I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision.  It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours [...]]]>

I was up north on the weekend, working with a small community that has been driven apart by a large and contentious decision.  It doesn’t matter what it was, or what either side wanted – the result is the same result that happens in many small communities: people who are friends and neighbours shouting and fighting with each other.

The team I was working with are trying to reinvent the way this community is engaged.  We used a lovely redux of Peter Block’s work to help frame our conversation about design and implementation.  A few things stood out for this group with respect to Peter’s work.

Changing the room changes the conversation.  We talked a lot about the fact that changing engagement starts in this room and in this moment because this room IS the community.  When we dove in about what was missing from the way the community engages it was clear that the ownership piece was the biggest one.  As in many community meetings the way people traditionally engage is with passion that is directed outward.  There is an expectation that someone else needs to change.  We joked about the sentiment that says “I’ll heal only after every else has healed!”  It was a joke but the laughter was nervous, because that statement cuts close to the bone.  So we DID change the room and decided to hold a World Cafe.  gathered around smaller tables, paper in the middle, markers available for everyone to write with…

So how do you begin a meeting with people who are invited to take up the ownership of the outcome?  I am not a fan of giving people groundrules, because as a facilitator it puts me in the position of enforcer, and gives people an out for how the behave towards one another.  So instead we considered the question of what it looks like when people are engaged.  What stood out is how people “lean in” to the centre of the conversation.  So the question became, how do we get people to lean in right away and take ownership of the centre?

The solution was simple but was later revealed to have tons of power.  At the outset of the cafe as I was introducing the process I gave the following instructions:

“That paper in the middle is for all of you to use, as are the markers.  We want you each to record thoughts and insights that other need to hear about.  So before we begin I invite you to pick up a marker and write your name in front of you.  <people write their names>.  Now I want to invite you to answer this question: what is one thing you can do to make sure that this meeting is different?  Write your answer beneath your name.”

People took a moment to write their names and their commitments.  And they shared them with each other at the table.  That is how we began.

The first round of conversation proceeded as usual, but I noticed something very powerful in the second round.  When everyone got up and moved around they took a seat in someone else’s place, and often the first thing they did was to read the name and the commitment that was in front of them.  Can you imagine coming across the name of someone who you have a  disagreement with only to see that they have written “I won’t fight anymore” beneath their name?   The core team is now going through all of the tablecloths and making a list of the commitments that people made.  Taken on their own, they form a powerful declaration of willingness.

People reported that this was the best meeting the community had in a long time.  And it had a lot to do with this tiny intervention of public ownership for the outcomes.

As we were wrapping up our action planning session this morning, a [...]]]> I’m at an Open Space conference in Grande Ronde, Oregon which is a summit of Tribal leaders and federal government agencies from around the Pacific Northwest of the USA, and Alaska.  The subject of the meeting is improving relations around environmental issues.

As we were wrapping up our action planning session this morning, a young man walked into the room who I hadn’t yet met.  He apologized for being late.  He got delayed on the way in.

“No problem,” I said.  ”What was the delay all about?”

“Oh, I live near Nome Alaska and we were out hunting.  Got a bearded seal and a walrus.  They’re about 45 miles offshore on some ice floes and it took us a while to get them back.  I’ve got to get back and get it dried and frozen and then go out and get a beluga.  Some good open water now and the whales are only a mile off shore.”

I just looked at him.  What can you say to that?

“Yeah, and on top of that, I’ve never been out of state before and I can’t believe how cheap things are down here.  These sunglasses I just bought for 13 bucks would cost me 50 at home.  I’m going to pick up a laptop and a necklace for my girl.”

Cool.

Yesterday I woke up at 6am in the Beaver Valley, on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario where a beautiful crisp spring day greeted me.  I set off to Toronto, now knowing what condistions the roasd were in [...]]]> It sometimes boggles my mind, how easy it actually is to cross an entire continent.

Yesterday I woke up at 6am in the Beaver Valley, on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario where a beautiful crisp spring day greeted me.  I set off to Toronto, now knowing what condistions the roasd were in on the high country between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario.  In between thos Great Lakes is the Niagara Escarpment and the oak Ridges Moraine, two incredible heights of land that received a lat winter beating this week from a cold front that scoured the whole area.

All was well with me though, on a good drive along Highway 26 which hugs to Bay from Thornbury to Collingwood and on to Wasaga Beach and Stayner.  From there the road turns south becoming Airport Road and takes a bee line across the rolling countryside, up and down the esacarpment, and over the 700 foot high folds of glacial till that are now covered with farmland, pine forest and maple woods.  For two hours, the bright sun, spring bird song and beautiful southern Onatrio countryside fill my senses.

Once through Caledon, the country changes radically.  The land flattens out and all around are the sprawling McMansion suburbs that litter the edge of Toronto.  Along Airport Road, whole sections of farmland have been converted to a monoculture of boring, treeless housing.  Nothing is human scale.  A small sidewalk is hardly ever used and the four lanes of road feeds commuters to the city and large transport trucks to the distribution centres, warehouses and factories of Malton and the other northwestern suburbs.  A large Sikh community lives near the airport, and so the few commercial plazas in the area are devoted to saris, curries and Bollywood video rentals.  Here and there, old Victorian famhouses stand surrounded by all of this development, a last echo of the previous wave of immigrants that lived there.

I dropped my rental car, boarded a plane for Vancouver and instantly fell asleep.  I woke up over Kelowna just in time for our descent into Vancouver.  The coast was grey and cold and pouring rain.  Grabbed my bag, jumped on teh Canada Line, stopped long enough at Granville and Georgia Streets for a La Brasserie Chicken Sandwich and then caught the Express bus to Horseshoe Bay.  The 330pm ferry delivered me back to Bowen Island.

It is odd standing on the deck of a ferry crossing a small channel in the Pacific Ocean having woken up a mere 12 hours earlier some 4300 kms away.  This is a journey that until the last century would have taken years of my life.  Instead, I walk off the ferry, shaking a little of the remaining Ontario rain from my suitcase, home before my kids arrive back from school.

Magic.

UPDATED: To include Patricia Kambitsch’s beautiful doodle.

We talk about the Art of Hosting as a practice. It is a way of being with self and other.

This is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, because the world is full of lots of instructions about what to do. Telling me what [...]]]>

UPDATED: To include Patricia Kambitsch’s beautiful doodle.

We talk about the Art of Hosting as a practice. It is a way of being with self and other.

This is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, because the world is full of lots of instructions about what to do. Telling me what to do is very useful in situations where I am doing things that can be repeated. For example, if I am building a cabinet, fixing a car, creating a budget or processing a claim, then you can give me a set of instructions that will be very helpful in most situations. Of course there is an art to all of these, which is to say there is almost always some part of the context of these activities that require me to be smart and creative and solve a little problem here and there. But in general, these kinds of tasks can be taught.

But what happens when we are confronted with a huge question, for which the answers are unknown? What happens when things shift in ways that we have never trained for? What do we do then?

If you have trained as a martial artist or as an athlete, you will know that only with practice can you be ready to face the unexpected and create a good outcome. In martial arts, the point of training is not to rehearse every single situation so that you can create a logic tree of what to next. Rather the point of training is to actually get to a place where you don’t need to think about what to do next. It helps you to react wisely, rather than blithely. When confronted with the fight of your life, you act from clarity and calm and resourcefulness, none of which you can learn in the moment.

It is the same with the Art of Hosting. Art of Hosting workshops are not “trainings” in the typical sense of the word. Rather they are practice grounds – dojos if you will – where we can come together to spend a few days in a heightened sense of conscious awareness about what it takes to create and hold space for good conversations. In other words, the best way to come to an Art of Hosting is to prepare to pay attention in every moment to how you are practicing the basics of being in conversations with other people: being present, being an active participant, taking responsibility for hosting and co-creating a space together.

Luckily, we can also practice the Art of Hosting outside of workshops and facilitation sessions, because at its core, the Art of Hosting is about being together with another person consciously. This means that this art is extremely easy to practice because there are 7 billion humans on earth and each day we interact with dozens of them. So every moment can be a little learning journey; every conversation, no matter how brief, can be practice.

And what are we practicing for? We are practicing for the sake of practice. The practice is the practice.

For a world that is addicted to measurable outcomes and a linear progression of competency that leads from beginner to expert, this seems absurd. Why would I want to practice for the sake of practicing?

There are several reasons for this. First this kind of conscious practice – of being present as often as possible with everyone you meet – actually changes things. It actually shifts the social spaces of our world. If you want a kind society, you cannot ask for others to provide it for you. It arises to the extent that you practice it, in every moment. Starting right now.

And if you want to become good at working with other people to make creative decisions and chooses about the problems we face together, practicing on a daily basis and in small ways gets you ready for big and surprising challenges. It prepares you to meet the challenges that come on so fast that you have no time to learn how to deal with them. Practicing kindness, possibility seeking and deep listening on a daily basis ingrains those skills and capacities. It makes you a better facilitator. It makes you a better parent and a better citizen. It even makes you a better cabinet maker, a better financial analyst and a better claims processor.

But there is no goal. You cannot practice with the idea of achieving an 80% efficacy rate in generating creative listening in the moment of deepest crises. Practice does not lend itself to these kinds of metrics and targets. So let go of those expectations. Practice for the sake of it and revel in the small shifts that happen around you. Become present simply because it is a better way to experience the world. Participate fully in your interactions with others, ask good questions and experience what it is to be hosted. Step up and practice kindness in daily interactions to discover the core practice of hosting challenging spaces. And find a place, moment by moment, to co-create the world you want to live in.

Those of us that work with people have a terrific opportunity to practice and improve in every moment. Approaching our own training as a life long practice opens the possibility that we might get very good at it very quickly. Consider this an invitation to do so. The world is your dojo. Go practice.

Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto the diverge/converge map. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.

The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot [...]]]>

Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto the diverge/converge map. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.

The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.

The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.

The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.

The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.