Harvesting: Making Collective Sense and Meaning

Many good conversations and deep insights are lost because they are never recorded or shared. Harvesting the collective wisdom generated in the room through the various rounds of dialogue is more than just taking notes. The Rivera Leadership Cohort met last week and began the shift from gathering insights to making sense of the data derived from our Public Conversations Forum. And we were grateful to Mr. Rich Rivera, a consultant and trainer in participatory leadership models who agreed to join us and facilitate our initial harvesting. We began by curating all of the artifacts (i.e. post-its, drawings, videos, and pictures) from the Public Conversation.

Meaning-making with the Leadership Cohort, who are also diverse stakeholders, with a high commitment to the project's mission, created a positive momentum when we began making collective meaning. With reflective questions like: What did we notice? What did we learn? What is emerging? We looked for ways to reduce the complexity and discovered that clustering phrases worked well, while other times voting on themes helped us to add clarity and reduce the noise of uncertainty.

"The fruits of our most important conversations need to be harvested if they are to have an impact in the world."

Making sense of the many artifacts, noticing the emerging patterns and finding the seeds to move us forward, is where the fruit of the harvesting has really emerged. The Cohort is excited to announce the Public Conversations' Harvesting Report is almost complete and ready to share!