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Conversation holds mystery and it runs through every movement.

:- Doug.

Abductive process, grab it and go, is important. We need to recognize we use it all the time, and we need to give it respect in larger decisions. It requires work and precision: digging for all the factors that affect us in this moment. It needs many minds and more context all the way through—we cannot just say That’s my answer and I’m sticking with it.

:- Doug.

Purpose, Gregory Bateson points out, can throw a monkey wrench into the works. Not that we should not have purpose (better than goals), but we need to include the warmer things like the creative and the dream and the unconscious and the allowing and the flow, and we need at the same time to work for these things. Not an easy work, especially in a culture that idolizes goals and money and numbers.

:- Doug.

The whole must be sought and involved: the purposive with the creative, the working with the allowing. It demands of us work, this business of finding and engaging with the whole, not merely study. The key: with. Nothing, no one, apart and above. Nor alone.

:- Doug.

Which comes first—the working elbow to elbow on some common project, or the conversation about what we have in common? Notice it’s not one or the other but the sequence. It turns out that elbows come before mind, if we want to do lasting good, and if the relationships are to endure. So in life giving conversation, the elbows of working or the knees of walking, are essential ingredients. See how good is the conversation in the kitchen, cleaning up after the potluck.

:- Doug.

We have so much coming at us and its rate of increase is itself increasing so that we have no practical choice: 1. We must use all the processing power of all of us; 2. We have to look for qualitative information in addition to quantitative; and 3. We need to take hold of our best guess and close enough approximations. Converse does all of these, and well.

:- Doug.

There is an unexpected—dare we call it action?—out far beyond listening: deep hearing and wild.

:- Doug.

Results not guaranteed, only your efforts freely chosen.

:- Doug.

I cannot write a book off the top of my head or bottom of my heart, but must attend the ever larger context. I need to attend my field, and all that touches it. I need to attend my universe. . . .

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2106

We are getting the work going. We are testing what might work. We are working on the problem of how the experimenters themselves can human better. We share methods and incomplete results. A fundamental plagues us: do humans want to get better?

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© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

When we are talking, what am I pulling from you? What is the conversation in all its largeness, and the surround, calling from us? And we from them?

:- Doug.

Noise is the sole source of new patterns.

:- Doug.

Between participants look for any arising potentiality for change which is presently uncommitted. Is not uncommitted essential to this potentiality?

:- Doug.

The purpose of conversation may be entirely different from the intent. The intent of participant A may be to get B to take action x, and B’s intent may be to get A to take a varying action. But at a meta level, the purpose might be to advance the economy or the society. More: the effect might be to take a direction neither A nor B nor the economy nor the society saw coming. The purpose and effect of conversation is to bring about change. It brings change by introducing difference, also called variety, also called context. Also called life.

:- Doug.

Keep in mind that the speaker’s question may be instead the answer to the hearer’s immanent internal question, allowing change to proceed. The speaker may not cause anything, merely allow a door to swing upon a hinge needing oil.

:- Doug.

Memory is expensive; else why would we have invented habits?

:- Doug.

Poetry—the real beyond words.

:- Doug.

There are more ways to love than we think of in any day.

:- Doug.

The conversation will never be finished, but it can ever turn, flower, go to seed, sprout, grow, wither, turn.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2105

Muddy your path
Show them you were here

Please pass it on.

© c 2022, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

What is conversation? A turning of bits to find a difference to make a difference. Again: A turning about looking for differences to make a difference.

:- Doug.

Over my few short years, something I’ve learned is that in many situations, more is possible than I thought going in. And there is often more good than I expected.

:- Doug.

Look for what remains unexplained in my theory.

:- Doug.