Unlocking the power of social learning in communities with Travis Tennessen

[MUSIC] Today I had a conversation with Travis Tennyson. He's the director of the Center for Community Learning at Western Washington University, and also writes a newsletter called "The Joy of Conveining." For more than 10 years, Travis has focused on creating spaces where people who bring communities together can share their experiences and learn from each other. His work is all about helping people connect, reflect on who they are, talk about what drives them, and make progress on their community projects. One thing I really liked was TalkTiles, a simple but powerful tool that he and his team use. It guides conversations using eight themes, feelings, possibilities, actions, changes, support, identity, importance, and place. These prompts help people open up, reflect, and share their thoughts in a way that's structured but still flexible. We also got into different ways of bringing people together and designing meaningful experiences. So if you're working on improving your community or member experience, there's a lot of useful insights here. Enjoy. [Music] Hello everyone, and hey Travis, welcome to Mapping Ties. We finally get to talk, which is great. It took a while. I'm so excited to have this time with you and learn from you. Before we kick it off, I'd just invite you to briefly tell us who you are, introduce yourself, will you leave, and what community are you leading, what's your connection to community building? Well, it's delightful to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm Travis Tennyson. I'm the director of the Center for Community Learning at Western Washington University. I'm the child of educators. My parents are stuck in Karen Tennyson. They were teachers in Alaska and Wisconsin and still are really active educators. My grandparents were builders and farmers and artists. So I just come from people that are trying to find ways to build solid, sturdy communities and serve the next generations. I lead a program called Community Engagement Fellows. We've been at it for about 11 years and it's a diverse social learning network that includes university faculty and staff and students and nonprofit community leaders, government leaders, tribal leaders, youth in middle school and high school, all learning together in a wide variety of ways. It's been a wonderful way to experiment with bringing people together to learn in different ways and practice community building together. Love that. One could even take notes. Travis has learning in his blood because you come to teachers. So I always like to ask my guest, Travis, when it comes to their community, what is the change that the community is hoping to bring into the world? That's the purpose. I heard someone called us, the call to adventure. What's at its core that this body of work aims to do? Well, I can share a bit about my own motivations. I think everybody in the network, everybody in community engagement fellows has their own set of purposes. So I feel like we're always holding those things together when we're learning together. For me, I think I'm a geographer. I'm an environmental historian. I'm really interested in how people's lives and cultures have evolved over time and how we've interacted with our planet in different ways. As I was learning about that in college and grad school and starting to teach about those things in my 20s, I think I became fairly dismayed with the state of things. It felt like we live on an abundant planet. We have rich cultures with tons of great ideas about how we can live well in families and with each other and how we can solve problems, but we're not doing it. We're not doing these things well. And my PhD dissertation ended up being titled Trouble in Paradise because it was about, yeah, we have this abundant earth and we're messing things up. We need different ways to practice being with each other, learning from each other. And so I think that's still my core purpose. I'm situated in a university running a professional development community development program, but the core purpose for me is helping people practice ways of learning together ways of developing community that do not involve one culture or racing another culture, do not involve extracting unsustainably from the earth, do not involve one set of identities triumphant over another set of identities, or one discipline triumphant over one other discipline. So to take this colonial system that we have that has divided us in so many ways and to find ways of re-knitting ourselves together and to find ways of seeing each other's common humanity. And it sounds grandiose, but it really is a wonderful project to work on and it really involves small mundane things like simple prompts that help people be together and snacks and space for people to listen to each other, which we can get into. But yeah, I'm sure we've got to all. And I think the people that come into this space has their own version of that. They're dissatisfied with the ways that they are, the way their work is situated, what they're seeing in their community life, and they're looking for ways to transform that work. And they have a belief that they shouldn't do it alone. They have a faith and an experience that if they learn with other people who have different life experiences and different perspectives and different skill sets, the work that they do is going to be better. And that is what keeps drawing people into community engagement, fellow spaces, I think over this decade plus, because they see that this is a really impactful, efficient way to transform their work for the better. You mentioned before we hit record that you were there from the very beginning. So from the get-go, it's already a few years have passed. So maybe it can take us just briefly back to that beginning. Like, what was the spark? How did it started? Whose idea was it? Like, how did you go from nothing to something? And what was that spark? Great question. Well, I came to, I was looking for a role in a university setting, but that wasn't a traditional faculty role because I was really motivated to do transformative work in a public university because I can see, so I love public universities. I think they're so important. And I can see the potential in them for creating a thriving society. And I feel like I'm a creature of higher education. So I know how to navigate these systems better than other systems. So I found a role as the assistant director in what was then the Center for Service Learning at this university. I walked into this office in January of 2015. And the primary task that was assigned to me was to start a faculty development program to get more high quality community-based learning happening. And it was sort of like, we don't know what will work, what we've tried before hasn't really gained momentum. So see what you can do. And what I did that those first few months was talked with as many of the newly hired faculty as I could. I think I talked with 25 or more people about their interest in community-based work. And what I heard from them was they were really interested. They had often done creative interdisciplinary work in their own in other settings in graduate school or where they were faculty before. So they were really motivated to do that. And they also didn't really know anybody. They didn't know how to get started. And didn't know what was happening out in the broader community. And so they were looking for a space to discover those things. Not looking for more work to do, but looking for help and support with the work that they already had to do. New class they were going to teach or a research project they wanted to get started. And so what they were saying to me, even though I didn't have the words at that point, was they were wanting a social learning community or a community of practice. And so that's what I designed for the first iteration of it. It was a year-long program. It was for faculty from our university and Northwest Union College, the tribal college nearby, Balingham Technical College and Wat Community College, so the before higher ed institutions in our county. And so that was how it worked. And we met monthly. And I organized people into interdisciplinary groups just long according to their schedules or less. And we came together and tried to have a format that would let us learn about each other, learn about each other's work, get people connected with community organizations. that would make sense for them to connect with and to just have a space for for connection and At about 50 people involved that first year and it's I've so many stories about how it's evolved But the the trajectory of evolution has been Just bringing more and more types of people into that space over time. So the second year was Why don't we have People that lead nonprofits and are in government in the program as well So we're not talking about them as separate community partners They're just fellows along with the faculty then why don't we bring in staff from the university and from the community colleges too Not just people that are in a faculty role. Why don't we have a program in a rural community? So we're bridging the urban rural divide. Why don't we create one that's about connecting the indigenous and non-indigenous people? Why don't we create some spaces where we're getting us some cross-border work and we're having Canadians and Americans talking with each other What if we had a program for people in Africa talking with each other about their community-based work? So it's expanded in those different directions as I've been able to partner with different conveners in in those different communities to have legitimacy there and to bring in more types of people we also pair them with high schools now and have intergenerational cohorts with high schoolers and adults Learning together, which has just been beautiful and wonderful and such an education for me about how to hold that kind of space So that's been the trajectory and we've just used that community engagement fellows kind of container to do these social learning experiments to try to create rich important spaces for these different kinds of communities This is very interesting because it's a quite a different flavor than other communities that I Featured on the pod. So it definitely picks my curiosity and maybe for those of us listening Well including myself that are maybe I know where of the world of universities and higher ed and I think you mentioned community learning or community-based work And I think I got interested in that particularly when you mention how you expanded the types of people or the the profile of the people from first just people in the university to Really a variety of different profiles, but the red thread still was this interest in community-based work Now for those of us that do not know what that is. What is community-based work? Can you color a bit like what if the projects or ideas? What how does this show up in the world? Like what are these members busy with what are they doing? Because they're coming from all of these different now background like us or interests, but still they need to have the shared language of something and it sounds to me that community-based work is the red thread still, but I don't know what that is so Can you help us out what does that look like in real life? What would yeah? What would some of these projects be? Yeah, I'm just thinking of like last week we were in we were finishing up our cohort that is with our Civic students at auctions high school in Valingham and then a variety of community members in different roles and we have the students bringing their interest in Like how can I get involved with supporting other youth in their in mental health crises? I feel like I see these things happening to my friends to my siblings. I Don't know what my role can be how can I? How can it can you help me with that work? And so what we can do when that person's bringing that question and their motivation to the space we can say Hey, have you thought about this do you know about this community resource? Do you know that there's? a committee in the city government working on that you know about this organization This person we can connect you with them So what we're trying to do is always we're trying to draw someone from their own motivation their own Desire to make a difference in the community. We're trying to connect them into the broader network of other people that care about that Same stuff. Yeah, so if you're a professor, let's say you're a professor that's like I'm gonna teach this new You know, we had a wonderful friend of mine that teaches at Wacom community college who came here and said I'm teaching literature My specialty is Latinx Literature and cultures, but I don't see that in the curriculum of the community college right now I want to create a space. I want to learn who are the Latinx Hispanic writers from the Pacific Northwest How can we create a space for students with those identities to be able to talk about their work and see each other and understand? That they are seen and that they are important and that the voices of people who they connect with are being centered in our classes So it's things like that. It's that people yes come with their different motivations and their challenges and then we We use that to drive the learning for each other because yes Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yes. I love it. Yeah, so I could give you tons tons of examples That's what are the kinds of things people are doing or you know even building a big institution like I want to start a school And I don't know how to do that. We're gonna start a new type of school Let's get started with that and we've we've watched things like that Evolved to over the years as we kept working together. Yes I almost want to say it's like an enablements community for community builders So if you have any kind of project of any shape for mint flavor that involves bringing groups of people together to mobilize them towards a share like a share transformation and They need help they need sharpening they need ideas. They need support They will find that supports and camaraderie and Resources in the community engagement fellows almost like a community for community builders. Yeah, I guess yeah Yeah, for sure and part of it its identity work too that we're helping people see themselves as Community builders as community leaders and whether whether it's a high school or it's a college professor Tenured college professor or the buddy on the city council is to help them see oh Here's what I my gifts and my abilities and my what I can do in my role and part of my work is Connecting with all these other people that care about these things too. It's not to protect my territory and say this is my project And I'm gonna guard it closely. It's to say what is the purpose? What are you trying to see happen and it's not about you? It's about that change that you're trying to make so who can you bring alongside you? How can you come alongside other people that are doing that work as well because we have a we have a deep cultural problem of wanting to be the center of the universe Mmm, and we're socialized to do that. We try we say those things to children and Adults all the time. You're so you know, you're the one that's gonna make the difference. It's like You only make the difference together. We're gonna we're gonna resolve or transform our communities We need to work together and we need to practice yeah, yeah trying to provide those spaces I love that I'm also intrigued by how you've expanded kind of the circle of type of people and members that are welcome to join because I think myself in good whenever I think about community I'm I'm kind of like That circle where you draw the circle of who's in and who's out that's like such a fine line because Too close up you get into Groups thing and lack of inspiration and lack of innovation Too broad and you might dilute because we might sit around the table look at each other and be like I don't know why you're talking about like that so foreign to me So I might fail to draw value out of that So I think I wonder when you bring together all of this variety of sectors and generations and world views and and people are showing up I think I wonder what were some of the benefits that you saw by this Open this up like were there any trade-offs that you had to make like have you paid a price for that And what did you gain as a result? It's a great question. That is a great question I feel like I've had like three conversations in the last week that touch into that Because because there are trade-offs every choice here I we're we've been making in Is a trade-off of Trying to make our best guess of How we can generate value for people and not run ourselves ragged and Continue learning as a convening team also. So we're trying to balance all of those things And so there is a trade-off if you bring high school students you say we're gonna have this group with high school students you have to do a lot more work to find Well some adults say that sounds great. I totally see the value of that what an opportunity. This is precious Amazing other people say I work with high schoolers all the time What's so special about that? I want to be in a space of other important people And so we have I one example as I think we have as we've Moved it away from being a faculty centered program into a really broad diverse program The the number of faculty from western that have that are actively participating right now in the cohorts kind of the core part of the program is smaller In part, and there are lots of reasons for that. Faculty are overwhelmed and burnt out. And there's all kinds of post COVID budget structural reasons for those things. But it also is that we're creating spaces that aren't propping up people's sense of professional status and pride as much that we're bringing people into a very horizontal space to say. The idea that this high schooler has is they're just as important as you, if you're the mayor, you know, we've got high schoolers and mayors in the same group and department chairs and directors. And I love the challenge of creating those spaces. And I see how real and profound the learning can be in those spaces. But it's a bigger lift to get some people to want to be in those spaces. And so absolutely. I mean, that's one of the hardest parts of doing this kind of convening work is to try to make those guesses, try to entice people in, but then not feel diminished or deflated when people don't see the value of the space that's being created. And instead, try to focus most energy on the people that do see the value of it and that are showing up and are transforming their work and their communities because of the work that they're doing in those spaces. But it's hard. It's hard to do that. I see you. Yeah. That's why you had this conversation because it's very-- yeah, it's hard to navigate. And sometimes, I think, you know, if I were to search for a metaphor for what it means to work in community or build community, I see almost like this, like a blob, you know, that you kind of try to put in a shape, but it will just move and take different shapes and take all sorts of weird shapes that you cannot control because it will do-- it has its own mind, right? So it will go-- it will shift in unexpected forms. And you describe this. You mentioned-- and you're bringing up social learning so often in your answers. And you then describe the community engagement fellows as a social learning community. So there's the strong, central concept to the type of work that you're doing. For our listeners who are maybe not as familiar with the concept of social learning, how would you describe it? And what should we imagine that happens when you bring a group of people together in a social learning space? What should we visualize? Yeah. To visualize people sitting in a circle, first of all, not sitting in bolted down chairs and rows. And doing things that help them learn about each others, who they are, who each other are, where they come from, what they're motivated by, what they're working on, and that that is the center of-- that's where the learning is going to happen. It's by drawing those things out of people and helping them talk about their work, talk about their observations, talk about the things that they're passionate about, and to then help them generate a variety of types of learning. And Beverly and Etienne Wenger trainer have done so much work to describe what can happen in those spaces. And we've developed things like these talk tiles that we've talked about that help people notice the types of learning that happen in these kinds of social learning environments. And here I've got talk tiles in Spanish and English here, but I'm just going to go-- this is a potential value. So people generate new feelings in these kinds of spaces, and that is important and matters. New potential-- this is potential value, possibilities, possibly that is. So its new connections are made. New-- you start to see, oh, I know that person. Oh, I didn't know that concept. Oh, here's a new tool I can use in my work. OK, that's cool. Actions-- it's not just that we're getting together and talking. We're applying that-- those new connections out into the world and experimenting in our work, because we want to see tangible changes or convios happen. And it doesn't happen in a vacuum. We need to support each other. We need to create-- we're creating this learning environment together. And so we have to pay attention to what makes it possible. We have to think about who we are. So ideally, social learning spaces are helping us think about who am I in this space? Who am I as a community member? Who am I as an anthropologist or a person, tribal leader, a city council person, a firefighter? Why does this learning matter? That's strategic value. And what is the landscape? This we use paisahe for place. This is orienting value in their theory. So how do I understand myself? And how do I understand the landscape of the work, the history of the place that I'm in, the biology of the place that I'm in, the organizational landscape, and how can I better navigate that landscape? So what we're trying to do in our learning environments and using tools like cocktails is to try to help people pay attention to those different dimensions of life and learning and to then move things forward for themselves and articulate, oh, because I'm in this space, I'm thinking of my work differently. Oh, I tried this new thing out because I met so and so then we got together and we put this event together and we saw this thing happen. So we're trying to give people spaces to start talking about how their lives and their work are transforming. Hmm. Wow. I have so many threats to pull here. First of all, four art listeners that are not watching, they cannot see us. Do you want to describe the talk tiles? Like tell us how many are they? What are they? How do they look like? I gather that you created them. Tell us a bit about this tool. Sure. So just imagine that people can't see them. I just saw them. So people can't see them. Describe it to them so that they can visualize them and imagine how they might use them in their work. Definitely. So about three years ago, we were trying to think about how to help the people in the community engagement fellows program more easily talk about the different types of learning that they were experiencing. And I knew that I had-- I and the other members of the convening team had the social learning value creation framework in our minds, but not all the fellows did. And we found it awkward to try to explain that whole theory to them. It didn't-- it wasn't really the point. So we needed some kind of tool. So I looked for-- I thought, why don't we find an object that can kind of represent those different things. And luckily, for me, my son, Oliver, who was three at the time, had a big box full of dominoes of different colors. And I found eight different colors of dominoes and decided, OK, each of these is going to represent one of the value creation cycles. So when you're thinking of talk tiles, you should picture eight colorful dominoes, all yellow, green, white, red, orange. They all have different words on them that relate to different dimensions of social learning. So there's one says, in English, we have them in a bunch of languages. But in English, the words are feelings, possibilities, actions, changes, support, identity, importance, and place. And we use them in a variety of ways, but we often will just put a set out in a basket or on the table and say, pick one word that'll help you talk about where you're at in the conversation right now or will help you talk about how this challenge that someone has brought to the group is settling with you, is sitting with you, you might say, oh, you've really brought this challenge related to stream restoration into this. And it really makes me remember that I was involved. That's a part of my identity that I haven't connected with. But I was involved in that kind of work 20 years ago. And it's really bringing back my memories of that kind of work and the challenges of it. So we're trying to help use that tool to help people relate to each other in a simple but deep and profound way. Thank you very much for describing them. They're beautiful. I also found a little link that explains what they are, how we can use them. So I'll just make sure to link that in a show notes for our listeners to have a look. So what I hear Travis and you correct me if I'm wrong or I got this wrong is very rarely you will actually have a set agenda around a topic and bring a piece of content that you would teach people and so on. So I gather that the way we should imagine this is less as stewards of buckets of content or expertise and more as stewards of space and maybe even facilitators of conversations if I could call us like that. So when you bring people together, you don't know what will emerge, what they will decide to talk about. But do you sometimes have topics like-- Obviously you mentioned that you're working with high school. So probably you kind of set a, or our topic and then people will come in, but you don't have slides, you don't bring models, you don't bring content, you don't teach them anything. You basically bring the talk tires, you put them in the middle, you said, okay, today we're talking about this general topic. Let's take a little domain, let's take a little piece and start the thread and see where this takes us. Is that, do I imagine that correctly? It's kind of a bold, it's a great question because yes, we, I'd say are creating structures for social learning to happen. So there is a lot of structure in the gatherings that we have, but there, but we are not filling the content. We're instead creating, catalyzing, opportunity. So a typical event for our cohort might be, we gather together, someone shares some thoughtful, opening words, we kind of share in that to kind of center people. Then we do an activator of some kind, we might use the talk tiles or we might use some other tool that just gets people up and talking with each other in small groups or partners. And it might be oriented around one of the talk tile words. We've been doing that more, say, hey, today we're going to just be really paying attention to new possibilities that are opening up. Who are we, what connections are we making, what's happening and maybe we'll hold that as kind of a theme. Now we're going to get together, we're going to organize ourselves into three different design clinics. And we haven't talked about design clinics yet, but they're just this central tool where someone in the group asks for help with their work and we use that request to drive the learning forward for the group. It's about a 20 minute process, but we'll let's go set up, let's learn who has a request for the group. We'll set ourselves up in groups, we'll go off and do those small group design clinics and then we'll come back and do a bit of a reflection and have someone provide some closing words. And that's a lovely structure. Please anybody borrow that structure, just go and do that with your groups forever or do something better, but that's enough. And I think so many facilitators and conveners don't think that's enough. And it totally is. It is, it's allowing the people in the space to fill it with their brilliance, to fill it with their care. And you don't have to fill it for them. They are full, wonderful people on their own if you just let them fill that space. We have to trust, we have to trust that the people have both the questions and the answers or the solutions. If we give them the time to think and the space and the build the right conditions for that trust to emerge, to open up and to share even half-baked ideas, even things that you probably thought like, oh, they're not valuable. They're not used for they're too basic and almost always someone else in the group is like, oh, actually, that's goal. That's exactly the thing I need. And you're like, really, oh, that's nothing. So it's very interesting to see. So it's more the, it more sounds to me like facilitation, facilitating those structures. And I think about liberating structures. Have you been using them in your work as well? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many great resources. The New Year practice or Commune New to practice book that that Bevinette Tiantenville and Cloud Road and liberating structures. There's just so many useful different ways of doing things. I think I've been driven to try to find consistency and simplicity in facilitating social learning spaces because I'm really interested in making it accessible for other facilitators. I work with a lot of, I work with a team of indigenous young adults that I co-facilitate with. And I want it to be, well, I want to use methods that we all feel like we've co-created and we see each other in, but also that are not overwhelmingly complicated so that we can say, I mean, like we did last week in another group, say, hey, it's your turn to facilitate. You're going to keep time for this design clinic. You're going to lead us through the prompts. You're going to take notes. I'm not going to be the one being the expert facilitator. I'm just going to be a group member because part of our purpose is driving our social learning capability as a community. And if me as the middle-aged leader of the program does all that work, holds that space always, I'm getting in the way of their growth. So, but to have methods that are simple, to have tools like talk tiles is like, hey, I can teach a second grader how to use talk tiles in one minute and they get it intuitively. And now we're often running, learning together. I absolutely adore that because sometimes myself included, I tend to like, we'll spend a lot of time on that. I have to say, and I love that. I love experience design. I love the situation. So sometimes I spend so much time and very often it happened to me that I overcomplicated things. And it was something that I only realized in the moment of the event, like in the moment of the gathering or afterwards. And there's beauty and simplicity. So, thank you for that nugget there. And you mentioned design cleaning. So Travis, I guess I can't let you not share a little bit what are design clinics and also how do we run them successfully? Like, what should we pay attention to? Yeah. Well, my entry point into design clinics was through, I mentioned before we were recording that I met Beverly and at the end, Wenger trainer in 2017 because I met them because somebody in community engagement fellows at the end of one of our meetings said, "Hey, Travis, I have to go back to my team and tell them about what I'm doing in this program." And she said, "What is this?" And I said, and my response was initially going to be, "Oh, it's a faculty learning community because I had that frame in mind when the program started and I'd read that literature, but we had to expand it beyond faculty from the university. She was worked for a nonprofit organization, a women's shelter in town." And I said, "I'll have to get back to you. I don't have a good answer." And I dug back into the faculty learning community's literature, found communities to practice, found Beverly and Etienne and said, "Oh, this is great. I think this is what I'm doing. I should go to one of their workshops and learn." So at the workshop that I went to, I saw them, they had us all use case clinics to talk about our work. And for me, that was so much better than what I had been doing before. I had been having people write project proposals and bring them to the group. And that could generate good learning, but we were centering certainty rather than centering uncertainty. And so case clinics flips that over and we had to say, "What do you need help with? What are you struggling with?" And we just took off with that and said, "Okay, how can we adapt this model for community engagement fellows? How can we center it really explicitly on the design of people's work?" So renamed it design clinic. And how do we kind of make the process simpler and easier to facilitate and more as rich as we can make it in learning? So we've been practicing with them. Anyway, a design clinic is a simple process that can be simple. Someone asks for help. Could you help me? And gives a bit of context. The group then asks them to share more about that. Step two, share more about, give us more of an idea of what that is. We do that for about four minutes. Then the group talks about what the challenge makes them think of. So it's kind of a way to build empathy for that challenge to see ourselves in the challenge, to think about how it connects with other things that we've done in our lives. Then we provide some suggestions. Gentle, we might try, or you might try, for a couple of minutes. And then the person that offered the request gets to reflect and say, what we have them thinking. And they don't have to tell us what ideas they like or they don't like. They can just say, "Thank you." They can say, "I wish I would have asked the question in a different way." So that's a basic simple design clinic. There are more elaborations that you can make on it. We can do it with seven steps. You can do it with eight steps. You can involve talk tiles. There's a whole bunch. But the basic simple thing is just someone asking for help. And then the group working through that challenge with them to generate learning for everybody. Because it's not about solving that person's problem. It's about using that problem to learn together. Yes. When I experience it at the social learning lab in Cecimbra, a year ago, two years ago, I remember thinking, "Wow, it's like in Alan D. Sheikers in the community that I am co-leading, we used very often this format called Intervision. Very simple. You bring a challenge, you ask questions, and then you jump into ideas. I think Liberating Structures has Troika Consulting, which is very similar format. There's something called Co-development. I think a format. So there's different formats. But I remember specifically when I experienced my first design clinic or case clinic, like they call it, I remember how they were so specific and firm with the step in which that you embed in between questions. Like, "Oh, let's explore the problem a little bit." And possible ideas or solutions, which is the step of this reminds me of. And I see you smile because I thought, like, "Oh, while we're doing that, like when they explain it, I was like, why are we doing that? Like, I want to go to solutions, I want to go to ideas. Obviously, that's why I bring a challenge here, right? Like, give me the juicy things." And it was fascinating when we experienced it, how much of a difference. that makes and also how much learning there is in that phase. In the phase where you're like, "Okay, I heard the challenge. We asked some questions." And now everyone around the room, and sometimes there would be like stretches of silence because people would have to actually digest and go and dig deeper into how does this connect to me? Where have I lived? Something similar, very different. And I remember people being, "Hmm, what this reminds me of, and the most interesting, rich, beautiful stories will come to life." Very often stories that on a surface were unrelated to the challenge at hand. And yet, always the challenge holder, the person would always find a nugget in that, apparently seemingly unrelated thing. And it feels like it also opens up a bit too possibility. And then, only then you would move into an idea could be an experiment you could run, what you could try, what you could do. Have you had the same experience? Absolutely. Hundreds of times. Yes. Yes. How fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you're making me think of how what's happening there, what we want to have happen is for people feel like they're important and their work is important. And this reminds me of is doing that. We also are trying to get the group to not have a tournament for who is the smartest person in the room that has the right idea. And this reminds me of breaks that. It decenters that. It makes it not about who has the brilliant idea that they can jump to solve that person's problem. So it creates more equity in the space. It takes the energy down from where we can sometimes get in professional settings, especially where we're kind of like ready to jump in and have the right idea say, this is not about that. This is about connection. This is about deep learning. This is a hard question. It doesn't have any easy answers. Let's be patient with it. Let's honor it and honor the wide-ranging life experiences in the space. And then we'll get to what might happen in the next. But that's not really the purpose. The purpose is seeing each other together and thinking creatively. How can we think creatively if we're just going to jump in with the first solution that comes to mind? We need that step. It's vital. And there are a lot of groups that want to skip over it. And I urge them not to, because they're just robbing themselves of a more rich worthwhile experience. Yes. I have my brain sparks. And it's true. I never-- I love brainstorming. I love brainstorming. My brain, if you bring a challenge, if you bring a question, my brain will instantly go to, here are a lot of 10 possible things that I would love you to experiment with by default. But it's true that I never really thought about this perspective that you just brought off this brainstorming. And when you jump with ideas, it can have a flavor of competitiveness to it. Is my idea better? Can I say something that's just better or more useful? So I never thought about it like that. So thank you so much for bringing that perspective to it. And how stopping to actually go in your experience to find something similar where you, when you felt or experienced something similar, is anchoring the group in some form of a shared something, a shared understanding. I think you put the word empathy into that. So it's grounding so that when we bring the ideas, we counteract this. I have a better one. Like the popcorn, like the brainstorm, the storm, right? So thank you for that. One thing about the four months, because you've already kind of thought about the talk tiles. And we talked about the clinic in your newsletter, which I'm going to, again, link at the show now. It's where you're kind of reflecting very intentionally and beautifully on your work. You shared recently, I think, two types of formats. They were actually, well, they were full session outlines. A lot of people could do when they come together and outdoors center visioning caught my eye. What is that? Well, that event, what is that organization? What is that structure or what is that? What's the format? What is it that you've done with them? Because you had a flow. Can you situate us in that example? Yeah, definitely. So I was working with my colleagues at that run the outdoor center for outdoor recreation at our university to sort of think about their next chapter of their work, Neavis. Barely a large team of mostly student employees, a few dozen students that work in different roles in their group, and they wanted to kind of help them. Think about their work together. And imagine how it can grow and evolve and change collectively. So we designed this event that gave them a chance to articulate their visions for how their work could move forward, really drawing on questions that were related to their mission statement and for their part of the university and related to the Wenger trainer value creation framework. So the core of the event was kind of a landscape set of activities where we had different stations set up around the room and with prompts that people could respond to. I love Sentin Starter Prompt. So a Sentin Starter Prompt, I could pull them up. But what's one thing we should stop doing, kind of applied value, what are ways we want to transform how we think about our work, kind of an identity thing. How do we bring joy to people? What's most important about what we're doing? And everyone in the group could add as many ideas as they wanted to sticky notes and put them around. And then we did some sharing out of-- well, we did some kind of little voting where people could put stars next to suggestions and ideas that they-- of their colleagues that they liked. So we got to hear what was happening at these different stations. And it was a wonderful way to gather a ton of data in a short amount of time. And to have them all as a group reflect on sort of where they are and even start growing and reforming their identity in the moment. That was a comment that my colleague Stu, who was the director for that center, made it. And he said, I didn't realize that this would feel like a training for the team, but that in their reflections that they share at the end, he can see already people addressing some of the problems that existed in different parts of their work and saying, hey, I want to show up in a different way. I hear what you're all saying. We can evolve. So there's so much power in a space like that. If you can just let people share what they're thinking, often not in only one way. And not only speaking, but writing or other formats and give people some patient time to read and engage with what their colleagues, what their friends, what their neighbors have shared. A huge amount of learning and work can happen there where you as a facilitator aren't having to do very much. You're just directing people to go to the next prompt or to say, hey, let's hear from one person from each of these groups. It's, again, I didn't have to say very much. And Stu, as a leader, didn't have to say very much. But it was really a wonderful way for him to do leadership development and team building for his group in a short, efficient amount of time. We just did it in an hour and a half. And evening, we ate pizza together. Everyone left feeling motivated and happy to be part of that team. So I love that. I mean, I love-- I don't do a lot of one-off kind of events like that, but I can really see the value of them for an organization. And yeah, I hope people borrow that format or improve upon it. It would be great for you to do it. Yes. Just come up with some good prompts that relate to who your group thinks they are and use the talk tile, value creation, prompts, and words for your own setting. You can just insert your own organization into it. How interesting that you brought the word leadership into this Travis, because I think as I look the bit into your work and your writing and kind of your thinking around community building, curious question, I guess, came to mind that I haven't thought about. I'm keen to hear what surfaces for you. How do you believe that convening or community building is can be potentially like a form of leadership, even without authority very often. We bring people together and we actually try to bring everyone at the same eye level. And there's very rarely-- there's this formal authority that people are used to when they think about the world leading or leadership. Right? You need to have some form of implicit or sometimes explicit power to be a leader, whether that's a role or a year's of experience or whatever. But in community building, we don't have that very often. Or we intentionally-- even try to, even if we do have that, we try to strip it away because it kind of comes, it gets in the way of the work. So how do you believe that convening can be a form of leadership without authority? Oh, that's a big question. I think, I mean, I think our western way of thinking about leadership is so deeply tied into the patriarchy and colonial ways of thinking. I just want to name that. And I think that the traditional societies that I've been able to learn from and interact with really understand leadership in a profoundly different way. And at meaning is that the center of that, that it's the person who has legitimacy to bring people together to share and celebrate and do ceremony and do work with each other and address community problems. Those are the, you know, in our in Coastalish cultures, they're called the CMs. Those are the CMs. And they don't bring people together through a threat of violence or through a threat of you're going to get riches because you're bowing to my authority. They, they're the culture holders. They're the people saying, we are important. We are a people. We are together. And being together, we need to come together to recognize the worth of the different parts of our community. And we need to figure out how to solve our problems. And I think, I think that, you know, that type of leadership is what our species is good at. It's what has helped us evolve and be the amazing beings that we are. But we have many parts of our society have forgotten that. We've been, we've forgotten that because of capitalism, because of colonialism, because of lots of isms, that that get in the way that get in the way of of things that we know better, we know better, we know, we know the people that we trust and want to follow. They're the adults that behave in a dignified and gentle way. And that help other people feel valued and seen and that they have dignity also. And I think that's the work of a leader. The work of a leader is to help other people understand their importance and their efficacy and their responsibility to serve others, to be a part of a community with a human community and the biological community. Because that's the truth. We are all that, but we are given messages constantly that we are not that and we're getting messages about leadership that are profoundly not that by the so-called leaders that we see in the news that are not being leaders. They're being selfish, offering something else. Something else. They're being something else. They're degrading that reality of our interest. So I almost wanted to say thank you very much for that. I almost wanted to distill it into it is community building convening work is at its core. It's pure, it's pure leadership because if people are willing to pay with their time and their presence to be in a space that someone opens and holds that is at its core, core, the definition of leadership, one thing to be in that space. I remember that at the start of the conversation you mentioned and I'm going to try to remember, I'm probably not going to remember your exact words, but you said something in the lines of in community work, we have to focus on the people who show up and very often I think in a lot of conversation, we do worry a lot of the people that don't show up and I wanted to bring this into the discussion with you because I think you might have a different angle on that. It's the topic of engagement. It is probably the biggest struggle when I talk to community builders in different settings. How do we get people to engage? How do we make them show up? And I'm bringing this up because I know that you're going to challenge that. You have a beautiful view on that. So I think I wonder how do you think about engagement? Is it a struggle for you? Is it keeping you up at night? Like it's keeping all of us and how do you get people to gather and to care and to learn from each other? Good. Man, you have good questions. So people want to show up because they want to show up in spaces where they feel important and they feel that their work is going to move forward. We are all much less interested in other people's projects. No one is going to show up for me because they think Travis is doing community engagement fellows and I want to show up for him because he's so passionate about it. I need to share my passion but I need to be more interested in their passions and their work and what they're trying to do and not in a fake way in a genuine way. And when this got started, I met one-on-one with every person that I was inviting into the space. We had coffee or we went for a walk or chatted at their office and I shared about what I was up to and what had led me into this work. And I wanted to know what are they up to and what are they trying to do and in their work. And so we made a real connection with each other and that is still carrying us forward years later. Even though we no longer meet one-on-one with every person when they join into the space and there are some trade-offs with that. But the core of it is that we care about each other as people and see the importance of each other's work and therefore people want to be there and show up and their friends that have been a part of that bring them in and say, "Hey, this is a good space. This is a space where you're going to be seen." I think one story that comes to mind is somebody who is fairly new to town and joined in one of our cohorts and is from a minority ethnic population made the comment. In most community spaces, you can be about 20% real. Like for a person like them, don't really do your real self bring the little part of yourself that's acceptable and that their comment was in these community engagement fellow spaces, I feel like I can bring a bigger percentage of my real self and I could see that person doing that week by week as we were meeting, sharing a little bit more genuine observation or hard things they were experiencing and it was one of the only spaces I was talking with them this month. But they said, "That was three years ago. This was one of the only spaces where they felt like they could be their genuine self." They didn't think that they'd still live here if they hadn't been able to be in a space like that and be more real and be seen for the interesting talented person that they are because they get so many spills and so many other spaces that they're a marginal, not important person. Which is terrible to hear. I wish that that was not true. But it's like, that's what we need to be doing and that's what all of you community builders find ways to do that, to help people feel seen and important and structure what you're doing so that people can move the work forward that they most care about. So you're learning what they most care about and if they can push that forward, not just in their narrow role at their office ideally. But why they're doing that work at all? What they care about as a person and bring, let that come out of people. People want that. They love that. They don't get that from Instagram. They don't get that from the international media. They don't get that from anything. Unfortunately, many things in our present world. They are. But you can create that for them. And it's actually not that hard. Use talk tiles and design clinics. And it'll happen. People will say that. I feel seen. I feel motivated. I feel happier about being part of this company, this community. It totally will work. So I take a few things here. The goal or the core, the thing that we should actually care about isn't when we think about engagement is not how do I get them to XYZ. It's the core of it all is, how can I learn what is important to these people on a personal level and what's the progress or the change they want to make into the world? And how I get to that is different. I might invest in one-on-ones and genuine open, real conversations and connections with people where I share a piece and I invite them to share their piece. Or I can actually go into this social learning, pretty quality technology, I think you mentioned. The social learning technology, which is these formats, the tools that by design invite people to feel valued, be seen and talk about their work in a meaningful way. If I can give you another example of this, we had just from yesterday, we had a walk and County Immigration Forum. So we have a lot of upheaval around our immigrant communities. Right now, a lot of tension, a lot of terrible things happening. And so we had a gathering of about 120 people with different roles, people in police chiefs, people from foreign consulates, people in elected roles, people that do community-based work, all coming together to talk about how we can better support immigrant communities. And this is a brand new group. They've never been together. They've never had a social learning experience. So that was the challenge for us as an organizing team. How can we bring people into a social learning space with their wide variety of cultures around how we meet? And who we are, but it can be done. We open the space, we'll open the space with a little story about how indigenous cultures have been welcoming to all of us. We'll have my friend, Klausel Mott, Sadie Olsen, Lummy, Young Woman, saying a welcoming song for us. We shared a little, then we led people into some partner conversations to say, talk with a partner for two minutes about a time you felt welcomed in a new community. And then talk with another partner about one hope that you're bringing with you today. Okay, we've done that. Now we're gonna have a panel of people that have distinctive roles in our society, in our community, talk about a hope that they've brought with them today. Okay, so we get to hear a bit from them. Now we're gonna do, we, you know, adapted design clinic. Let's share more about who has a share more about for our panelists. So we learn more of the context of what's happening. Okay, now we're getting, we're in a social learning space together, we're talking about deep, terrible, dark things and super challenges, but we're doing it in a way that's generative, it's not accusing anyone, it's not ranting, it's generative. We do that this makes me think of, this reminds me of who else is feeling what things? What are the suggestions that we have? And then we close with sitting in a group and have a talk to our conversation. Use one of those words to help you talk about where you're seeing yourself in that work. What kinds of next steps might you take we heard from the panel? So even it being, this is the most difficult issue our community's dealing with, poignantly right now, and we were able to create a rich social learning experience for 100 plus people for three hours. We did that. So you all do that too. You can create social learning without a huge amount of complexity. You just, and you know, use, and that was, and we centered it around one question, right? How can we create a more welcoming and supportive community for immigrants and just kept ourselves with that question and did these different activities around it? So thank you for sharing that. You can do it. Arrow that format. Maybe I'll put that on the, on Joy of Convening also. Yes. I make sure to link your newsletters. Travis, we, this was fascinating. Thank you so much for all the practicalities that you've brought and for sharing your view on community building. And I would actually, this idea just came to me as you, because you talked a lot. I know you have to talk to us next to you. So to close us off the conversation, I invite you to go back to the Travis, I think it was 2015 when you started this kind of work with community engagement followers. So it's been a while now. And if you were to draw a parallel from Travis back then and Travis today, what has most changed in how you see community and how you see yourself from back then to then? And I invite you to choose a talk tile to answer this question and see what inspired, which title inspires you to answer it? Okay, wait, say the first part of that question again. When you think about the person that you were 16 years ago when the community engagement fellows started and the person that you are now, what changed most in how you see community and how you see yourself? - I think community, I'm looking at the play style or Paisahe landscape. And I think we tend to think, and probably I tend to think of, we can romanticize community as a uniform thing that we are a part of and that we can take for granted. And I think that I continue to learn more and more all the time that we are all navigating a different landscape but a landscape that overlaps with our neighbors and overlaps with people in the past and people in the future. And so I've learned to be more attentive to learning what the landscape looks like for different people and not taking it for granted that the way I see the landscape is the way that anybody else sees the landscape. And so that comes to mind. - That's beautiful. - I'm looking at the identity tile and you're part of your question about how I see myself in the work. I kind of alluded to this before, but I think we are socialized in so many ways to think that we are the center of the universe. And I think that's part of my socialization too. And I'm a go-getter who is a good student and love to be the one talking and experience myself as a good teacher, right? A teacher in my 20s that could stand in front of a lecture hall and inspire other young people and old people. And I think when I started community engagement fellows, I imagined a bit more of that. Like I was gonna be this orchestrator of some profound thing and people were going to, their identities were going to be centered around that work in some way and maybe around me. And I think I have learned, you know, I'm 43 now, I have three kids, I've done this work for a while and I've learned that what's important is gently with as few actions as possible, trying to help profound connection and learning happen that is okay for me to be invisible. It's okay for me to be visible, but it's also okay for me to be invisible. And that the work that's happening is what's important. And the ethic of and practice of not holding tight to or not centering the value of myself is deeply important. Back to my, you know, my Joker comment about yesterday and my daughter saying, yeah, you could make a lot of money spelling these talk tiles and maybe like, that's not really what it's about, right? I don't care about that. I'm delighted I get to work at a university, I'm delighted I can support my family that way. And at the end of the day, what's important is that we solve the challenges that we have as a species that we remember who we are, our profound interconnections and our responsibilities to each other. And that's what the work is. And that's what I love about your podcast and all the work you're doing is that you're helping us learn how to do that better and helping people find connections and new ways of doing that. So it's incredibly important, just really delighted that you let me be a part of it. - Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing. I wanna leave our listeners with this last question and your reflection. And I invite everyone to take a moment as well to answer that question for themselves. And sit with a bit of curiosity and see what what surfaces and willing the talk tiles in the show notes. So if you're curious, you can call the imaginary talk tiles as well from the list. (laughs) Travis, thank you very much for your time and for your generosity in sharing your journey so far. I have learned a lot. It is enough the day for me, but my brain is on fire and I have used the thing for that. And I wish you a beautiful rest of the day and I hope to catch up with you very soon. - Great, thank you so much. It's just been a pleasure. You got me thinking as well. (upbeat music)