Thursday 18th & Friday 19th November 2010

When you need to be more centered, mature, mindful and healthy than those in your care: Some contributors of CMM (Coordinated Management of Meaning) to personal development and to spiritual practice.

Presenters: Kim Pearce is Professor, De Anza College, Cupertino, California, and Barnett Pearce, is Professor Emeritus, Fielding Graduate University: www.fielding.edu

The presenters are founding members of the Public Dialogue Consortium, a non-profit making body that works with communities to improve patterns of communication between government and members of the public, and Co-Principals of Pearce Associates, a consulting firm improving patterns of communication in organizations.

Their practice is based on the theory that they have helped develop, the Coordinated Management of Meaning(CMM) as set out in Kim’s book Making Better Social Worlds: Engaging in and Facilitating Dialogic Communication (Pearce Associates, 2002) and in Barnett’s book Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Their current work is exploring the use of CMM in personal development (what they call “spiritual practice”) they are also writing a book on this topic.

This workshop is for those interested in their own personal and professional development and/or those interested in the continuing evolution of CMM. It is especially appropriate for social workers, therapists, mediators, teachers, parents and others whose professional responsibilities call for them to be more centered, mature, mindful, and healthy than those who are in their care.

Kim and Barnett are deeply involved in the continuing evolution of CMM. In answer to the question “what are we making together” when we communicate, CMM has offered a distinctive vocabulary including speech acts, episodes, relationships, stories of self, organizational cultures. They now include “minds” in that vocabulary; they are exploring how the way we communicate (making/managing meaning and coordinating actions) literally changes our minds and reprograms our brains.

Exciting cutting edge research is being done by Daniel Siegel (The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being; Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation) and Robert Kegan (In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life). Both of these scholar-practitioners focus on understanding the factors contributing to the development of whole, healthy, integrated human beings.

Both Siegel and Kegan acknowledge the importance of the social world in personal development, and both offer a set of practices designed to support that development. However, Kim and Barnett believe that the complexity social world is inadequately understood in the work of both. CMM has some important things to add that strengthen both CMM and the work of Siegel and of Kegan.

This integrated work gives rise to a set of practices that usefully complement those identified by Siegel and by Kegan. These CMM-inflected practices can help us all be centered in difficult situations, skillful in designing and intervening in unwanted situations, and purposeful in creating situations conducive to our own and others’ development as persons.

Cost for two days: £180

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