Part three in a series: Part one: Just what I needed Part Two: Where did this come from? Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation. As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had …
Part of a series. Part one: Just what I needed Part two: Where did this come from? Something Harrison Owen said to me somewhere along the line drove me to understand that facilitating Open Space Technology meetings required a tremendous amount of personal practice. He talked about rising at 4am the day of his Open Space meetings and meditating for an hour. The work of actively letting go takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially if, like most of us, you have control instincts to overcome. When one is facilitating an Open Space meeting the desire to control things, even …
To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does. Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share …
One of the core practices in the world of participatory leadership is working closely with others, and staying in relationship. I’ve sometimes said that my business model is friendship, and that feels truer than ever as I move into my fifties and find myself practicing more and more accompaniment and mentorship in my life and work. It has been an important metric for me to have more collaborators than clients in a given year. It is a further metric that I count many of my clients as collaborators and friends. And so here is a list of the amazing people …
It has been thirty years since 14 women were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and every year I mark their passing here. I’ve always associated this song with that event, and I’ve even asked Lynn Miles about it, and she has said to me, despite her introduction in the above video, “yeah, I guess it’s also about that.” And let’s remember their names and what they were studying or working on that day because they were our peers and their deaths marked a whole generation of us. Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil …