Tangled Up In Blue

In reflecting on the World Cafe event, I was thinking about how I didn't get a chance to participate deeply in the conversations. As the facilitator, I walked around and monitored the group, but it wasn't the same as being in the thick of it. In a sense, this made me a bit of an outsider to my own team.

I've been reading about organizational design and strategy recently, too. One of the points made in my reading is that by choosing to do some activity, an organization is concurrently choosing NOT to do something else. It's simply a natural byproduct of the process.

In the case of the World Cafe, I chose the role of designer and facilitator. A byproduct of that choice is that I could not be both fully in the facilitator role and in the participant role.

While I'm celebrating the success of my breakout into a new role, at the same time I'm mourning that loss of shared participation and identification with my team.