Save the Date: The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution Announces Its First Collective Learning Conference in Birmingham, UK

The CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, an NCDD member organization, has announced its inaugural Collective Learning Conference (CLC), to be held June 17–18, 2027, at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, UK, in collaboration with the Birmingham Systemic Training Programme. Built around the theme of Living the Questions: Navigating Complexity and Clarity, the two-day conference will bring together practitioners from across fields — including public dialogue, conflict resolution, therapy, organizational development, and systems design — to explore applications of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, a communication framework grounded in the belief that better communication creates better social worlds. The event will feature workshops, presentations, and artistic installations designed for practitioners at all levels of CMM familiarity, with registration and a call for proposals opening later in 2026. This gathering represents a meaningful opportunity for NCDD members to engage with an international community of communicators and dialogue practitioners whose work directly embodies the coalition's mission of building better social worlds through more intentional conversation.

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What if the way we communicate could fundamentally transform the social worlds we inhabit — our relationships, our organizations, our communities, and our democracies? That is the animating question behind the Coordinated Management of Meaning, a communication theory and practice framework that has been quietly shaping how facilitators, therapists, organizational leaders, and public dialogue practitioners work for decades. Now, the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution — an NCDD member organization — is bringing that community together for the first time in a dedicated gathering. The inaugural Collective Learning Conference (CLC), co-organized with the Birmingham Systemic Training Programme, will take place June 17–18, 2027, at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, UK.

The conference theme — Living the Questions: Navigating Complexity and Clarity — draws on a famous passage from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, inviting participants not to arrive with answers but to dwell productively in the questions that matter most to their work and lives. Grounded in CMM's foundational belief that communication creates our social worlds, the two-day program will feature workshops, presentations, and artistic installations designed to explore what "better communication" actually looks like in practice across a wide range of contexts — from therapy and social work to leadership, public dialogue, conflict resolution, and systems design. The event is explicitly designed for practitioners at all levels of CMM familiarity, as well as those entirely new to the framework who are simply curious about how a communication-centered perspective might enrich their work.

​For dialogue and deliberation practitioners, CMM offers a rigorous theoretical grounding for the relational and communicative work that sits at the heart of this field. The CMM Institute's presence within the NCDD network reflects a shared commitment to the idea that how we talk to each other is not incidental to civic life — it is constitutive of it. The Collective Learning Conference represents a rare opportunity to engage with an international community of practitioners who take that premise seriously and are committed to translating it into action across diverse settings. Registration is not yet open, but the CMM Institute is collecting interest now to notify prospective participants when registration and the call for workshop proposals go live. If you're interested in attending or presenting, fill out the interest form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfAnQhVVbg_KTJlDHYWBUr_eBfBYWQ0vkzMlr5U1hQHNQCyyA/viewform.