The Power of Conversation

via The Interaction Institute for Social Change

Here Jack Ricchiuto, talks about building community and collaboration through conversatoin, and he mentions the “shadow conversations” that keep us from success.

Ricchiuto names the following four conversations with power:

• Dream Space Conversation – this is the possibility conversation, and many of us are familiar with vision exercises.  He says it is a conversation that takes us 20 years out, one generation.  He reminds us that the depth of our vision correlates with the depth of our passion, and he invites us to create spaces that facilitate the alignment of our dreams

• Small Acts Conversation – I find this one to be a great corollary to the dream space conversation because it gets us talking about what we can do.  Given where we want to go, what is it that we can do right now?  I also like it because it gets us out of the trap of big plans, the fantasy games that we play when we try to project every step into an uncertain future.  This conversation gets us started, it allows for the early prototype.

• Gifts Conversation – This one is the asset based conversation, the conversation that finds out what it is that each one of us brings to the table, what is it that we already have in our hands and how is it that we put it to work for our dreams?

• Invitation Conversation – This is where we look around, we appreciate who we are and what we have and we decide who else to invite, who are the people that might want to be a part of this dream?