Meeting People in Network Events

Networks. Meeting old friends and new people. Voluntary participation. Meetings of people. Feelings. Learning. External Idea-sprinters aka speakers. Helping others to see new perspectives. Ideas. Thoughts.

All these words I can find in my mind map I constructed yesterday in the SoL Conference workshop. I think they represent well what's going on in a good network. We were there talking about role of network in learning and in team learning. It was kind of interesting and inspired me to think. I was introduced to a new term by Humap's Ilkka, instead of ROI (Return of Investment, I suppose) in networks we can talk about ROG (Return of given). I think that what you get is related to what you get. As somebody had put it in a tag in a wall in London close by the Learning House: The love you take equals to the love you make.

Recently I've been coming back a lot to the book by W.Isaacs Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. I just read about a new tool which was called something like Make Strange. The idea was to look and think about people you know actually as they were strange to you. I probably understood it somehow not in the way he meant it, but in a network event like SoL Conference it's easy to implement. There are people who are strange to you, but also those whom you already know. Has anyone got some experiences of using this tool?