Live Radio Interview on NVC & Parenting with South East Radio

I'm going to be interviewed on Wednesday 17th at 10:35 on South East Radio. I'll be talking about my presentation on NVC and Parenting at the Irish API Conference in the Glenroyal Conference Centre, Maynooth, Co. Kildare this Friday 19th May. The interview will last about 15 minutes.

You will be able to listen to the broadcast live via the South East Radio website.

Rory's Story Cubes - today's story

In the run-up to the release of the latest version of Rory's Story Cubes, I thought it might be fun to post a new sequence daily-ish of a random roll of the Cubes. By challenging yourself, children, friends and colleagues to weave the sequence of icons and symbols into a story you will develop your imagination, creative thinking and storytelling skills. I've rolled the dice for today, and here is a photo of today's Story Cube symbols.

Remember, start with "Once upon a time..." and beginning with the first image to grab your attention, weave a story together that SOMEHOW links all the icons together. The challenge is to see how far you can go with one icons before having to move to the next. This will encourage you to move past the literal interpretation to find new associations. And if you are not certain what an image represents...make it up. Ask yourself, what does it look like to me. Using the Story Cubes is all about building trust in yourself and your imagination.

The five most imaginative stories (in my opinion) posted between now and the release of Rory's Story Cubes, will receive the gift of a set.

Have fun.

Bridging the Divide (One) - Video Now Online

I am really excited about being able to share with you a link at Google Video of the latest conflict-resolution film-making project called Bridging the Divide. This work is carried out with my co-facilitator Tom Magill under the banner of ESC - Escape Into Creativity.

The project took place from Oct-Dec last year and involved bringing together Ballymac and East Belfast Mission - two Protestant youth groups from East Belfast with Mornington - a Catholic youth group from South Belfast. It was co-produced with the help of Marion Campbell from Queen's Film Theatre here in Belfast.
The video is made up of:
Making of Doc - Bridging the Divide - 15mins
Short Film 1: Turn the Music Down - 5mins
Short Film 2: Hoodin' It - 3mins
Short Film 3: Don't Judge Us - 10mins

You view or download the video here.

I would really enjoy hearing and responding to any and all feedback or questions.

"Once upon a time.." Storytelling and Innovation with Rory's Story Cubes

Having just read Chuck Frey's post Enhance your creativity through storytelling and his review of A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, I thought it time to share how I developed Rory's Story Cubes and use them as an aid to innovation. Using a technique developed by Win Wenger know as Beachhead, I developed Rory's Story Cubes in an attempt to create a game that explored the use of pattern recognition. If I get a chance, I'll post the audio file of this session. I quickly prototyped a Rubik's Cube version which proved incredibly popular.

After unsuccessfully getting the International distributor of the Rubik's Cube to pick up on the idea, I developed a dice version with the help of Kate Jones and Kadon Games, as there was no copyright on their usage. Here you can see the sample version as they come of the line in China. So how do I use them? I ask the person to frame a question that they want to gain some insight into. This may be "How do I innovate our service?" or "How do we break free of clients we aren't happy with?", etc. They then roll the dice, and tell me a story that begins with "Once upon a time..." that somehow links all the images on the the dice into one coherent story. What inevitably happens is that the story that unfolds acts as a metaphor for the issue that the person is facing. By asking how does this or that event, character, location provide some insight into your question, my clients usually experience a breakthrough in their understanding of the issue, leading to greater insight and answers they had never previously considered. Rory's Story Cubes will be available by the end of May to purchase from The Creativity Hub You can try out this technique now, by checking out my previous post Rory's Story Cubes - The Counterbalance to Sudoku

Diagram Illustrating our 'Sidebands of Awareness'

I've wanted to share with you a diagram that I use to visually explain Win Wenger's Sidebands of Awareness. For ease of access, I've also included the full text of his article below.

SIDEBANDS - SO BEAUTIFULLY SIMPLE
by Win Wenger
While some of the tens of thousands of things going on in your mind but outside your focus are trivial and unrelated, many others definitely are neither trivial nor unrelated and, when examined, prove to be a very powerful part of our thinking and perceiving. We just hadn’t been noticing them. When noticed, and examined, they are proving to be quite useful — indeed, quite powerfully useful.
These are the "Sidebands" of your awareness, a rich and fertile source, a veritable motherlode of valuable information. Now we are examining several strategies for capturing or eliciting some of these “Sidebands” of ongoing aswareness.
What's so beautiful about "Sidebands" is that almost ANYthing you do in reference to something, and then are alert for relevant perceptions to come into focus of awareness during discrete times afterward, will have something of this effect. This whole thing is getting so very simple that it's beyond belief.
One of our more successful experiments with this is simply to write a problem statement, question, or matter you want to understand, and WHILE writing it pay attention to and note down your sidebands, your secondary awarenesses and associations relating to the matter. Then change your handwriting - block print is the way we ran the second part - the same statement and even the same wording - and again record what comes up for you this time when you do so. Then a third cut with the same statement or question in the same words but with an exotic handwriting very different from yours, and again record the new secondaries that come up. (Other ways to vary the "medium" would be with differently colored paper, differently colored ink, lined and unlined and graph paper, different formats on your computer.) Then LOOK at one of your written pieces, notice the further sidebands; look at your next written variant and again notice the different STYLE of secondaries which are coming up for you on it, and then the third.
As simple as that - try it and you will generate major new insights you never had before. That easily.
And almost ANYthing you do, in context of the question or issue, while staying alert for a discrete interval of time for such sidebands or relevant secondaries to emerge for you, will bring into your conscious focus such insights! Unbelievably simple! Everyone reading this: you are missing something great if you don't try this, simple as it is, easy as it is.
This is so COUNTER to how we were raised to think of thinking, to think of grit-your-teeth mental effort, to think of the great and extraordinary suffer-suffer effort of somehow being a genius, something only a very few mysteriously could do and the rest of us moping around in outer darkness.
Hey: it takes only a few minutes; try this utter simplicity, stand for a minute in the sunlight of your own mind, and wonder how we could have missed something this major and this simple all these centuries...
- Win Wenger ( wwenger101@aol.com )

My understanding is that (for whatever reasons - convenience, habit, survival) we are only ever partly aware of our surrounding environment. There is simply too much to take in consciously. Luckily however, we are still taking in the information, it is just by-passing our conscious awareness, and being stored for future reference, in case we need to access it. A large part of being creative, is about our ability to access these Sidebands more consciously, thereby widening the thin sliver of conscious awareness, so that we have more awareness to play with.

Presenting a talk on 'NVC and Parenting'

I have been asked at the last minute by my colleague Sarah Bird to step in and give a one hour talk on NVC and Parenting at the Attachment Parenting International (API) Conference on Friday May 19th 2006. The conference runs from 19-21st May 2006 at the Glenroyal Conference Centre, Maynooth.

From their website

The mission of Attachment Parenting International (API) is to promote parenting practices that create strong, healthy emotional bonds between children and their parents. These practices nurture and fulfill a child's need for trust, empathy, and affection, providing a lifelong foundation for healthy, enduring relationships.
Through education, support, advocacy and research, API seeks to strengthen families and increase awareness of the importance of secure attachment, ultimately helping to reduce or prevent child abuse, behavioral disorders, criminal acts and other serious social problems.

I am both excited and anxious about sharing my experiences of using Nonviolent Communication with my wife and 2-year old daughter Niamh (whom you can see a photo of in my profile opposite).

Escape Into Creativity

My colleague Tom Magill and I have have just created a new blog Escape Into Creativity to share our insights and experiences of facilitating together and using film with groups in Northern Ireland. We aim to help people to transform their lives by turning their unique experiences into films and documentaries. We work with prisoners, prison officers homeless adults and young people. Check it out.