Art of Participatory Leadership, day two

This group we are working with in Estonia is cracking a lovely design for a six month learning journey around hosting, harvesting and participatory leadership.  They began in September with a little Art of Hosting retreat, are together now in the Art of Participatory Leadership and in February they will gather one more time.  In between workshops, they are working on projects in their organizations and communities, deep in real practice and real life.  As a result they have much to share with one another and it is only up to Toke and I as teachers to offer a few bones and move out of the way so they can accelerate their learning.

These guys are not afraid to go deep with their work either.  This morning we checked in by working with a little ritual. We had everyone go to sleep at the end of Day One with a pillow question: what do I need to let go off to take my work to the next level, and what do I need to embrace?  When we began, each of us wrote down the thing we needed to let go of, and then we very carefully placed it in the fireplace.  This is always a powerful ritual, and it was for me today too.  Following that we wrote a note or two on what we need to embrace, and we joined another person to speak that aloud.  The conclusion of those little dyads ended in an embrace of one kind or another: a handshake, a hug, a touch on the arm.  It was about making connection and seeing each other in the vulnerability of opening to what we need to let come.

Toke and I offered a little teaching on the art of hosting and harvest conversations and the group released into a set of conversation about the applications of various methodologies.  In many Art of Hosting trainings, we refer to this as a knowledge camp, or a knowledge cafe, where people dive deeper into a method or a design tool.  Usually we have experienced practitioners host these conversations, but today the learners themselves hosted these conversations.  The learning was deep, and each table (Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, Circle and Powerful Questions) produced some insights which Toke and I riffed on a little.  One thing that became clear was that in Estonian there is no word for “Purpose” at least not in the sense that we have been using it.  It seems that it is usually translated as “goal” or “aim” and we have been struggling to understand that instead of a goal that lies outside of yourself, it is more like the inner engine that drives you forward.  It has been fun playing with the translation of concepts finding that no one word seems to capture the concept, but many words will do!

After lunch, Open Space, and the participants dove into their projects and their questions, also very rich.  We finished with a little check out and retired for dinner.

What happened next was astounding.  We dined on salmon and carrot salad and rice, and beer and wine and “snaps” began to flow.  Conversation was pleasant, but at one point one of our participants, Margus, rose to his feet and began to tell the story of his people.  He is a Setu, a tribal indigenous group from southern Estonia, a people that have been in the way of Estonians, Russians and others for thousands of years.  They have a tradition of every year electing a “king’s master” who is responsible for producing a type of vodka produced from rye.  The drink is very strong and the tradition is that the one who carries it pours a glass for party goers and asks who you are and where you come from.  Margus travelled the room offering shot after shot of the spirit, in a powerful and ritual way.  That loosened up the voices of the Estonians who broke into song and we sang for hours afterwards.  Song after song flowed around the table, folks songs, Eurovision songs, novelty drinking songs (one of which involved us standing on our chairs and singing a verse and then sitting under the table singing a verse!).  We sang and told poems and played tunes until the wee hours.  As some drifted off to bed, a group of us went down to the sauna and indulged in that Nordic ritual for the rest of the night, singing and drinking and sweating together.  It was four in the morning by the time I finally got to bed.

This is the joy and pleasure of a field, of a shared culture, of a group of people who cling to their learning and to each other, and who can explore any territory together.  It was a sweet, sweet day.

(Photos are here and the group has started a blog too.)