Conventional academic discourse

Enacting Transformative Integral Thinking through Playful Elegance (Part #2)

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The pattern of such discourse is extremely well-known -- characterized as it is by presentations, commentary and discussions within formal sessions, with various possible reporting and synthesizing procedures. It remains unclear whether this process is in its own right incompatible with the emergence of any meaningful transformative synthesis -- whatever the assumptions, claims and skills of organizers and facilitators.

Of particular concern is the questionable track record of facilitation in enabling the emergence of transformative insight, most often relying on essentially mechanistic procedures. Whole meetings are typically structured with the aid of such patterns. Paradoxically it is also widely acknowledged that meetings tend to be most valued by their participants for the "networking" and interaction outside, or between, such formal sessions.

The challenge of participating in such events is in transforming the interaction between formal presentations and commentary in order to elicit and configure patterns of association transversally across the knowledge space of the event as a whole. The individual formal presentations effectively constitute the embodiment of the intellectual trajectories of individuals that traverse that space, however they may interact with it or evoke interactions within it.