Dave Pollard's Page

Professional Skills

Knowledge Management, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation (Open Space)

What is your main interest in this network?

Education, Improv Resources

What kind of person are you?

Night

What kinds of improv-related services are you involved in?

Teambuilding, Problem Solving, Life Skills, Presentation Skills

Share a favorite 'improv epiphany'

We are obsessed with our stories, and they are all fiction. Improv lets us live in the Now, instead of inside our heads inside our stories.

More about you: (Short Bio or any other details you'd like people to know)

1. My usual 'bio':

Dave Pollard is the author of the weblog How to Save the World
(howtosavetheworld.ca), which documents what he's learned about how the world
really works, and how we might create better ways to live and make a living.
His first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to
Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, was published last year.

Dave has over thirty years' business experience advising entrepreneurs about
innovation, research, sustainability, collaboration, coping with complexity,
and the effective use of knowledge and social media. He believes that life's
meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges most often from
conversation in community with people you love.

2. What I care about:

(a) I think our globalized, growth-economy based, oil-dependent, unsustainable,
unresilient civilization is going to crash in this century, no matter what we
do, and our descendants are going to suffer monstrously when it happens.

(b) I think industrial agriculture (and animal factory farming in particular)
is a horrifically cruel and wasteful system that contributes massively to
climate change, deforestation, impoverishment of soil and loss of biodiversity.

(c) I believe that the greatest challenge we face in this century is finding
the right partners to collaborate with, in our personal lives, in enterprise,
in political activism and in community.

(d) I believe we need to de-school our society, and relearn the process of
self-directed learning focused on developing critical knowledge and capacities
such as understanding how the world really works, acquiring self-knowledge and
self-understanding, learning how to discover what we are meant to do, and
learning how to deal with complex issues.

3. Why I'm here:

For 30 years I have witnessed dysfunctional groups, mostly in business, that
are hobbled by their inability to converse effectively, and hence their
inability to convey important information, to make informed decisions, and to
learn. This dysfunction spans every aspect of conversation, from who is invited
to the conversation, to when and why and how conversations occur, to how they
are conducted, to the (in)capacities of the conversants, to what is listened
to, what is heard, how it is accepted and how it is acted upon.

As a result I've studied and written extensively about conversation. Two
examples from my blog are:
Ideas for Better Conversations (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/04/06.html)
and Five Hurdles to Effective Communication & Conversation
(http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/06/20.html).

Mostly I'm here because the four things I've listed above, the things I care
about, cannot be solved without effective dialogue and collaboration on a
massive scale, and effective conversation and communication is essential to
this. I have written that facilitation is the most important skill of the 21st
century, and believe that facilitating group conversations is integral to that
(http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/10/02.html).

What I bring to the group, mostly, is a deep knowledge of what does NOT work in
group conversation -- in business meetings, in conference presentations, and in
work 'teams'. I know a fair bit about knowledge transfer, systems thinking and
social complexity. I am also a reasonably competent writer, if that skill
should be useful to the group.

I need help with...

Just about everything. When it comes to improv, I'm completely unpracticed.

Blog or other personal website

http://howtosavetheworld.ca

Check out my...(book, workshop, etc.)

http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/finding_the_sweet_spot:p...

Skype Name (Skype.com is the most popular free internet audio/text chat and more)

davepollard

Twitter Name (Twitter.com is the most popular 'hyper blog' client, enabling instant updates)

davepollard

How did you hear about this network?

About 5 of your members mentioned it to me.