It feels like Christmas Eve around here. I am sitting at home on Bowen Island and our house is full of friends and colleagues Amanda Fenton and Kelly Poirier who have now retired to bed. Along with Caitlin, we have completed a long and productive day of planning and design for what will be the 17th annual Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. This evening I am sitting by my fire, finishing a dram of Laphroaig and remembering the first one in 2003 when Toke Moeller and I sat by this same fireplace discussing teaching and learning and what this …
I travel around many different kinds of organizations. Many of them preach the mantra that goes something like “it’s okay to fail here. Please take risks and try new things!” Unfortunately, when I look around I can’t see much infrastructure in place that allows the work context to be safe enough to fail. An organization needs to build learning and experimentation into its operations, especially if it is required to respond to changing conditions, improvements in services, or new ideas. And so the idea that “we want people to take risks” is promoted, often alongside an exhortation to do so …
I’ve been enjoying Haruki Murakami’s early novels lately. Here is a paragraph from “Pinball, 1973.” “On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing; a rosebud, a lost cap, a favourite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to all their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.” –Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University. In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes: In disciplines as diverse as …
In this blog post, I’m going to lift the lid on the core of my facilitation practice. I specialize in complex facilitation for addressing complex issues and this requires a special approach to working with groups. In the Art of Hosting world, we call this approach “hosting” to signify that it has its primary focus on the spaces and processes that we use to host dialogue rather than a more traditional facilitation approach that manages the content, meaning-making, and dynamics. For me, this approach is defined by a focus on the two key dynamics of emergence and self-organization. After 15 …