In April, Chipps Taylor and Nicole Wells, a 2nd grade teacher, spent the day at the Capital building in Louisiana to showcase CosmoKidz as part of the Louisiana Children’s Trust Fund. The woman who made the last set of puppets also made the table cloth for us. Big smile!!!
Learn more about CosmoKidz here.
A monthly zoom meeting usually takes place on the first Wednesday of each month. However, we are cancelling the meeting scheduled in July. However, we are cancelling the meeting scheduled for July because of its proximity to the US Independence Day. Stay tuned for more on our August meeting.
Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Academic Director of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program at Columbia University, will be presenting at the following conferences in July and she invites anyone of our community who will be at either of them to meet up with her.
July 4: Women, narrative and healthcare, at Ono Business Academy, Israel
July 7-10: International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) annual conference, Dublin
Sergej van MIddendorp is presenting a paper and hosting a workshop at the Anticipation Conference. Along with colleagues Laurence Habib, Flávio Mesquita da Silva, and Fred Steier, the workshop will cover collaborative support networks as generative of new futures: using world café and other dialogic methods to further inclusion, awareness and sustainability. Everyone is invited to join Sergej and colleagues if they can. For more information http://anticipationconference.org/
The new Youth, Peace, and Security Leadership Program at Columbia University began this month. This program, led by Beth Fisher-Yoshida, focuses on developing leadership skills for youth leaders between ages of 18-30.
There will not be a Learning Exchange this year. Instead, the CMM Institute is jointly sponsoring the Global Social Witnessing Lab from March 30-April 3, 2020 to be held at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany.
Facilitating conversations that matter and groove : CMM as a Dialogic OD approach and method, illustrated by Jazz metaphors (with live played music examples) was the title of our (Eerika Hedman-Phillips and Rik Spann) creative jam session on the 9th of May in Amsterdam. At the Organizational Development Network Europe conference, we offered the audience a low-key but hi-sophistication (yeah !) introduction to this thing called CMM. Our goal : making the audience even more curious after our show than it was before the session. It worked.
The conference (logo above) was called Inspired by Difference. From many angles and perspectives we all explored what OD was, is, and could be in our future. The whole thing was very inspirational. Our contribution added its own specific flavour to the conference gumbo. Some twenty people (there were many parallel sessions) were invited to our story in a small cafe-like place, with couches to hang on, a bar in the back and even some jazz vinyl and an LP player in the other back of the room. An informal vibe in tune with the setting of our story.
The essence of CMM in less than one hour? We didn’t even try. To use an analogy with a music festival: it’s about the music, not about the full message. Some weeks before the conference I went to the fabulous Motelmozaique Festival in Rotterdam. The festival is renowned for the really creative and imaginative blend of experimental, independent acts (music, art, theatre, film) that present a taste of their work. The atmosphere is informal, very well organized and respectful. The audience at the concerts is listening deeply to all that emerges. From very soft and tender soundscapes to roaring walls of rumble & roll. Inspired by difference. Co-learning in action. The musicians interact with the audience while ‘jamming on the ambience’. Rewarding the depth of the listening with high quality impressions of whatever it is that their takes on a well-sounding universe might be like. Friendly earworms from another planet.
After the concerts, the audience leaves the room refreshed, inspired and, yes, renewed. Looking for more seeds for organic transformation of their perspectives and paradigms. Where can I buy an album of these great artists? Where can I find their stories, sounds, adventures? How can I be part of the jam?
In our session at the ODNE conference we used a loosely structured mix of words, slides (beautifully crafted graphics by Eerika) and sounds to invite the audience to our CMM-universe. After the show they came up to us (some rock stars stay very approachable…) , asking questions, being curious. Some books lying on the table (works from Barnett, Kim, Ilene, Beth and some jazz and music sources). They scanned, made notes, asked questions, while in the background Miles Davis still provided the soundtrack. Intriguing stuff, folks ! What is this thing called CMM? Where can I find more stories, sounds, adventures? How can I be part of the jam? What is life and work like on planet CMM ?
A jazz album normally lasts about forty minutes. We only had a few minutes more. It was enough to give a taste of our story. It surely was not enough to Spread the News in ways that do honour to the value of it. But well, every friend of the family or ambassador of our groove might be moving towards making that difference that makes the difference. Inspired by difference, the cool and funky way.
And, in line with the gratitude and ethics that are part of the jazz experience : Eerika, thanks for jamming ! Already looking forward to the next gig. Other players that want to jam along: the session is open.
Rik Spann, Amsterdam, June 2019
“This is about roots. This is where the development and the growth get their energy from. The roots grow into the ground. They grow through different layers of earth to get to the nutrition. They get their energy from the ground, the earth. They have to go through these layers, and by doing that, they reach the water and they feed the growth of the whole.”
Sterre van Middendorp, reflecting on her painting Sharing Structures.
In this post, Sergej van Middendorp discusses the article, “Making social worlds better: Grammars of action in traditions of practice,” that he retrieved from the W. B. Pearce Archives. It was a controversial article, and Sergej raises some provocative possibilities from it.
I have been thinking about a theme for this post for quite a while. Initially I searched the archives for articles on dialogue. I read Bohm’s On Dialogue and was having conversations with Kim Pearce and others about CMM’s take on dialogue (which I was learning was informed by Bohm’s thinking, but resonates more strongly with Buber’s relational take on dialogue). I was also trying to create stronger links between various theories, research, and practices to increase the force of the projects we are engaged in with the Institute and other like-minded organizations. I chose this particular article because it seems to integrate several of these perspectives and levels of context in one piece. I was also struck by Barnett’s note on the manuscript, which says:
Never published. I sent it to prominent practitioners of each of the practices included and got a surprisingly consistent response: “You’ve got all the others just right, but you’ve missed the subtlety and nuances of my practice”. (Pearce, 2002, p.1)
The piece starts with an outline of some of the great challenges facing human beings on earth as we enter the 21st century. Many of these challenges are still present today. In describing the challenges, Barnett set them in the context of practices that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, where professionals could be hired to methodically support “therapy, consultation, organizational development, small group leadership, and large group facilitation” to address such problems. Early on in the piece, Barnett identifies himself as “a person with one foot in each of the worlds of scholarship and practice”, wanting to understand what he is doing in these different contexts. Specifically, he wants to be able to compare and contrast different practices through the development of a common language, or a grammar. The idea is that such a grammar might help us better understand and compare these practices, which in turn might make them more effective for improving the social worlds in which they are enacted. The intent of the paper is to start the process of developing and applying such a comparative language. The paper is structured around four types of situations in which specific practices can be used to improve the situation. The table below outlines the situations and ways of working in which specific practices can be used.
| Situation | Way of working |
| Coordination problems | Working systemically, working appreciatively |
| Intractable/moral conflict | Working dialogically |
| Bargaining | Interest based negotiation; Problem-solving; mediation; Transformational mediation; Deliberation |
| Critical incident | Crisis management |
Table 1: reproduced from Pearce 2002, Figure 1: Situations and ways of working Barnett goes on to describe each combination of situation and ways of working by offering some examples and “keys to recognition”, before explaining the way of working itself with illustrative practices followed by a case study of each practice. The specific practices discussed in the piece are drawn from a) the Milan School of Family Therapy for working systemically, b) Appreciative Inquiry for working appreciatively, and c) the dialogic work based on Buber and Rogers as practiced with CMM in the Public Dialogue Consortium for working dialogically. Barnett’s subtle humor percolates through his descriptions and can be seen, for example, in the key to recognizing coordination problems:
In the second part of the paper, Barnett builds on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar as “a knowing how to act” in a situation as a way of understanding that situation. Barnett also draws on Kenneth Burke’s notion of a grammar of motives to sketch his approach to analyzing the grammar of action in the practices. He uses CMM as the underlying structure in making comparisons and contrasts, thereby shifting the language away from the analogy between grammar (rules/logics) and sentence structure (grammatical parts) to an analogy between grammar (rules/logics) and communicative actions (context/forces/actions). The minimal structure that emerges from this consists of:
Barnett then proceeds to apply this minimal structure in an analysis of the three example practices of family therapy, appreciative inquiry, and public dialogue. The similarities that come from the analysis between the practices are:
In the conclusion, Barnett revisits the question: is it worth trying to elicit this grammar of practice if leading edge practitioners will always be ‘further ahead’ than any description and/or analysis? He says he thinks it is worth it. Such a grammar and the practice of such a grammar can enhance our ability to act into specific situations with discernment, thus not only improving our specific practice but also improving our ability to act across practices.
Ironically, the attempt at creating and applying a first version of this grammar seems to have reflected back on Barnett through the reactions of the practitioners. Barnett himself reflects that he probably didn’t ‘get’ the case studies of the practices wrong, but that no newly developing language can capture from one single case what an expert practitioner knows from a wealth of experience. Being a grammar in a Wittgensteinian or Burkean sense means it is a “knowing how to act in it”1, applied by leading edge practitioners, mostly without an articulation of that grammar-in-action as a grammar. In other words, they know “how to go on” but it can be more intuitive than articulated.
In my reading of the piece, Barnett uses CMM to suggest the building blocks for a comparative analysis of structures across practices. Along similar lines, I have noted the pattern “CMM and […] “ emerging in our language in the CMM community over the past few years. (ie CMM and Global Social Witnessing, CMM and Family Therapy, CMM and Embodied Practice, etcetera). I now realize that until recently, I read these comparisons as “Practice” and “Practice”. In other words, CMM as a practice would be complimentary to the other practice mentioned. This piece has opened my eyes to another relationship that CMM can have to an “and”: that is, Grammar and Practice. In this sense, CMM offers a way of seeing and the minimal logic language to articulate it, while the “…and practice” is the enactment of a specific type of practice.
CMM applied in this way, compares to a form of musical notation for practices that can help their practitioners create (better) social worlds. Musical traditions of practice existed (well) before musical notation, but musical notation took the practice of music to a whole different level. Similarly, understanding the grammar of CMM as a grammar of context, forces, and actions can take ways of working, and practices in therapy, consultation, organizational development, small group leadership, and large group facilitation to a whole different level. Not only in the practice or way of working itself, but possibly also as a shared language across such practices and ways of working, helping us to improve our ways of working together globally and inter-professionally to address some of the deep and difficult problems facing human-beings and our earth.
But before we take this metaphor for a grammar of action further into our traditions of practice, I think it is important to revisit one possible meaning of the shift Barnett made earlier: from the metaphor of grammar as building blocks of sentence structure to the metaphor of grammar as forces/contexts/actions for coordinating the management of meaning. This, to me, is analogous to the shift from using musical notation to prescribe a classical music performance to using musical notation to create minimal structures for jazz improvisation.
Jazz songs are minimal structures that suggest chord progressions on a scale for a known melody and in a certain style. Jazz musicians share these structures so that when they start playing together, they are free to “listen to one another, anticipate and adjust to one another. This is what allows them to maximize independence and flexibility in their enactments.” (Barrett & Peplowski, 1998, p. 559). When we enacted that pattern of improvisation in our workshops with a jazz band in Jazzinbusiness2, we would ask the audience-participants to call out different styles in which we should play Summertime.
Whatever style the audience-participants threw at us, be it reggae, R&B, dance, or hard rock, it would only take a few seconds of coordination within the band to change the song to fit that style, and the band would get going again.
From this jazz improvisation perspective, it would seem that having such shared structures, or a grammar of action, as proposed by Barnett has some real merit. This shared structure would allow practitioners from different ways of working to better work together, and to switch practical mode when coordination problems shift into moral conflict, bargaining, or a critical incident.
Further development of this take on CMM might lead to a communication perspective ‘Real Book’, analogous to the book that holds the jazz standards3. Or to a communication perspective pattern language, similar to the pattern language that Christopher Alexander created to describe ways in which to make the physical environment come to life (Alexander, 1979). It could use CMM as a grammar of action to describe ways of working and practices in a visual language, annotated with hints at how to play with the forces and contexts that are part of the pattern that can be enacted using that page, allowing the players of the pattern to help a communicative groove come to life large enough to broaden, and deepen, their shared understanding of the situation that they are trying to make better together.
1 In an editorial comment on this piece, Robyn Penman shared that: “the one thing I[and Barnett] didn’t pursue was the concept of “knowing how to go on’. “ She wanted to consider changing this “knowing how to go on” to the idea of “knowing from”—part of the 3 fold distinction John Shotter used (knowing that, how and from) also one analogous to that of Aristotle’s, to Gadamer’s understanding of moral knowledge and, she believes, to Wittgenstein. But, as she said “I think that might have got the review onto another track altogether.” This is something we might pursue further in a follow-up review.
2 Jazzinbusiness was a (participatory) action research project and a workshop experience with a live jazzband that helped people in organizations to experience the inner workings of jazz improvisation and to apply those to problems in collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation. For an impression, see: https://vimeo.com/11625911
Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Barrett, F. J., & Peplowski, K. (1998). Minimal structures within a song: An analysis of “All of Me.” Organization Science, 9(5), 558–560.
Pearce, W. B. (2002). Making social worlds better: Grammars of action in traditions of practice. Unpublished paper retrieved from http://digitalarchives.fitchburgstate.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15892coll12/id/1096/rec/1
On the internet, I found a slightly different iteration of the same paper on: https://www.newconversations.net/pdf/makingworlds.pdf This appears on a site by Dennis Rivers, one of the friends Barnett quotes early on in the paper.
Our Learning Exchange this year had the dual theme of Creating Magical Moments and Building Community. We have captured some particularly poignant reflections from participants about the magical moments and the sense of community they experienced.
Vin Jensen is our highly valued web and social media maestro. This is his second time at one of our Learning Exchanges and when asked about his experience this year he said:
“Did a moment stand out for me? I think, with a straight face, that magic was available in every moment. Let me say, first, that the word “gregarious” has readily come to mind for no one, ever, who has offered to describe me. Yet as I looked around at some thirty-five people (probably half of whom had been names, at best, or complete strangers to me two days earlier) I counted not a single person with whom I had not shared at least one meaningful, and memorable, conversation during the Learning Exchange. That’s a rare kind of magic.”
At the end of the Learning Exchange we were favored with the gift of music, from Bart Buechner and Sonny Seabrook, and an impromptu poem from Tamara Smiley Hamilton.
Bart tells us how Sunny found himself at the Learning Exchange this year:
“Sunny Seabrook is an Army veteran and musician I first met a the Veterans Home of California at Yountville, where he still lives today in a community of some 800 other veterans. He was involved in the EST movement in the early 1970’s, and continues to work on personal improvement and development at 84 years of age. We have had numerous conversations about CMM over the years, and he finally got curious enough about it to accept my invitation to the LE. As we were leaving, he told me that he finally understood the difference between the EST/Landmark Forums and CMM. In years of attending the Landmark Forums, he achieved good personal insights from each of them, but not the level of interpersonal connection that he experienced at the LE. This understanding of the profound relational capacity of CMM was a profound learning for him.”
And Sonny tells us what it meant for him:
“The CMM Generosity of spirit is running through my veins … thank you for sharing and creating those precious musical miracle moments with me …
And for introducing me to such a high quality group of human beings! each of them contributed in their own way many unforgettable miracle moments for me.
There’s not one person on the list that did not reach me deeply in one way or another I feel forever bonded with these extraordinary people and that realization is a miracle moment! Those five beautiful days in Oracle Arizona and the whole transformational experience was up to this point the highlight of my year!
I am so grateful for your unforgettable gift of including me”
Fielding Graduate University was well represented this year. Apart from these six alumni, Linda Blong, Bart Buechner, Erin Kreeger, Sergej van MIddendorp, Beth Fisher-Yoshida and Jan Elliott (L to R), there was also a 10-member Fielding University contingent. Elena Nicklasson, Director of Development at Fielding Graduate University, was one of the participants. She prepared a brief news item on her experience from a Fielding Perspective:
“During the last weekend of October, a group of Fielding alumni, faculty member Miguel Guilarte, PhD, and Teresa Southam, the inaugural recipient of Fielding’s CMM scholarship and a doctoral student in the School of Leadership Studies came to Oracle, AZ for the CMM Learning Exchange 2018.
Kim Pearce, president of the CMM Institute and widow of beloved faculty member W. Barnett Pearce, PhD, inventor of the coordinated management of meaning (CMM) theory, hosted the three-day workshop. This year’s theme was “Creating Magical Moments across Space and Time: Building CMM Learning Communities.
Themes that were presented and worked on by the participants ranged from Cosmokidz to Global Social Witnessing. The event stood out for its many ways to engage all participants in working together to experience the magic of CMM while learning and talking about it at the same time.”
You can read more of her story on the Fielding Alumni Network site.
Last year we were excited to tell you about our first ever CosmoKidz Camp. This year we have more good news to report. The Camp has continued and it has become bigger and better with the generous support of the Louisiana Governor’s Office.
This year’s Camp CosmoKidz was held at the end of July. It was a free, week-long camp with over 60 kindergarten and first-grade students at Woodland Park School in Hammond, Louisiana. We were able to run such a long camp for so many young students because of the generous support of the Governor’s Office in Louisiana—in the form of a $25,000 grant to the CMM Institute.
The CosmoKidz Director in Louisiana, Chipps Taylor, had told staff in the Governor’s Office about the CosmoKidz program being run in Hammond over the past year. This program and the positive impact it is having on the young children is described in the 2017-2018 research report that you can read on the CosmoKidz page.
As part of the CosmoKidz program, young children are given opportunities to engage in unscripted deliberations about communication issues. Chipps invited staff from the Governor’s Office to observe an unscripted deliberation by first graders on how to respond to hurtful comments. Both of the representatives said they were “blown away” by what they observed. They had never seen a group of young children having the type and quality conversation that was occurring and they were convinced that the skills these children are learning will make a significant contribution to reducing violence in their communities. Within a matter of months the grant had been organized to continue the good work of CosmoKidz in a summer camp.
Nine teachers from Woodland Park, who had been using CosmoKidz for the past year, developed the curriculum for the week-long camp. Ten college students assisted the teachers. The camp included a healthy breakfast and lunch each day and focused on SOARing behavior (Sense what’s around you; Open your hands to help others; Act with kindness; Respect other people).
On Monday, the children focused on what it means to sense what’s around you. The children talked about body awareness using the CosmoKidz card on this topic. They made faces from felt to exemplify different emotional facial expressions.
On Tuesday, children in one class wrote one thing they would do that day to open their hands to help another and they made a chain comprising their responses. Kindergarten children in another class made clay angels that they painted and later gave to seniors living in a residential home in the community.
Children in yet a third class made a sign to post on the wall of their school to remind all kindergarten through 8th grade students to “act with kindness” through their words and actions. The sign will remain on the wall throughout the school year.
The social world that was made during camp week was truly uplifting for all involved and it was made possible through the good will and support of so many committed people. We give thanks to the teachers, college students, food services personnel, bus drivers, janitors, the administrator on duty, the Director of CosmoKidz in Louisiana, Chipps Taylor, and the over 60 children who attended. And we give a special thank you to the Louisiana Children’s Trust Fund for making this week possible. The official school year will begin in another week and these CosmoKidz campers are prepared to SOAR when they arrive in their new classroom.
Cosmopolis2045 is now sufficiently evolved to throw open its doors to visitors. The website is up and running and we invite you to come and explore our imagined city of the future.
The Cosmopolis 2045 project has evolved over many years, involving an extraordinary range of collaborators. Throughout the project we have been exploring innovative ideas for creating better social worlds and have incorporated them into an imagined community to demonstrate how such better social worlds are possible.
The citizens of our imagined future world of Cosmopolis have adopted a communication-centric view of their city and community functioning and the website of Cosmopolis2045 shows how this plays out in everyday life. On the website you can read personal stories written by citizens of the city; descriptions of new ways of city functioning and community celebrating; and find an extensive collection of resources and other inspirational material.
We invite you to explore our imagined city of the near future, showing a better social world.
We’d also love to hear back from you about your experiences on the website and welcome suggestions for improvement.
Arthur Jensen adjensen141@gmail.com
Robyn Penman robyn.penman@clearmail.com.au
Rik joined us an advisor to the board last year and this year he has become a full member. Here Rik introduces himself by way of a short biographical note around the theme of “And jam, of course”.
‘And jam, of course’.
My name is Rik Spann. I am a musicologist, living in Amsterdam. I have two beautiful sons. They have two beautiful mothers. We live at different places, and we have a lot of fun together. I’m quite a happy guy.
I studied musicology, developmental psychology and general linguistics at the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands). After that I worked professionally in several contexts of the worlds of art, music, journalism, dance, theatre, film and education. At Popschool Amsterdam I worked as a teacher in guitar, band coaching and composition & arrangement. I’m now working as an ’applied musicologist’, offering my experiences, expertise and programs in organizational and educational settings where my work is seen as making a contribution.
I hear music everywhere: it is about the harmonies, melodies, grooves and sounds that connect us all. I work as a consultant and organizational scientist. My practical work is around Miles Ahead Business Jazz (with Sergej van Middendorp, on consultancy around communication, improvisation and design from the jazz perspective), at De Goudse School (I have the honor to be a co-founder of this platform around organizational issues at the crossroads of technology, spirituality, science and art), and in my work from Jamtime Consultancy and Giant Steps Leadership Jazz (contexts that allow me to share knowledge and inspiration by Keynote lectures and workshops on topics addressing leadership, innovation, social creativity, improvisation, the jazz metaphor, cosmopolitan communication and human and organizational development). I mainly work for corporations and organizations in healthcare, education and other non-profits.
My sessions always contain live played metaphors and stories (mainly on guitar) from jazz, rock, soul, funk, blues and other music styles. With all this, I truly enjoy contributing to the great work of the CMM Institute, IFGIC, the Taos Institute and other collectives of great people caring about the world we live in.
My publications are mainly in Dutch. They are on topics like musicology, art, history of jazz and pop music, team dynamics, improvisation, integrity, quality, ‘the human factor in the digital transformation’ and generative metaphors in communication processes. Some are under re-evaluation and in translation into English.
My passion for CMM comes from my deeper passion for those perspectives that collectively jam together towards that groove that creates better social worlds. CMM, meaning Coordinated Management of Meaning but also meaning Creating Magic Moments, or whatever personal variation you might like to bring to the jam, simply sounds good. And it sounds so good that it needs to be explored, embellished, brought to the stage and played for an audience that, after the concert, goes home with new inspirations for, again, collectively creating better social worlds. Jamming on a quote from the movie August Rush: The music is all around us. All we have to do is listen.
And jam, of course.
Barbara has just joined the CMMI Board and will be with us at the Learning Exchange. Here she tells us about her professional background and how CMM has inspired her in her work and personal life.
Passion about CMM
I came upon CMM during my training as a psychotherapist with KCC in London when Barnett and Vernon were guest lecturers. I had the great pleasure of spending my ‘research’ week (preparation for MSc study) with Barnett who was accompanied at that time by Kim Walters. What Barnett did for me that week was inspire me to see myself not only as a potentially good therapist but a future researcher. Having come from a working class background from a coal mining community, this seemed beyond my imagination. The experience stayed with me and inspired me to go to further and study up to Doctoral level.
Having experienced the profound effect of CMM on my own life I have been occupied with making such ideas available to others either in my own therapeutic practice or with students on any of the courses that I teach. When offering consultations to professionals (often strategic leaders in social care), I work with them about forms of communication that start with the way they think about others in the world (relevant as it is common for social workers to problematize families) and consider more thoughtful and compassionate forms of communicating throughout the organisation. This is having a profound effect on services that is being recognised through the Governance inspection framework that monitors standards of practice in the UK. I have worked with over 20 local authorities during their improvement journey – which is the state of moving from being deemed ‘inadequate’ (such shaming language of the monitoring framework) towards ‘requires improvement to good’ and ‘good to outstanding.’
As Director of the Institute of Family Therapy I ensure that CMM is now firmly in the curriculum at all levels of our training of systemic therapists and supervisors.
In my personal life I am involved in my local Church. As a Christian I am motivated to live my life according to the principles of creating better social worlds. I have given a copy of Kim’s book – compassionate communicating to my Vicar as he is struggling with some of the more dogmatic people in the congregation and some of the structures that make his work to reach marginalized communities harder.
One idea that has stayed with me throughout my relationship with CMM when things get hard – is – change happens one conversation at a time.
I hope that by being part of the CMM Board I will be able to contribute my conversation to join others. Thank you for your invitation and I look forward to seeing everyone in October.
Professional background
Degrees / qualifications
Current and recent past employment
Writing and publications
McKay, B. (1982). Research on Cottage Hospitals as a planned resource which could reduce the depression rates amongst carers of the elderly. Nursing Times
McKay, B. (2006) Couple Counselling. In C. Feltham & I. Horton, (Eds) The Sage Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy. Sage
McKay, B. (2014) Making the most of multiple opportunities in group supervision: using systemic and narrative practices to bring forth skilled clinical practice. In C. Lim & E. Sim (Eds) Clinical Supervision. Counselling and Care Centre
McKay, B. (2015) Systemic landscapes for thinking and acting in inter-agency meetings. Context 137:23-27
McKay, B. (2016) A systemic conceptualisation of the process of change in Local Authority Children’s Services. Context December 2016
McKay, B. (2017) Moving with the times: responsive training for changing professional contexts. One institutions’ view of agency based foundation and intermediate training courses. Context 2017
(in press) coming out in December 2018 Context – 3 co-written articles that emerged from student essays submitted as part of a course that I taught on Systemic Leadership
2018 , Submitted article to the Journal of Family Therapy – awaiting response: Lead and Govern Excellent Practice: The relevance of systemic approaches to social care contexts
As you can see from the most recent titles of my writing I am interested in using a range of systemic (therapeutic) ideas to resource leaders, supervisors and practitioners in other fields. Because of my social work background I have been working in this field for the last 12 years in my role as Director of the Institute to train professionals in using more appreciative and respectful ways of working with families that harnesses their capacity for change through cooperation. All too often statutory services act coercively with families (with the good intention of protecting children) but this does not often foster the kinds of relationships in which change can occur, it usually creates suspicion and distrust. By using systemic approaches and specifically CMM with social workers and their managers my ambition is to create the context for more compassionate ways of talking and acting in this tough field of child protection.
The special focus of this year’s Learning Exchange is on creating communities of practice that help us in being better at what we are and do. We’d love to have you with us as we explore how CMM helps in creating these communities. If you’re coming, you need to register soon.
For us, all of you receiving our newsletter and reading about the Learning Exchange on our website are part of our broad CMM community. Because we share an interest in CMM, we use CMM, or we simply want to know more about CMM, we have something in common: a domain of knowledge. But we need to have more, and do more, than this if we want to be a community of practice. We also need to care about this area of knowledge, to value it for good reasons, and we need to share a set of practices that we develop collectively to be effective in our area of knowledge.
We actually have to put effort into building a community of practice around the subject we care about, if we are to maximize the potential for learning and creativity. This year’s Learning Exchange is about putting in the effort. It’s about exploring and experiencing ways of working together that bring about really productive learning contexts.
This year’s Learning Exchange is also about exploring and experiencing how our understandings of our special domain of interest, CMM theory and a communication perspective, can be used to create great communities of practice. It’s such a special challenge and we anticipate it will have very special rewards for all of us there. And, if we do it well, we also anticipate creating many magical moments for us all.
Looking forward to you being with us from
Friday 26 October, 5pm to Sunday 28 October, 3pm
Saddlebrooke Ranch,
The New Clubhouse and Restaurant
1143 S. Amenity Drive Oracle, AZ 85623
The “More Information” and “To Register button” are above this post on the CMMI Learning Exchanges page.