Card Sessions: Questions

Paradigm, Scene, Images, Questions, Cards, Cards considered in light of questions, Card Sessions, How to play, Today, Knowledge, Paths, Social (cognition, social media, machines), Preferable outcomes.

You are called as human, to extend a choice select part of your essential character, online, in order to coordinate necessary and sufficient effort, distributing resources and holding space for a requisite variety of paths, between today and preferable outcomes.

Card: Comfort

“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the
public wants the environment protected
or their lives saved and that they will be grateful
to any idealist who will fight for such ends.
What the public wants is their own individual comfort.”
— Isaac Asimov

Renewal, comfort zone, denial, confusion, trust, movement, renewal.

You are currently resisting this, defending your borderline solipsist desire to remain inside personal ken pontification, and/or occasionally indulging in shared misery in social media, accomplishing nothing.

The only core challenge:

behavior > flow > agency

behavior (pontification(twitter), shared misery(fb)) > understanding understanding (Heinz von Foerster, multi-order cybernetics > agency

problem space (mostly uninformed opinion) > metalogue > possibility space

Problem Space
Mostly uninformed opinion, with a sideorder of catgifs, selfies and content marketing. Aka telephone booth sanitizing (D. Adams).

Possibility Space
Insight, actionable insight, alignment around generative questions and agreement on next steps.

A requisite variety of paths.

One way to do this, to learn how to play really well together with other human beings in networks, is to level up our conversational intelligence game.

Conversational Intelligence as a Generative Sequence

role, purpose, needs, feedback, story, perspectives, criteria, shared understanding, actionable insight, practice, leverage, co-creation, resolve

Card: Question

A question is mind rediscovering
the generative nature of relating
with reality and transforming it
into possibility.

“The nature of reality is transactional.” — Alan Watts

Conversational Intelligence: Systems Intelligence

1. What role are you as a conversation participant assuming?

2. What purpose is your comment serving?

3. What needs can be addressed by the conversation?

4. What feedback, mutuality and learning is provided, by whom?

Understanding, knowledge and possibility spaces.

Conversational Intelligence: From There To Here

5. What (joint) focus on what story, tasks and what generative review?

6. What experience and knowledge is shared, what perspectives are explored?

7. What criteria are used, towards teasing out what insights?

8. Which are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a meaningful conversation, and what are the steps followed to ensure there’s shared understanding around these conditions?

Circles of concern, influence and concrescence.

Conversational Intelligence:
In a network, we found the others and
made a difference that saw us through

9. What insights can be turned actionable, serving what local and community needs?

10. What intention, perspectives, language and tools are chosen and held, making for what action and practice?

11. What unique individual skills combined with what collective intelligence can help produce something extraordinary?

12. What networks of practice, co-evolving and co-creating what value, with what lines of inquiry?

Emerging, unfolding, cultivating and evolving.

All together now, a set of steps that when undertaken, result in structure-preserving transformation, paths through possibility spaces.

13. Given all of the above, what key insights can be drawn and what actions taken, in order to solve what important issues?

role, purpose, needs, feedback, story, perspectives, criteria, shared understanding, actionable insight, practice, leverage, co-creation, resolve

Leveling up our game:

How to play -> How to play really well together with other human beings

Knowledge -> Knowledge with a small trim-tab side-order of phronesis

Social media -> Social machines augmenting social computing

Social computing augmenting paths towards preferable outcomes.

Paradigmatic shift; scenius; imagineering; generative questions; card decks and play dispositions; hypertext: informed, considered, considerate; labs; how to play really well together with other human beings; attention turned situational awareness; knowledge with a small trim-tab side-order of phronesis; paths turned spiraling, scaffolding possibility spaces; social machines augmenting social computing; preferable outcomes, seven generations to come.

What questions can we hold, in between today and preferable outcomes?