café represents. It is the question that informs Anne Dosher, the
80-something ‘Elder’ of the World Café and Board member of the World
Café Community Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to developing and
disseminating this and other innovative dialogue approaches. I recently
had the privilege of interviewing this gracious, generous and engaging
lady—the human embodiment of what I imagined the World Café phenomena
itself to be—with a few inquiries of my own.[ Read More]
Written by admin at Wisdom in Action
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 By Shae Hadden | Bio
Conversations can change the world. When we speak openly about what
matters most to us, we can build authentic relationships. We can tap
into the wisdom and collective intelligence we need to address our
problems. We can create the future together. I’ve been excited in the last few weeks to learn about The World Café
through conversations with Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Cafe
and Anne Dosher, who at age 85 serves as the “elder” of this global
movement to create cultures of dialogue. Based on living systems
thinking, this relatively new technology (discovered in 1995) works
especially well in large groups where a traditional dialogue circle
would not normally be possible.[ Read More]
Written by admin at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
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Most of us are fans of the idea of ‘dialogue’. Dialogue is generally
touted as the answer for resolving conflicts, building trust and
crossing cultural divides of all kinds—be they national,
organizational, ethnic, racial, gender-based or generational. I was
having a conversation recently with a very bright young woman in the
same business as me and we were swapping stories and ideas and
experiences.
Although we are both professional communicators and teach others how to
communicate more effectively, it became obvious after a while that we
were talking ‘at’ each other. I began to experience the same kind of
tension I sometimes feel when I am speaking with my son. Nothing was
wrong per se, but I had the feeling that she wasn’t really listening to
me. As we began to speak about what was going on, I found out the same
was true for her. I felt like she either wasn’t interested in what I
had to say or didn’t care about or respect the breadth and depth of my
experience and knowledge. She also felt I wasn’t ‘getting her’ and
wasn’t respecting her and her considerable knowledge on the subject at
hand. We were two professionals from two generations who were more
competitive than collaborative, and at the end of the day we were both
frustrated at not being able to ‘connect’ the way we do every day with
people of our own generation. There was no dialogue and we ended up
with, at best, a discussion that will not in all likelihood make the
slightest difference in either one of our lives. [ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Wisdom in Action
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 If we had the means to promote an intergenerational dialogue, what would we talk about? I think we’d first have to acknowledge that: • Neither generation has a lock on truth AND • Neither of us knows more than the other. [ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Wisdom in Action
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 We speak of ‘generations’ as if they are homogenous groupings of
like-minded people who see the world in more or less the same way. I
don’t know about this. I think there are as many intra-generational
differences as there are inter-generational differences. I think that
what may be distinct is how the young and the old differ in respect to
time. The young have a lot more of it to look forward to than we do.
The patterns of youthful enthusiasm, idealism and energy seem to be
pretty much the same from one generation to the next. Whether their
ideals are liberal or conservative doesn’t seem to matter. On the other
hand, my generation is busy planning for retirement, trying to figure
out what to do with the rest of our lives and taking stock of what
we’ve accomplished or neglected over the past four decades or so. As a
body politic, I’d say we’ve got a fairly even distribution of interests
and views across the generational divide. [ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Wisdom in Action
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I had a great meeting with David Korten yesterday. He is the very
inspiring thought-leader I mentioned in a past blog and the author of The Great Turning.
His vision of some of the underlying issues that perpetuate the
persistence of many of the world’s nastiest problems is brilliant and
offers a framework for creating a ‘new story’ of who we are and what’s
possible.[ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at The Great Turning
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