Reflections 28th March

My focus in the last week has moved from connections to the conversations that power them. Our conversations carries the stories we tell about ourselves, others, the nature of our connections, and how we live. Conversations are the mycelium of our society. They provide connection, exchange and nutrition to our communities below the surface and out of sight.

It seems to me that our conversations are not in good shape. They have become routine and we have unintentionally but effectively industrialised much of our conversation.

In business. "Effective Meetings". Agendas. Goals. Efficiency. Productivity. Performance. Time limits. They all constrain free flow and creativity and we end up with dialectic, binary, right/wrong discussions with winners and losers where what we increasingly need is the inefficient, colourful, wandering dialogue that pokes into corners to find unexpected treasures.

In our social conversation, we too often end up trading pre assembled packages of ideas and opinions d…