Group Clean Space / Symbolic Modelling

[Andre Clements]

Greetings Everyone

Have you ever used the clean-space modality with a group, in other words facilitating a process with all the members of the group simultaneously? Is it even possible?

First some background, I did clean-language & symbolic modelling training with Wendy Sullivan some years ago – and although it has made a huge impact in various contexts for me, its only recently that I’ve decided to more actively pursue this area – strictly speaking I’m a designer/IT developer in the higher education industry in South Africa.

I’ve volunteered to facilitate this month’s instalment of a regular meeting we host where participants interactively investigate various issues around the topic of authentic leadership. Although the event is called a Dialogue Circle it doesn’t necessarily follow a strict ‘Dialogue’ method but we do try and avoid a lecture style of relationship between the facilitator and participants.

I’ll be facilitating a meeting focusing on creativity and how it relates to authenticity and leadership.

I realise that the mere fact that we are dealing with a group and to some extent have a pre-defined desired outcome – if implicit – means that this won’t be purist clean-space or even clean-language. But I’ll be happy with even a partial move in the general direction.
What I have in mind…

Splitting the participants into groups of five or so individuals per group which should leave us with three or four groups. Then essentially treating the groups as if they are individuals. I have in mind using big sheets of paper on which groups can make collaborative notes in response to pre-prepared clean-questions – and these can be placed in the venue as ‘places’. The challenge here is if a ‘place’ is defined by one group the other groups might not resonate/buy-in to that ‘reality’.

Perhaps it would be interesting to play with the groups having to modify in turn each other’s defined ‘places’ as required in order for them to collectively ‘own’ these, but I wouldn’t want the negotiations to detract from exploring what emerges in the relationships between the ‘places’ except maybe that is exactly where the emergence will happen? :-/

Any suggestions? (it’s also okay to tell me that I’ve completely lost my marbles for wanting to do this :-)

Thanx

André Clements

PS. The event details http://www.regenesys.co.za/2100/dialoguecircle-v-creativity

[phil]

Hi Andre

A couple of resources for you:

http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/216/1/Self-Organising-Systems-Findhorn/Page1.html
describes some of the background to a large group process done using metaphor and CL a few years back.

http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/24/1/Clean-Space-Modeling-Human-Perception-through-Emergence/Page1.html
Clean Space - basic description.

http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/metaphorswork/
Caitlin Walker's Metaphors@Work process is designed for working with grops using metaphor and CL. It mixes well with using space as you describe.

In Caitlin's process the 'collaborative notes' you mention are a shared metaphor owned by that small group. The metaphor is what represents that group. I can see that metaphor/group finding a place in space and also moving as the systme self-organises.

Hope that will get you going. It sounds really good fun!

Phil

PS On the basis of your post, IMO you have a full compement of marbles. :)

[Andre Clements]

Hope that will get you going.
Oh yes :-), thanks for that

Looking at the piece on self-organising systems, I think I am starting to realise why I feel so strongly about specifically using this kind of process for a group enquiry into creativity; We tend to think of creativity as a property of the individual - or 'agent' if you will - but it is inextricably tied to factors of the agent's situation, and specifically their 'relations' with that situation.

This is fascinating stuff :-)

[phil]

Yes - and another description might be a propert of that system... an emergent property, even!

Let us know how you get on.

Phil

[caitlinwalker]

I'm excited to know what you do and how it goes. We have a few examples of using clean space with groups and organisations but I'd love to know what emerges from your ideas.

Caitlin

[Penny Tompkins]

James and I have run lots of Clean Space processes with a wide range of groups so we know it is not only possible but offers fantastic opportunities. Below are details of a group Clean Space process created and run by James Lawley. In his words:

I took the idea of Clean Space (which was devised by David Grove as a process for individuals) and modified it for use with a group; in the example below, it was a group of 14 people that worked in the same University Department in 2004.

The premise behind Clean Space is that if we physically spatialize and move around the contents of our (group) mind, we can examine the content, relationships and patterns in a new way. It utilizes the apparently innate ability of humans to make use of the metaphors of relative location, perspective and interconnectivity.

The Clean Space activity was part of a whole day of activities. The purpose of the day was to look at how members of the department could better support each others' work. Clean Space was the final activity used to explore how they could "co-inspire" each other. (Of course you could substitute 'co-inspire' with any desired outcome of the group.)

We started with a short introduction and discussion about the idea of 'co-inspiration'. (As an aside, Penny and I were introduced to the concept by Humberto Maturana and Pille Bunnell over breakfeast :)). Then a flip-chart sheet with 'co-inspiring' written on it was placed "where it needed to be" (in this case, in the middle of a large room).

Each participant wrote or drew on a sheet of paper one idea, concept, learning, experience that related to co-inspiring. One by one participants placed their sheets "in the space where they need to be in relation to the topic and other people's contributions" and stood in that place and explained their understanding.

At various intervals the participants moved to someone else's space and added their knowledge, or they created a new space for an inspired thought, or they identified a connection between two or more existing spaces.

I established an 'Observer/Reflector' space where people could go at any time to reflect on the process and the network of experiences that was being created. After the initial set up, the activity ran for an hour and a quarter during which time more and more connections, issues, feelings, inspirations were expressed, located and connected into the emergent network.

After a break the group sat around the edge of the space which contained the visibly recorded knowledge (on the sheets) and all the unrecorded contributions and interactions. We reflected on the process and our learning, and captured the issues, desires and actions that resulted from the activity.

The feedback from the participants indicated that the exercise fulfilled its purpose. One of the key learnings was that Clean Space kept a group of highly individualistic academics focussed on the topic at hand. Other discussions during the day meandered from topic to topic to topic; whereas for over an hour the entire group self-organized to maintain their contributions and discussions within the context of co-inspiring. Given the individuals involved, that was no mean feat!

To give you an idea of scale, the space used was about 8 x 4 metres.

Penny

[Andre Clements]

Thanx guys,
please forgive me if I ramble on a bit here :-)

I realize that my biggest challenge is probably going to be the very short time frame of one and a half hour. That and the fact that some of the participants will be relatively new to this kind of process - expecting a lecture interspersed with cabaret style group discussions.

When we I did the training with Wendy we did a exercise in which everyone had to move themselves to be equidistant with two other participants, basically a self-organizing system. Some aspects of that exercise made a huge impact on me and I've used it in different facilitation situations in the past - now I'm contemplating trying to use similar principles to facilitate the interaction in the group.

Basically using a simple spatial algorithm to facilitate 'parrallel processing' - in other words a kind of clean question relay (limiting the no. of threads should impact on scope for reflection and spectation) a 'spatialized' symbolic landscape consisting of both personal (pre-event formulated) and collectively defined metaphors of the three main topic 'nodes' - still working on the mechanics of this.

But one of the things that fascinates me about what i believe is possible through these kinds of processes is allowing groups to operate beyond the confines of conventions, especially in the light of developmental models like the Graves/Beck spiral dynamics and even Wilber's AQAL models - dialogue as a modality, even in its most purist Bohm form, and as fluid and open as you can manage to get it is still me thinks 'native' to the social/Relativistic-personalistic/comunitarian 'Green' realm/level - and seems to be a ceiling to what is possible - participatory mutual active modeling seems to me to be the critical, often missing, essential ingredient to sustainably access the 'higher' realms... Hmmm, okay that's my share of airy-fairy-ness for tonight ;-)

[Corrie van Wijk]

Hi Andre,

"one of the things that fascinates me about what i believe is possible through these kinds of processes is allowing groups to operate beyond the confines of conventions [...] and seems to be a ceiling to what is possible - participatory mutual active modeling seems to me to be the critical, often missing, essential ingredient to sustainably access the 'higher' realms..."

I think it is important to distinguish between modelling space in a symbolic landscape, like James and Penny do and the clean space process as such.
The latter is designed to retrieve memories by using possibly different sensory combinations in different spaces to trigger state dependent memories, which is important in therapy. By intuitively moving among perceptual spaces retrieval cues may bring into conscious mind memories that connect self and being-in-the-world, which is a function of episodic memory. Hence we use 'to know' and as soon as a pronoun is used David would ask how old it is and what it is wearing. See my thread 'clean space is not about modelling space' in this section.

I agree with you that a 'participatory mutual active modeling is the critical, often missing, essential ingredient'. I attempted to describe such a process in my thread Process thinking.
However, I'm not sure clean space would be a good candidate for such a process: it is tempting to figure interconnections in space as a picture, but that would make them static and they probably get easily labelled. Keep moving, David would say and Steve Saunders works with that in emergence.

Corrie van Wijk