How local meetings w/global experts can boost CI

This entry is copied from an email exchange with ChrisMacrae, with his permission. He wrote:

> -the need of deep foreign experts who travel through London to find 10
> disciples (in any way that disciples can help as the opposite of
> audiences paying to hear)

Chris, I remember, you mentioned that idea in the conversations we had with you and Johnnie Moore, last Friday, and suggested me to participate in such conversation, the next time when I will visit London. In the same conversation, besides gently deflecting to be treated as a guru :-) I extolled the benefits to our collective intelligence if we could seamlessly integrate and synergize our real-time and asynch dialogues. Your email provides me with an opportunity to illustrate my point as follows.

In the relatively short time of meeting with Johnnie Moore and Chris Macrae, we covered a large number of topics of mutual interest, however there was just not enough room to attend Chris' suggestion for organized café-style meetings with experts visiting London. In contrast to that, reading his words in the email message allowed me reflect on them more deeply, leading to this response:

The self-organizing collective consciousness of our Big Shift to the next evolutionary plateau is propelled by the in-nervation of our global brain, the cross-fertilization of generative ideas and transformative practices, across organizational cultural and geographic boundaries. That’s why the role of traveling evolutionary agents and their local hosts as cultural translators and connectors can be highly valuable.

I think of those agents in terms of “learning partners” more than “experts” which have a baggage of meaning inherited from the past century when the dominant paradigm of learning was vertical transaction between producers and consumers of knowledge. Let’s consider a horizontalization of learning which would co-exist, not replace the natural hierarchy in a given domain between those who have been giving more or less attention to explore and contribute to that domain.

Given the always-scarce f-t-f time, in order to let all participants create the most value with it, we need to expand it with asynch time, both before and after the meeting. Here’s how it would look. When I will know the date of my next trip to London, I will post an entry in the Blog of CI reflecting the currently hottest issue on the learning agenda of one or more communities that I belong to, which are also on the cutting edge of my own learning. Those whom you want to invite to meet with me, could receive from you the URL of the entry in Blog of CI, along with your words of encouragement to see into and engage with the question(s) posted there if they find it interesting.

In that way, by the time we will meet in person, we’ll have started knowing what we care about, and our potential collective intelligence will have a better chance to start coalescing and knowing itself. Of course, you can also trackback and comment on my entry in your own blog, thus seeding a multi-blog asynch conversation that can help both preparing and following up our meeting.

How does all this sound to you?

george

p.s. Questions and comments about this approach to build CI across space and time are welcome from all.