Edith Wharton’s Round Table

As the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, Edith Wharton is best remembered for masterful stories and novels that consciously exposed the turn-of-the-century world of wealth and privilege she inhabited. Less well known is the fact that Wharton was an innovative designer whose first published book was The Decoration of Houses, a guide in which she and her co-author, architect Ogden Codman, Jr., pioneered an aesthetic of clean lines and graceful spaces that rejected society’s prevailing preference for ostentation.

When you visit The Mount, the country estate she built in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1902, you see many design choices that reflect Wharton’s simpler, classical sensibilities. In one important instance, you also see how she used design both to tweak the social conventions of her era and to stimulate her inner storyteller.

Other estates being built at this time featured large dining rooms in which massive rectangular tables were intended to impress. In his place at the head of the table, the host’s status would be perfectly clear. By contrast, for the dining room at The Mount, Wharton created a smaller, intimate space, opening onto the garden and full of light. At its center she placed a small, round table, just big enough to accommodate eight people. And at this round table, where corners couldn’t “cut off conversation,” she and her guests (often including her dear friend Henry James) engaged as equals in lively literary dialogue.

Wharton was no feminist. Politically conservative, she moved to France after her marriage ended and stayed there until she died, avoiding the awkwardness of divorced life in American high society. Nevertheless, in her round table, I see a tiny contribution to the dramatic social changes that were afoot. As any experienced facilitator can tell you, when you change the space, you change the conversation—and there is nothing like a circle to get people talking and telling stories.

How do you create spaces where conversation and change can happen?

Dialogue and Deliberation Resource Center

As a proponent of systems thinking, I’m often reminded of the gulf that exists between our ability to recognize big, hairy, systemic problems and our capacity to solve such problems together. It’s sometimes tempting to throw up our hands in disgust at the persistent divisions that impede constructive conversation and action on big system challenges. But one organization that never wavers in its resolve and has established itself as a force for progress in this realm is the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD).

NCDD has been cataloging resources about and for dialogue and deliberation since 2002.  Their extraordinary resource center gives you access to more than 2,600 discussion guides, assessment tools, case studies, public engagement programs and organizations, articles, books, videos, and more.

Dialogue and deliberation are innovative processes that bring people together across divides to discuss, decide, and collaborate on today’s toughest issues.  NCDD’s Resource Center was designed to connect you with the information, guidance, theory, and examples you need to engage people effectively.

You can use the search field, categories and tags, or additional sidebar navigation options to hone in. Especially recommended is the “I’m Looking For…” sidebar box that lets you cross-search categories and tags. Use the site map contents to see a full list of all the categories and tags, or just look over the most recently added resources.  Know of a great resource on dialogue, deliberation, or public engagement that should be added to NCDD’s Resource Center?  A form is provided so you can submit your favorites!

A big thank you to NCDD co-founders Sandy Heierbacher and Andy Fluke for their commitment to this important work.

Let’s Talk About Food

The dreary weather conditions in the Boston area this past weekend did not discourage thousands of people from attending an innovative outdoor festival at the Museum of Science celebrating and exploring our relationship with food and food systems.

As one of several volunteer facilitators, I had the privilege of engaging in conversations at an “endless table” where festival attendees dropped in to discuss various aspects of food production, distribution, consumption, and regulation.

Festival organizers set the conditions for lively dialogue by providing dry-erase placemats that offered provocative data points and questions relating to six topic areas: Nutrition, Food Access, Seafood, Farming, Food Safety, and Labels and Marketing. Experts on hand to field questions and share their opinions included farmers, wholesale buyers, food scientists, academics, public health officials, and consumer and community advocates. The reflections and suggestions generated in the conversations were captured by museum staff for later publication on the web.

I don’t know which I enjoyed more, picking up a lot of new insights about how “what we eat affects our bodies, our planet, our economy, and our future,” or marveling at our capacity for constructive public discourse when we design the process effectively. A spirit of collective curiosity and good will was palpable throughout the event.

After the festival I found myself appreciating how the simple act of eating connects us to so many other human beings through unseen threads of interdependence. I thought of Thich Nhat Hanh’s good counsel to savor our food and his observation that an “…apple is not simply a quick snack to quiet a grumbling stomach. It is something more complex, something part of a greater whole.”

Like the apple, we are each a complex part of a greater whole. Thanks to the Museum of Science and its sponsors for helping us stay mindful of that delicious complexity.