I can’t believe it, but I started to write this post LAST Sunday, and here it is a week later. There are so many things running through my mind but I decided I should stick with two: visual thinking and eggs.
I’ll start with the eggs, because it is shorter. Yesterday we got three new hens to add to our tiny flock of 2 older hens who are in great shape, but laying fewer and fewer eggs. We still appreciate their contribution of their doo-doo to our garden’s soil quality, but we need a few more eggs. So I met up with a young woman who raises hens and picked up three Golden Nugget 7 month old hens. (Scroll down on this page if you want to know more about the breed).
We were advised to keep the new hens apart from our older hens until it was dark then introduce them while the other hens were sleeping. We did that and this morning I headed out at dawn to check on them. No fights. YAY! But all day the two mini-flocks kept their distance from each other.
I was reminded of the posts of yours that I have been reading from last weeks TEAM THEME. Quite consistently people talked about how much easier it is in smaller sub-teams than in your full teams of 7 or 8 people. It seems like these small “twosie-threesies” are the GOLDEN EGG! So if you are having success in the mini-groups, I’ll be interested to see how you build that up into larger team success. I’d love any comments if you have already figured that out.
The second thing is the power of visuals in both thinking together and sharing what we’ve learned with others. A week ago I taught two graphic facilitation courses. (Here are some photos from one of them.) One issue that came up in both was how useful visuals were in negotiating meaning in multicultural contexts. What I find is a visual prompts us to ask “what did you mean by that,” when we often keep plowing forward without asking and building on assumptions if we are just relying on words. This can be a challenge for groups who are working across diverse first/second languages.
I keep wondering if some of your teams would benefit from using visuals, or perhaps you already are. If you are, would you share your experiences in the comments?
OK, sun is still out, so I’m heading back to my garden. I hope one of you found the surprise I had above in the post!
