The theme of this e-zine is the role of conversations in co-creating community.  I find much of the language and ideas that I'm exploring with colleagues and clients these days are improvisations around the core chart that I found in Peter Block's book, Community: The Structure of Belonging.  I've been recommending it enthusiastically and people who have read it claim to be convinced by the significance of his approach.
 
Here's the way Block connects community and conversation:
 
The idea of community restoration becomes concrete when we grasp the importance of language.  When we understand that, we can see how our language, or conversation, is the action step that makes creating an alternative future possible.  ... the aspect of a community that gives it a new possibility is simply the conversation it chooses to have with itself. (52)
 
Some years ago I picked up a book written by the Utne Reader community entitled Salons: The Joy of Conversations.  They are gatherings where people engage in serious, delightful conversation.  Here's their idea of how conversations co-create community, with an important nod in the direction of conversation as jazz:

 

"[Salons are] conversational and conceptual jazz. ... Salons are gatherings where people talk big talk, talk meant to be listened to and perhaps passionately acted upon.  Salons are incubators where ideas are conceived, gestated, and hatched, sometimes slowly and ruminatively, sometimes with dazzling speed.  Salons are frontiers of social and cultural change.  Salons are concert halls where conversation is presented in virtuoso style. ...  Important changes don't often occur as a result of sudden, earth-shattering events.  They happen in increments, through a slow buildup of fragile, almost imperceptible experiences.  Gradual alterations in attitudes and opinions add up, until you find yourself doing something you know you wouldn't have done a year ago, five years ago, a decade ago.  Salons are communities where such tiny alterations occur and evolve into something meaningful." (vi, ix & xii)
 
I am pleased this month to feature another Canadian jazz musician who sees the connections among jazz, community, and conversations.  Bassist Steve Kirby directs the jazz program at the University of Manitoba.  The passage below first appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.  It bears careful reading.
 
Shifting our ways of conversing to co-create flourishing communities in our workplaces will take deliberate practice.  More attention will have to be paid to how our words sound and are heard.  Habits of careless conversation will have to change.  The gift of listening will have to be nurtured.  But the consequences of these changed attitudes and behaviours are worth the effort in finding and refining our community-building groove.

Cheers,