Last week, I spent almost four days in Manchester participating in the AI Network. This self-organising network of appreciative and strengths-focused advisers, facilitators and practitioners of all descriptions, has met 12 times across Europe over the last five years. The event is structured around Open Space and World Cafe technology, which provides highly engaging ways for groups to connect, combine and co-create.
Across a series of short yet intensive sessions we covered a wide range of themes and subjects, including imagining a new Europe through the use of AI, case studies of successful change across all sectors using appreciative and strengths-focused methods, on-site visits to community projects using AI in live action for the benefit for the community, sharing ideas to create commercial markets for these approaches and to improve our practice plus so many more.
The power of the network event lies in the knowledge and wisdom colleagues' bring to the sessions and of course in the time we spend together between the sessions. The experiences we share are based in the practical, hard-edged, real-time world, helping individuals,teams, groups, organisations and whole communities to develop, grow and change. This change has to be sustainable, repeatable and maintainable, yet unique to every situation. That's why the approaches we use in the appreciative world are not the simplistic, formulaic, 'four-box' models as promoted by some consultants. These are ethical, principle and science-based approaches, concentrating on facilitating the knowledge and skills of the client-community, not on the 'expert' knowledge of the consultant that often create a dependency culture in the client.
Our goal is to help our clients create insights, build knowledge and develop capacity as rapidly as practicable. Our work frees the client to identify their talents, build on their strengths, dream their futures and create their own destinies. The examples we have from practice span all sectors, countries, cultures and interests; they are both energising and real.
Check out the networkplace.eu for the latest in the news of AI in Europe and beyond. There are regional AI networks gradually starting to emerge in the UKand the UK AI network has been flourishing for several years. All can be accessed by this link: http://www.networkplace.eu/web/page.aspx?sid=736
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