Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.
This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.
Dear mates:
For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.
As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.
These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”
The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system
Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”
For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.
A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:
- People from a system are not THE system.
- Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
- Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
- Changed relationships are not changed structures.
- Powerful experiences are not system change.
This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.
My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.
Reconsidering the container
I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.
This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.
It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.
For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.
But what is the cost of that?
Hosting is an exercise of power
One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.
However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.
Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.
Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.
If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.
The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.
Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power
If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.
Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:
Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.
Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.
Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.
Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.
In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.
Contact with context
The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.
But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.
But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.
What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.
When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.
When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.
My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.
The invitation
So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.
Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.
Questions like:
- What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
- What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
- What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
- What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
- What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?
This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.
You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one can play.
I’ll introduce this in stages, and use language that speaks to facilitators, hosts, participatory leaders. Folks who read this blog, who practice the Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures or other forms facilitation that treats groups as complex. I want this framework to help us inquire into some of things we take for granted such as the role of the host, the helpfulness of methods. the belief in the collective capacity of the group, and in the notion and idea of what a container is and how to work with it.
The title of this post is a nod to Mark Downham’s long treatise The Architecture of Held Space, which is a very generous discussion of these questions too and which deserves a full response on it’s own. But his work and Snowden’s work previously pointed at in this series ask the questions that I am trying to answer here. Here’s a post that links to those writings.
Starting with basics.
Let’s start here. Groups of people are constantly meeting, working, talking and living their lives without the role of a facilitator. Most of human history, historically and in the present day has unfolded without facilitators and consultant working with groups of people to optimize processes, introduce new ways of working together or saving people from the everyday chaos of their lives. I say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s a serious observation. We – the consulting industry, the hosting world, the facilitation community – are a lot less necessary than we believe.
So we start with the above polarity. There are interactions and there is structure. Pause for a moment and think about where you live. It could be a village, and island, a neighbourhood, a building or a city. Think of ways that people have problems solved together, introduced new ideas, created new things. How neighbours are helped when a new child is born. Or how conflicts arise in the public conversation and how they are resolved or how they cage over time. Novelty in societies and groups springs from interactions between people. They come out of who knows whom, who is connected or not, what gets talked about. Communities and groups are bubbling cauldrons of connections and exchanges. You can never fully understand them, you can never fully see what they are capable of. But beautiful things emerge.
Interactions between people do not happen randomly however. Thing of the place you live and think of the built environment. Think of how folks get around, where they meet and where they don’t meet. Think about the “way we always do things” the traditions, languages, and implicit ways of being that are unique to each place. Think of what it feels like to visit a new place and know that you don’t completely belong there. There are structural elements that shape humans experiences. These structures are physical, psychological, social, and cultural. They are patterns that persist over time that makes some things more likely to happen than other things. These structures can change, but the do so slowly.
The structures and the interactions are continually in relationship. The structure influences what’s easy for people to do wan what is hard for them to do. In complexity, we call these affordances. People who are skilled at working within their own environments often have a good understanding of some of these structures and affordances are are able to work with them in a way that makes things happen. Others might have great ideas, but they always seem to get nowhere. Structures can provide resistance – “that’s not how we do things around here” – or they can provide hard boundaries – “you can’t walk from Bowen Island to the mainland, no matter how much you want to.”
SO the question to ask when learning about a group of people, or when a group of people is learning about themselves is “How do enduring structures shape interactions and how to repeated interactions become structural?”
If you are coming into a community or organization to do work and you don’t start here you are treating each group as a blank canvas upon which your influence can be exerted. This applies especially to consultants but it alos applies to leaders who “drop in” to their teams or departments without any understanding of what is really happening. The field of pre-existing interactions, the ways that people respond to change or generate it, and the pre-existing structures – physical and cultural, immutable and changeable – provide the landscape inside of which any intervention takes place.
Take a breath while I tell you why three is better than two.
Pause here. I’m going to tell you why I’m going to make the next move.
A favoured tool of many consultants is working with polarities. I use them all the time to look at things. Structure and Interaction is a classic polarity. Both exist at the same time, both are helpful, positive states. In the Art of Hosting work we use Chaos and Order. I’ve also used others like Individual and Team, and Organization and Stakeholders. Often conflicts in organizations are about contested ends of a polarity. That’s helpful to see.
But the problem with polarities is that it places a situation on a scale and asks us to maybe balance the upsides of both or do things that will slide the problem more towards on end or the other.
The bigger PROBLEM with pairs like this is that it tends to introduce either/or thinking. Even if we are using a tool like polarity management (which promotes Both/And thinking) we are still highly entrained to see the ends as more important than the middle. That can have the effect of embedding the conflict even deeper and make it feel like maximizing the upsides of one is a compromise or a value tradeoff for people that prefer the other.
And so, what about three?
Snowden has written recently on this, but for decades he has used triads in sense-making in a way that helps us see that a complex situation exists in a space that is influenced by multiple sources of constraints that make some things more possible than others. Triads are a feature of his software, SenseMaker and although they are sometimes hard to understand, I find them helpful for getting beyond simple dichotomies.
And so the next section of this essay will be about the third part of this system, the one that turns a group of people into a facilitated group, a led group, a team, an organization. It is the acknowledgement of an intention, backed with privileged power, that provides an important source of constraints.
The designer
In a recent LinkedIn post responding to an earlier blog post in this series, Natalia Treninya offers a gentle disagreement with my offering of this third source of constraints. She writes: “I find it hard to accept that the design of a dialogue, or of any other creative process, stands as an equal third vertex of the trialectic. Stability and emergence describe the state of the field, whereas design acts upon the field, so to me it belongs to a different level.” (translation from Ukrainian provided by LinkedIn).
I get that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of introducing this third corner is to be honest about the work that intention does when it is coupled with a position of privileged power in a pre-existing field of interactions and structure. Snowden’s constant challenge to the Art of Hosting community, let alone the broader facilitation community as a whole, is to get the facilitator out of the centre of the work. But the facilitator is never removed from the work. That is exactly another problem: cloaking the role of power in good intentions, or a wonderful design, or a set of brilliant exercises.
Even in “complex facilitation“, which is the approach to methods used by the Cynefin community, the role of the facilitator has to be accounted for. Methods are used, each with an intention. Interactions are shaped. Strutures and patterns appear and the facilitator manages the process.
But how and why is the facilitator able to “manage the process?” Because the position comes with the power to do so. That power is accorded by the consent of the group (or not, in which case something else takes over). “Yes, we will do the Future Backwards exercise or the Word Cafe or the Circle or the Paired Walk or the 1-2-4-All” is what the group says to the facilitator, but never completely.. There is always someone in the room who thinks this is bullshit, or who has to suspend their scepticism to go along with the group. We all carry memories of being told what to do that elicit responses ranging from compliance and approval seeking to outright rebellion.
So the unique position of the facilitator influences both the structure of the moment and the interactions. In complex facilitation approaches, the facilitator/host does not get involved in the content of the work, but only manages the interactions between people in the space. That is an important and influential role and so it has to be accounted for.
Time for a break
Let’s watch a video together. Let’s see what happens when the person with the power to shape the process comes into a room ignoring the structures and interactions that are already present in the group and imposes a his own ideas about what should happen. This is a scene from West Side Story where Glad Hand, the community social worker, embodies the bumbling leadership role we have probably all occupied at one time or another. You can read my commentary on this scene here.
Poor Glad Hand. He was convicted that this new method of his would break the group up, introduce new relationships and solve the gang problem. My favourite part of the scene happens after the group rebels and becomes even more entrenched. The police officer makes a bee line for Glad Hand and desperately points out to him how bad he has just made the situation.
Answering the challenge
There are groups interacting in the present moment. There are pre-existing structures that embed and embody the residue and habits of historical practice. And there is the p[ractitioner, the consultant, the teacher, the facilitator, the leader. The one who holds the design that is accompanied by an intention that speaks to a preferred future.
So let’s explore this third point in the triangle in relation to the other two.
Now we are looking at a dynamic space bounded by three sides inside of which dialogic containers exist and move. The Design point can be occupied by a facilitator who brings a method, or a leader, or an authority, or anyone else who has the power and ability to enter the space with intention that can shape the space. The introduction of this third point introduces two new tensions and space in which we can map what emerges from these three tensions.
From a facilitation perspective, the left hand side asks the question of how the method or intention being brought relates to the existing patterns at play. Anyone who has set the chairs up in a circle, while working with an organization used to sitting around a table, will be familiar with this questions. There are ways of doing things. If you are going to be introducing a new intention that results in a new structure, something interesting will happen in contact with the pre-existing structures.
On the other side, the tension is between the intention of the facilitator and what the group is attending to. The group holds the capability for designing and choosing change and a design and intention introduced on top of them runs the risk of being patronizing, disempowering or colonizing in its effect. In complexity, It is not methods or good facilitation or leadership that creates novelty or good responses to the problem at hand but rather the distributed knowledge, capability and capacity of the group itself to address its conditions. This has important implications for what we choose to do. As a facilitator when I am too in love with my method, I impose it in a way that disables the group’s capacity, even while I speak praises to the group’s collective intelligence and capacity.
The space
So this diagram is finally a space represented by three distinct source of constraint that affect and influence the dialogic container. The facilitator’s role then is to constantly attend to the work of the container within this space. In an expert driven process, where for example an engineer is directing a team to install a building system, the interactions of the team members are highly controlled. The engineer might need a detail or two from the front line, but in general, the design and implementation of a knowable system will proceed very close to the left hand edge of the triangle.
On the other hand, a group that is trying to design a new organizational structure for itself might not need any facilitation or design at all beyond an agreement to meet in a pub and kick around answers to the question “how should we make decisions together?” It doesn’t need facilitation, and the intention and design can be entirely co-owned by the group itself. The pub provides a structure, especially if said pub is a part of the ritual space in which the group often decamps to consider the bigger questions in life.
On yet another hand, a consulting intervention for a strategic plan might start with an intention from the Board and quickly move to a narrative capture of the staff, clients and partners of the organization, followed by collective sense-making. This immediately works with the capability of the group to sense opportunities, to name the structural affordances and blockages for development of change and to change the interactions from “working together” to “planning together” which wakes up the latent capacity to a group to make collective decisions and choose pathways forward into the unknown. The consultant becomes responsible for hosting the methods to do that, paying attention all the time to the preferred direction of travel introduced and held by the Board as an intention (“we need a plan to help us move into the future and we need everyone to be involved”). The consultant’s role is to constantly work to attend to and shape the interactions, with consent, with transparency and with accountability.
Dialogic containers arise all the time. As each of the points in the triangle take on great or lesser effect on that container, the container’s life can be mapped in this space. The lifecycle of a container is not linear, it’s not universal and it is context free. Each one appears from the interactions of these constraints and is shifted and influenced over time until it dissolves again. While it exists, the facilitator continually attends to the changing relationship between Design, Structure and Interactions. When the work is done, to put it in Taoist terms, the facilitator disappears along with the container and the people see that they did it themselves.
So play with this a little. Tell me what it evokes in you. I am especially interested in how this challenges your practice, rather than how it validates it? What question for yourself does this open up?
This triad has turned out to be surprisingly helpful. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I posted it a few days ago, because it answers some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. So here’s an attempt to capture where the idea is leading. Think of this as watching it evolve in real time. Read on…
I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.
If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.
One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?
Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.
We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.
Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.
We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.
This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.
It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.
Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.
Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what anthro-complexity is, and being very deliberate about pulling it back from interpretations that seek to fit it into pre-existing understandings of complexity. Anthro-complexity is a new approach to complexity in human systems, and these posts are a strong statement of what that is.
In the course of these posts, Dave has focused in part on the Art of Hosting, among other approaches to working in complexity, and has named me explicitly as someone who has been trying to work within the field of the Art of Hosting to bring my own practice more in line with what I have been learning about anthro-complexity over the past 15 years or so, since I was introduced to Cynefin.
The entire series is very important to understand the context, and it is very long and dense stuff, but it’s important to understand some of the context. You can start the most recent series on the channel and the estuary here. For these posts I am going to write, I encourage you to read the two most direct posts about the Art of Hosting:
These posts have helped me to reach an important moment in my own thinking, and I promised to respond to them personally and messily, so I’ll do my best here, probably in a series of posts. I am just heading out on a three-and-a-half-week walking holiday, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get to, but long walks do offer a chance to ruminate.
So here is the first of what will likely be a number of posts on this topic.
First, thank you, Dave, for naming me, and for naming the Art of Hosting as a practice field, and for putting some deeply important questions to me and to us. These are questions that help guide and deepen our understanding of the field we work in. The Art of Hosting field is a broad one, spanning every continent, made up of people who arrive from many different traditions and levels of experience in the worlds of facilitation and change-making. Originally, the field was formed by folks moved by their experiences in social change, new metaphors of organizational leadership and systems change, and large-group facilitation methods. We are, and always have been, a community of practitioners first, and so the field has taken on the feel of a place where methods and tools are top of mind. I think the world sees the Art of Hosting as a collection of tools and practices for convening dialogue, and I don’t think that is incorrect. But it presents a problem that Snowden has identified, and it’s one we have to deal with.
The basic problem is this: while we use the language of emergence and complexity in the Art of Hosting, our use of methods and pre-designed processes, and our emphasis on “hosts,” means that we run the risk of not always being coherent with our own claims about emergence. Our approach to hosting conversations that matter certainly acknowledges emergence and can create conditions in which emergence happens, but it does that largely because humans operating in any constraint regime will create emergent outcomes. The question is whether that emergence is relevant to the field out of which these people come, or whether it is a distortion brought about by the container in which people are gathered and in which we convene conversation. A powerful conversation on its own is not helpful if its effects cannot survive contact with the system that it seeks to change.
The critique is important because it raises a question of epistemic justice, and I don’t think we answer that question very well: whose knowledge is being surfaced, and under what conditions? Are we enabling the distributed intelligence of the system to become visible, or are we shaping what can be said and heard through the design of our processes, invitations, and harvests?
If the conversations we convene are to truly matter, they must be coherent with the field in which they are situated. More than that, whatever emerges in those conversations must be able to travel back into that field and interact with it: shifting patterns, enabling action, and surviving beyond the temporary conditions of the container.
The issue, then, is not whether to convene, but how to do so in ways that remain accountable to the field. We need to be aware of the constraints we introduce, conscious of the power we hold as hosts, and attentive to whether what emerges is actually usable once people return to the systems they inhabit. And we need to be constantly critiquing our positionality.
Dave’s work lately has been to discuss systems as geological features. He locates the work of anthro-complexity firmly in the metaphor of the estuary, and yesterday his post very helpfully described the Art of Hosting (as a body of work) as a delta. These are two different kinds of systems, and the distinction is important. I want to quote from that post at length:
Art of Hosting is the delta of the leadership and organisational field. Over two decades and across dozens of cultural contexts, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, and the community they built have produced real moments of collective intelligence, genuine emergence, and authentic contact. The practice carries real generosity and real craft, and this post takes that seriously.
But the delta has been building. The hosting aesthetic, the circle, the open space, the world café, the council, the harvest: these are now a recognisable repertoire, instantly legible to anyone who has spent time in that world. And a repertoire is a structure that precedes the encounter. The hosting team designs the invitation, shapes the container, holds the process, and harvests the outputs. The circle looks leaderless. The architecture is not.
Chris Corrigan, who has engaged generously with this argument in previous conversations and stated plainly that he is trying to change Art of Hosting from within, deserves acknowledgement here. That is the most intellectually honest position available to a practitioner committed to a tradition they have also diagnosed. It is exactly the move Griffin made with Stacey and the matrix: following the argument toward its conclusion, regardless of the professional cost. The question is whether the tradition as a whole is willing to follow that argument, or whether the delta will continue to accumulate.
The delta’s generativity is real. The flood plain moments, the occasions when Art of Hosting breaks through its own container and something genuinely distributed happens, are not accidental. They are what the tradition has been reaching for, and they occur. The problem is that the method cannot reliably produce them, cannot fully explain when they occur, and cannot sustain them when they do. The hosting team is still in the room. The design is still prior. The harvest is still shaped by hands that arrived before the conversation began.
In order to fairly deal with this critique we must honestly look at the ways in which it is true. And so to all my friends and colleagues in this field, I invite you and us to find the genuine questions in here that help us deepen our practice and rise to the challenge posed by serious questions of epistemic justice, legitimate change, and a deeper understanding of complexity and its dynamics.
My experience of reading Dave’s posts lately has been at times feeling a bit defensive but on the whole (and especially after yesterday’s) more akin to what a delta might feel during and after an autumn king tide, when it is overwhelmed and inundated by the sea and the rain. When the deluge stops and the tide ebbs, one finds that the landscape has been gently rearranged and new patterns of flow and precarious stability arise. I find myself in somewhat familiar location, but standing on new ground and needing to re-navigate and re-orient myself and my practice. I genuine experience of estuarine thinking. As I have been doing so over the past few days (during which I was also co-leading an Art of Hosting training) I found myself operating with heightened curiosity and inquiry.
I’ll write more about these questions, and especially as they relate specifically to how I understand the practice of the Art of Hosting, the usefulness of methods (including harvest), the importance of dialogic containers and how anthro-complexity helps us make better change. Stay tuned, and enjoy the view.