The original CFAR alumni workshop included a warning: ”be warned that the nature of this workshop means we may be pushing on folks harder than we do at most other CFAR events, so please only sign up if that sounds like something that a) you want, and b) will be good for you.”
I’m struggling to understand the motivations behind this.
Reading between the lines, was there a tacit knowledge by the organisers that this was somewhat experimental, and that it could perhaps lead to great breakthroughs and positive emotions as well as the opposite; but could only figure it out by trying?
The reason this feels so weird to me—especially the ‘pushing on folks harder’ - is because I know there are many ways to enable difficult things to be said and heard without people feeling ‘pushed on’; in fact, in ways that feel light! Or at least you can go into it knowing it can go either way, but with the intention of it not feeling heavy / difficult; but it sounds like heaviness / ‘pushing on people’ in explicitly part of the recipe? That feels unnecessary to me...
Grateful for illumination from whoever it comes from!
Copying from the link, I think they were pretty explicitly doing something experimental. I wasn’t involved in the workshop, I suppose they found the previous experiment with Hamming Circles useful and wanted to try a variation:
The mathematician Richard Hamming allegedly liked to bother his colleagues at Bell Labs, as follows. First, he would ask a given fellow, “What are the most important questions in your field?” And then, after the poor fellow answered, he would follow up: “And why aren’t you working on them?” (The full story here; an interesting alternate take on how to work on important problems, from Richard Feynman, which we’ll also be incorporating)
We will spend the weekend following Hamming’s fine example. We will ask ourselves “What are the most important questions in our lives (or in our organizations/work), and why aren’t we working on them?” We’ll also bring CFAR standard tools, and some new ones, to bear on this question. The goal is to send us all forth, at the end of the weekend, to make real progress on the problems that matter most to each of us (for both our own lives, and the world).
This workshop will be in the same spirit as the previous alumni-only Hamming workshop, but we expect the content to be once again quite experimental—a lot of the things we tried out in the last Hamming workshop ended up getting folded in to the regular 4-day workshops, so we’ll be building on that further body of experience, and probably trying out a bunch of new ideas. It will be raw, it will be unpolished, and it will probably be really interesting. In particular, be warned that the nature of this workshop means we may be pushing on folks harder than we do at most other CFAR events, so please only sign up if that sounds like something that a) you want, and b) will be good for you.
I’m struggling to understand the motivations behind this.
Reading between the lines, was there a tacit knowledge by the organisers that this was somewhat experimental, and that it could perhaps lead to great breakthroughs and positive emotions as well as the opposite; but could only figure it out by trying?
The reason this feels so weird to me—especially the ‘pushing on folks harder’ - is because I know there are many ways to enable difficult things to be said and heard without people feeling ‘pushed on’; in fact, in ways that feel light! Or at least you can go into it knowing it can go either way, but with the intention of it not feeling heavy / difficult; but it sounds like heaviness / ‘pushing on people’ in explicitly part of the recipe? That feels unnecessary to me...
Grateful for illumination from whoever it comes from!
Copying from the link, I think they were pretty explicitly doing something experimental. I wasn’t involved in the workshop, I suppose they found the previous experiment with Hamming Circles useful and wanted to try a variation: