Conversation as a visioning and learning tool

Starting a conversation

Before finding out what we can do for each other, it is first important to understand the nature of the friendship. During this process of deepening the friendship, significant time needs to be spent in the place as a way of better understanding each other and our motivations for being involved.

Thus, it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but what he says. During a conversation community issues are discussed via informal dialogues with the specific objective of collective learning from whatever emerges during these dialogues.

Engaging people in conversation is a stronger sign of friendship, than formal meetings and agreements.
Conversations may have a planned start, but don’t have any expected outcome, therefore are opportunities for creativity and novelty.
A genuine conversation puts all partners at the same level. There is no expertise, no controller and no controlled.
In a conversation everyone has opportunity to talk and to be listened to with the same level of attention.
True friendships are constructed over genuine conversations.
Drawing a Conversational Map is one of the ways to represent and capture what has been said during a conversation.
The ideas that arise, are registered and do not get lost, without as well loosing the spontaneity, creativity and emergence aspects inherent to a genuine conversation process.

Conversations can be used to explore, initiate and/or deepen our friendships. The importance of these conversations can not be over stated. The friends need to be able to come with an open mind about what the friendship is and might lead to, with no specific expectation of outcomes. Therefore its important to first have a conversation about what the friends really want/need to receive and/or to give. Need take into consideration the impacts of the exchange upon both sides and whether it is appropriate in the local contexts. For example, donating whiteboards to Timorese schools without considering the ability of teachers to buy the markers, while blackboards would be cheaper and chalk is easily available at a reasonable cost.

Other important thing to take into consideration during the conversations is to respect local traditions, including the different ways people deal with time. The next section looks at some very important aspects of communication, which is the main aim of having a conversation.

Mapping Conversations - Capturing everyone's ideas

Here we talk about conversational process, how to facilitate and map a conversation and when / where it might be useful. We have made some notes on that which is in another writely document shared with you as well.

Conversational mapping is a tool to document a conversation in a simple way. They are important because the people involved in the conversation are able to see how their ideas relate to that of others. Even if they have very different points of view, they can see how each of them are linked and are influencing eachother. All participants in the conversation are able to see the whole picture and where they fit.

What are the Conversational Maps?

A conversational map is a way to document and illustrate a conversation around a particular theme and to show the links between its different parts. The picture below is a simple example of a map showing some relationships about what can be done with coconuts. The Figure shows some products from coconuts: coconut water; coconut oil; and dried coconut and some of the things that we can do with them: cooking; selling in the local market; or selling to tourists.

There are no rules for building them, but it is important that participants agree on the process of drawing the map. For example, in the map above it was agreed that circles would represent the products and that domes would represent what can be done with them. We also agreed that we wouldn't use arrows for the links. But it could have been done differently and still represent the same ideas. What is important here is that the participants built this together and agreed on the final result as a representation of the uses for coconuts.

The maps help us understand what was said during a conversation, learn from it and make collective decisions involving everyone's opinions and ideas, and highligting the links between them. Also a conversation map allows us to go back to what was said anytime we want. It is, therefore, a very powerful tool for learning, decision making and documenting.

How the maps can be useful?

on initiating new relationships
on building a strategic plan
on monitoring and evaluating
on understanding what each others needs and priorities are.

Helps clarify potential misunderstandings by visually representing what each Friendship group is saying and why.

How to initiate a conversation?

In order to initiate a conversation it is important to begin with an open question which does not assume a particular outcome. In exampel 2 below, the open question was "what sort of track".

How to draw a Conversational Map?

The three examples below show different ways of having a conversation and mapping them. Each one is different, because the place and the people and the question were different. And because these conversations are agendaless they adapt to each context. And this is one of the critical things to remember, do not predict the outcome and do not come with the answers let them emerge from the conversation.

Example 1 The Beloi Map

Example 2 From Ebor Australia

Example 3 From NSW Regional Conference

Workbooks (PDF)

Developing A Community Strategic Plan 28.3Kb

Project Management by Communities 33kb

Community Visioning 41.1Kb

Monitoring 41.9Kb