A bit about Crucial Conversations, in case you haven't heard of that program. Essentially, it's a model for how to discuss an emotionally-charged issue with someone and set the stage for collaboration. I went to a two-day training program on Crucial Conversations earlier this week, and at the end, the trainer said (paraphrasing) "education doesn't work, you have to put what you've learned into practice".
First, I disagree with this statement in that my idea of education includes putting what you have heard, seen, tried, discovered, etc... into practice. But I don't want to get into an "I most of a PhD in education and you don't" argument with the guy -- the idea behind what he was saying is true. You'll really learn the model once you try to put it into practice.
So that's what I did today (more or less). I had a meeting with some people in our Classroom and Lab Computing group about redesigning their web site. I started off by stating the fact that I knew about what we were supposed to accomplish and what resources we had to offer, verified those facts with the people in the room, asked for their input, established a common purpose, worked through the options, and came up with a list of actions.
In other words:
This may not have been the best test of the Crucial Conversations process though. The CLC guys are a pretty logical and agreeable group. However, I did find that the CC process helped to clarify things early on and make it clear that we were going to be in this together as a team.
In case you're wondering about the content of the meeting, we talked about the importance of a content management system, what we had available, what system would be the best fit for what they need to do (probably Plone), where they should host Plone if we go that route, and how to best answer some of their questions about hosting Plone and integrating it with their existing hardware and data-driven applications (IIS/ASP).
First, I disagree with this statement in that my idea of education includes putting what you have heard, seen, tried, discovered, etc... into practice. But I don't want to get into an "I most of a PhD in education and you don't" argument with the guy -- the idea behind what he was saying is true. You'll really learn the model once you try to put it into practice.
So that's what I did today (more or less). I had a meeting with some people in our Classroom and Lab Computing group about redesigning their web site. I started off by stating the fact that I knew about what we were supposed to accomplish and what resources we had to offer, verified those facts with the people in the room, asked for their input, established a common purpose, worked through the options, and came up with a list of actions.
In other words:
- What do we know?
- What do we think?
- What do we want?
- What should we do?
This may not have been the best test of the Crucial Conversations process though. The CLC guys are a pretty logical and agreeable group. However, I did find that the CC process helped to clarify things early on and make it clear that we were going to be in this together as a team.
In case you're wondering about the content of the meeting, we talked about the importance of a content management system, what we had available, what system would be the best fit for what they need to do (probably Plone), where they should host Plone if we go that route, and how to best answer some of their questions about hosting Plone and integrating it with their existing hardware and data-driven applications (IIS/ASP).
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