Friction and serendipity boosting.

I have just spent an excellent evening with a group of Berlin-based facilitators (bound together by their work with http://citizensforeurope.org/), academics and activists who are visiting Malmö and Copenhagen to look at social innovation, civic engagement and participatory processes.

A recurrent theme in our discussions was how to measure the success of participatory processes; and also which indicators are relevant. Whether process or result is king depends on the reason for running a participatory process. We agreed that some degree of friction is useful as it drives the process forward and destabilises orthodoxies.

Finally my favourite term of the evening was

serendipity boosting

.

Thanks to Fredrik Björk for organising this evening.