Snowstorm of Chat, Conversation and Content

As many of you would know from past posts, podcasts and talks, my fellow snowflake Erik and I are working on developing and sharing our thoughts and passion around what we call The Snowflake Effect, which is our vision of a world designed for the uniqueness of each person, group and situation.

Erik and I also love experiential learning and discovering new ways of getting things done.  We noticed how often we are struck by the power of conversation both literally in the great conversations we have but also as a conceptual model that includes things like the way most good conversations have a very serendipitous quality to them in that you really don’t plan or know in advance where a conversation is going to go and yet they so often lead to great discussions. 

Conversation is also very powerful for what my dear friend and fellow snowflake Marcia Conner so ably articulated in her article for FastCompany called “Do You Talk to Think or Think to Talk?”  I, in particular, talk to think. I figure things out and come up with new ideas, analogies, and stories in the process of having a great conversation with others.  And I think to talk when I put time into reflective thinking, developing new models and concepts and then sharing them with others when I get the opportunity to talk with them.

There is so much that we can learn from conversation, and so for all of the reasons above and several more, Erik and I decided to put some of these thoughts into action and practice what we preach. We have started some new ways of learning from conversation and using conversation as a way to develop some of the content and discussion around the Snowflake Effect. 

So far, we have two ways we are experimenting with this:

1. Long Slow Chat is a web site/blog we have recently started up with an agreement that both Erik and I will post one small “snowflake thought of the day” each and every day of the week. "Long and slow" because we expect this to continue for some time and "Chat" because we will try to keep each posting down to a small single thought.  The previous link will take you to the blog where you can read what we have chatted about so far and send in your comments and reactions to help drive the conversation further.
2. TWiST which stands for This Week in Snowflake Talk, where we record a weekly conversation we have on some of the points we’ve made the past week on the Long Slow Chat. We make these available to anyone interested either directly from the Long Slow Chat site or from this link  where you can subscribe via iTunes.

Both of these are experiments we are conducting and are very much works in progress, and we hope that some of this will be of interest and value to many of you, so please check it out whenever you can and let us know what you think. We are VERY anxious to get your comments, reactions, and ideas about this way of working.

Erik and I will be spending more time and energy on the Snowflake Effect and posting as prolifically as we can to the Long Slow Chat site so please head on over there and consider adding a feed for these Long Slow Chat posts and TWiST podcasts as we continue to explore the Snowflake Effect.

** update of original post of Oct.17, 2008 to correct typos and add correct links

Comments

[sohbet]

thanks for you beautifully.