On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:
What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question! Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process. And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.
If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized. For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much. In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option. Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change. What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said. In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work. In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.
And then having said all of that, I think there is an art to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”
Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group. My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place. How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order. In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met. At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people. We can learn a lot from those situations. If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?
The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential. And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity. But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else. If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.
In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.
That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.
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I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists. I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed. I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada.
We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.” This is an impossible condition for victory. At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no?
This interesting article in the NY Times is about Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian who brokered the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993. In it he talks about the need to talk to people as an alternative to say, unilateral declarations of war on hundreds of previously unconnected networks:
Norway’s message to the United States is blunt: the next administration, whether headed by Barack Obama or John McCain, should pronounce the war on terror over. Because it has tended to isolate the United States, polarize the world, inflate the enemy, conflate diverse movements and limit scope for dialogue, its time has passed.
“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”
He continued: “Moderates lose ground if they cannot show tangible results. You don’t engage at any price, but the price can come down and we can achieve more.”
Norway has kept channels open to Hamas and to Syria. It has spoken with the Hamas leadership. It is convinced the West missed an opportunity by not talking in March 2007 to the elected Palestinian national unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas members. It argues that Taliban elements can be drawn out of terror into politics through talks.
In all of this, Norway has used the greater diplomatic latitude it enjoys as a non-member of the European Union. The E.U., like the United States, lists Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“We have enormous reason to be upset with Hamas because it spent every day after Oslo trying to destroy Oslo,” Store said. “But there is a strong realist tradition in Hamas oriented toward a political landscape. In general, it should be in our interest to get organizations out of military activity and into politics. The political working method has not been sufficiently tested.”
Interesting.
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We’d like to invite you to join us for an Art of Hosting workshop here on Bowen Island in September. Myself, Monica Nissen, Caitlin Frost, Tenneson Woolf and David Stevenson will host you here at Rivendell Retreat Centre for three and half days of learning, exploring and playing with the art of hosting and harvesting conversations that matter.
Please grab the invitation, share with others and consider joining us. You can also register online through the Berkana Institute website. And if you are already registered, leave a note in the comments to let folks know who is coming. Confirmed participants already include bloggers, facilitators people working in business, tribal communities and in the food sector.
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Dave Pollard has published a comprehensive list of books which together might hold to the keys to How to Save the World. To those I would add these, from my library, as a modest addition to tools which help us make best use of our collective intelligence.
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Doug posted a creed a little while back:
We are nothing alone. We cannot exist without reference points. We cannot know ourselves until another knows us. This is why we seek love–not just something to hold, but someone to know us and hold us as just us. Neither can we be together if we do not exist as individuals. Both are needed.
Dialogue is both our existence and what we do. We are beings in our doings.
Our purpose is to stir things up. The stirrings are the living edge of us. Where we leak into others, there we create new life. This is the work of conversation: to create new life.
Dialogue then is not a mere tool, but the fountain of life. Drink from each other’s mouths and ears the stuff of life.
The between is life. The between throws off life. The between lives. The between gives life. We meet in the between. We live in the between. What we do separately is done only to serve the between. The between is life.
I was recently interviewed for a film and the interviewer asked me about my spiritual path. On the spur of the moment I said that my religion is the spaces between us, or, as Lorca said: “there are spaces that ache in the uninhabited air.” I am a devotee of those.