I’ve been “sitting in circle” for two weeks straight, attending institutes and fellowships and training sessions. Literally. Sitting in a circle of chairs with dozens of people. So what, you ask?
Turns out sitting in circle can be very productive for you and your business or organization. Think for a minute about all those times you’ve sat in long, drawn out meetings where your peers are nodding off, fidgeting to stay awake and doodling on their notepads just to stay focused. How comfortable were you? What was the quality of that meeting? Did anything get accomplished? Was there a talking head who just continued to go on and on while everyone tuned out?
Now imagine you are sitting in a circle, no tables. Just bodies in chairs. Now you can see everyone in the room. You can gauge the energy level, you can make eye contact! *GASP* Eye contact? In this society? When the hardest of conversations need to happen on project planning or community organizing or when you are digging deep with your team on a business problem, or trying to change your entire economic system, try putting the group in a circle and see if the conversation is richer, more productive. Get rid of the distractions of tables and ask people to be fully present, fully listening. Give each person the opportunity to be seen and heard.
“Sitting in circle” is not a new thing, I’ll remind you. It’s still a tradition in many cultures that use storytelling a tool for community conversations and it’s how we learned cool things about each other at summer camp around the fire.
What does this have to do with the local economy, you ask? It’s simple: our traditional models of economic development have failed us many times over and most of those meetings are held in stifling rooms with tables and chairs or even in council chambers where the Mayor is dozing off while a councilor takes the mic. Bo-ooorING. (I think I nodded off while I was writing that sentence.) What if we held those meetings in spaces that allowed for creativity, let everyone have equal say and acknowledge all ideas brought forward with gratitude? I had the pleasure of being in circle with a Mayor from a small northern Wisconsin town last week. I could see the light bulbs going off when a group of us surrounded him in circle to work on a waterfront redevelopment planning project he’d been dealing with for years and could not get off the ground. “I’m going back to my community to host a dialogue OUTSIDE of council chambers, where they can draw ideas on paper and think out loud, and look at each other. Maybe then the developers will hear what people have to say and our council will pass the plan instead of asking more questions to stall it for another five years.” Now that’s progress in politics.
Change the way you sit in a meeting and you just might change your entire local economy. Radical, I know, but what have you got to lose?
