This is the fifth post in a series of posts looking at hygge and working out loud circles using Meik Wiking’s The Hygge Manifesto from his book “The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well” as a framework for discussion.
Hygge may be best experienced with others. Hygge encourages people sharing the experience and individuals not hogging the limelight in that experience.
The “we” over “me” bit is a key element of circles. We are learning as a group and we should all be seeking to learn from each other else why are we in a circle in the first place.
Whilst at least one person needs to ensure the group happens, it is important that the airtime is shared equally, ideally. However, this puts a responsibility on all of us to do the work and prep to be ready to fully engage and contribute to the learning and experience of everyone else in the circle.
As a facilitator of circles, I often find that it feels like I talk too much but I do leave silences to encourage contributions whilst maintaining momentum to drive through the agenda to meet the end time. Clearly, all circles could overrun given the collective wisdom and experience in all circles.
I am also aware that the split of airtime may flex over the 12 weeks of a circle as some weeks may raise more specific challenges for specific members of the circle than other weeks and as facilitators we need to be sensitive to that.
In terms of sharing the tasks, the circle infrastructure once agreed and set up simply runs itself and content is posted by all members of the circles as appropriate including briefing notes for the week, updates on what we have individually done and supporting posts and comment responses to others in the group.
Those who have done physical circles and who have not used platforms such as Slack or internal company enterprise social networks may want to comment on how collaboration works in your circles.
“We” also encourages us to invite others to join us to do a circle. Anyone, literally anyone, can start a circle. It has been a joy to recruit for 2 circles and circle with people that I either knew nothing about before or knew minimally on Twitter. I recommend it! But I am also increasingly aware that there are other people that I get to know online who I would love to circle with to simply spend time with them and learn from them. For the 3rd circle I have issued public invites as well as invites to specific individuals. In some cases those specific individuals have been on my “to contact” lists from earlier circle exercises. Amazingly, many have responded “yes” instantly. I am also inviting people who I am in the early stages of establishing any form of relationship with to do a circle for the first time confident that they would be amazing circlers to work with.
What would you add to the hygge part and/or the working out loud circle part of this post?
Resources
For a full list of posts in this series see the index post
My Top Ten Resources for Encouraging People To Actually Work Out Loud (as at 6 November 2017) (this post includes links to Working Out Loud resources)
Author Info
Simon Fogg is an IT professional who has worked in IT for all bar 8 months of his 34 year career to date. He delivers business consultancy, project management and service management services as part of the Claritas Solutions team in Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK. Claritas deliver solutions to clients in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors across the UK. He was first introduced to Working Out Loud Circles in 2016 and has since led 2 x 12-week global/virtual circles (using Slack and Zoom) and is currently recruiting and setting up for launching an “out-of-the-ordinary” (more than 5 people) 3rd circle on a trial Workplace by Facebook community in January 2018 with members already using the platform.
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