Helping a friend with a design challenge today. He is running a small group process at the end of a day of presentations about energy futures in a small community. He initially thought that it would be good to end the day – in which 120 people are gathered to hear about energy futures – with action steps, but these kinds of gatherings are not good places to come up with action planning. Instead I advised him to use a World Cafe for reflection process to produce the elements of a shared vision. IN a little over an hour, good …
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community. Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. …
The Art of Hosting is predicated on a very simple set of practices which we call the Four Fold Practice. This framework emerged from a conversation in the late 1990s between Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Carsten Ohm and Jan-Hein Nillson about what patterns make for a meaningful conversation. After talking about it for days, the clarity that arose was that people experience meaningful conversations when they are present, when they participate, when they are hosted and when they co-create something. Simple. The next question then became, what if these four patterns were actually practices that could be cultivated both by …
Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues. Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here. Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.
When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things. These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see. At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff. On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to: If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their …