Gene and Louise
Gene and Chris
June 12, 2006
Deputy Conversations
A month or so ago I received an email inviting any “deputies without committee assignments and any alternate deputies” to volunteer to facilitate “table conversations” amongst deputies following Monday’s orientation at 3 PM. I volunteered and later received a notice telling me to show up for facilitator training Monday at 11 AM. The training focused on the “Appreciative Inquiry” model, which uses a lot of Transactional Analysis (“I’m OK, you’re OK”) bases. Suffice to say that in an hour they weren’t going to turn us into highly experienced facilitators, but we got enough of the basics to try and keep the conversations from going into the ditch. As it turns out, not a lot of that was necessary. I had a lovely group of deputies: a woman priest from the Diocese of Iowa, a woman priest from the Diocese of Atlanta, a man priest from the Diocese of Central Florida, a man priest from the Diocese of California, a woman priest from the Diocese of Eastern Oregon and a man (he never self-identified as either lay or clergy) from the Diocese of Alaska.
After a 10 or 15 minute exercise of attempting to herd cats (getting 700 or 800 of us into tables of 8, each one with one of the trained facilitators) and a brief introduction to what it was we were attempting to do, we were asked to answer the following questions. Each of us had a maximum of 8 minutes to “tell our stories” in response to the questions and the job of facilitator (at my table, anyway) basically came down to timekeeping. (more…)
