The Var River below the high village of Touët in France.

This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity.

I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my practice. This post focusses especially on how I arrived at anthro-complexity as a theory-informed dialogue practitioner and it connects it to the longest standing curiosity I have had which is essentially “What are you going to do about it?” That question has driven every inquiry in my life. It is important to talk about where one is coming from.

The first: my work with Friendship Centres and other Indigenous organizations through the 1990s gave me a practical experience of applying what I learned during the five years I spent at Trent University in what was then called Native Studies, with an emphasis on community and organizational culture. That already shaped much of the way I approached working with people. My practice was further formed by the organizers, facilitators and leaders in the Friendship Centre movement who had built an influential national grassroots movement in Canada.

The second: I’ve talked before about how Open Space completely changed my approach to group facilitation by introducing my to a mode of working with groups that was rooted in the people, their own intelligence and knowledge and not the performative or interventionist nature of the facilitator. Learning about Open Space fundamentally changed the way I looked at organizations, governance and facilitation, and it led me into an inquiry with a wider group of people who were asking questions about what self-organization, complexity and participation meant for these milleaux.

The third: In 2003, at a gathering called by Harrison Owen and others we spent five days in Open Space and I came into the Art of Hosting community through an explicit invitation from Toke Møller who was one of a small number of people forming a community of of practice around the idea of the Four Fold Practice. This appealed to me because I recognized right away that the communities of practice associated with process methodologies were too limiting in terms of trying to understand what happens in a groups space that is truly complex. I was looking for what I later called “communities of praxis” where theory and practice were meeting.

The Art of Hosting itself – the four fold practice – provided a useful heuristic for facilitating practice (and design of participatory facilitation work) and was disruptive enough to the understood norms of facilitation that it was named “hosting.” This naming pointed at the idea that it wasn’t the people or the process that was being actively facilitated by the host. Rather it was the conditions of interaction that were being shaped by the host. The work of the dialogic container was done by the people themselves. The work was not just tools, but rather developing principles of practice.

Several threads from different large group method practice found their way into this nascent understanding of what hosting seeks to generate. It is about highly participatory work, rooted in dialogue and shared meaning-making. From the World Cafe, it was about the “magic in the middle: as Finn Voldtofte named it: the emergent possibilities of what happens in truly participatory spaces. From The Circle Way practice of Baldwin and Linnea, it was “leadership in every seat.” From Harrison Owen and Open Space it was about self-organization and “trust the people, not the process.” All of these point to something that didn’t yet have a mainstream frame of reference, but we understood them to be rooted in complexity.

At that time complexity in humans systems was tied more to the chaos science world, and my own understanding had been informed by the sources the Open Space practitioner community pointed to: Capra, Gleick, Kauffmann, Isaacs, and Bohm. I was less enamoured with Senge et. all’s systems thinking stuff with its causal loops and leverages and flows. In the Art of Hosting world, Tøke and Monica had spent some time with Dee Hock in a Kaos Pilot cohort in San Francisco in the late 1990s and his idea of the dynamic relationship between chaos and order (producing chaordic space) helped us to understand that hosting was a process that helped address the volatile and unknowable nature of true complexity. Hock formulated that thinking in the 1960s when he was trying to create a currency – the VISA cared – and he struggled to find organizational structures that could provide some stability while allowing for self organization. Hock’s work, formed in the 1960s, was more in line with the living systems/chaos theory approach to complexity rather than the more mechanistic systems thinking stuff that Senge and Meadows and others were producing.

Still my curiosity about how complexity happened in groups and organizations and what implications it had for facilitation practice and leadership – and what I was going to do about it – continue to seek deeper understanding And that’s where the fourth big pivotal shift in my practice happened.

Sometime in 2008 I became aware of Dave Snowden’s work and the Cynefin framework entered my awareness. I had been searching for a framework that helped me to understand all the different ways humans systems work and in particular the need to be context specific when doing all of this. My degree in Native Studies had taught me that; context is so much bigger and more important that anything that might happen within it. Maps were central to this understanding.

During my years at Trent, the medicine wheel was perhaps the first framework that was introduced to me to help me understand how context operates. We talked about holistic ways of seeing and working, and be aware of the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of all that we do. Medicine wheels were extremely powerful frameworks used in the cultural revitalization movements of the 1970s and 1980s when I was studying this work. They represented a way of seeing that recovered Indigenous perspectives on conditions and situations and demanded a deeper accountability to the interconnectedness of living and non-living things in order to create healthy lives. HOW they were used was important though.

I actually wrote my honours these on this, looking two Indigenous organizations and how they were expressing Indigenous culture in the their work. One used the medicine wheel in an almost fundamentalist way, structuring everything according to directions. So it assigned roles to people who lived in the north, east, south and west not according to ability but according to where they lived. Action, healing, vision and strategy had nothing to do with competencies or need, and everything to do with the structure. This was an abject failure and created confusion, conflict and despair in the organization. It was led by two Anishinaabe Elders and cultural practitioners and it was a blanket application of an Anishinaabe values onto a national organization made up of people from many different cultures, spiritual traditions and ways of working.

By contrast, the other organization – the National Association of Friendship Centres, for whom I later worked – organized itself along traditional non-profit ways of doing things. It had a representative board, a standard staffing model, with an Executive Director and a small staff and a pretty clear mandate. The form was light, the staff was small, and it allowed for the organization to be agile and flexible in pursuing funding and program opportunities with the federal government. The work was deeply cultural as well, and the organization had many different cultural practitioners, spiritual leaders and Elders within its ranks and every meeting was supported by this role. We had Elders like Bruce Elijah who attended to our national board meetings and our AGMs were full of ceremony, appropriate to the territory in which we were meeting or supported by people who stepped up to take responsibility for caring for the spiritual and cultural life of the organization. The light, grassroots, member driven structure gave rise to a rich organizational cultural life that was able to handle depression conflicts, emergencies and crises, but also to create a movement in which people were cared for and chose to spend their careers.

The conclusions that stayed with me from the year long piece of research were essentially that culture does not live in imposed frameworks, no matter how sacred or rigidly applied they are, but rather lives in the ways in which people can bring their skills, themselves, and their experiences to bear on the situation at hand. There were many medicine wheels used at the NAFC, but they were used to orient us and make sense of what was happening and to ask questions about what we might do, not to prescribe action or, horror, demand outcome accountability.

This is the backdrop to how I saw and used maps. (I even mashed them all together at one point in what is clearly a whimsical folly.)

Of all the maps I saw, Cynefin said this most explicitly: “horses for courses.” And also, one of Dave’s important principles “data precedes the framework.” Do the appropriate thing given the context you are working with. Don’t impose anything on people that forces them to make meaning according to your frame. And beyond that, Snowden’s work on complexity was exactly what I was looking for to explain how to work with human systems. Hock’s chaord and the way we talked about it in the Art of Hosting mapped well enough onto what Snowden called “linear Cynefin.” I still use this framing to lightly introduce people to complexity, becasue the idea that we default to control when confusing things get unpredictable rather than leaning into a “shallow dive into chaos” is still – and maybe increasingly – radical to most people. The Chaord and Cynenfin are NOT the same thing at all though, and this point will be explored in a subsequent post.

After many years of reading, teaching, and trying stuff out, I took my first Cynefin course in London in 2014. I was especially interested in how complexity would change my approach to harvesting and evaluation, but it did so much more than that. What became “anthro-complexity” offered a significant redirection to my own hosting practice and changed (and continues to inform) my practice of the Art of Hosting. This redirection was strong enough that it knocked me outside of the mainstream practice of the Art of Hosting community of practice. This included the way methods are used (and the primacy of methods), the way training happens, and the way we use this approach for making change. The lessons of that course still resonate with me to this day and have shaped my Art of Hosting practice.

I find myself now in a world that straddles both approaches to this work and I believe that there is a very fruitful area of overlap and generative engagement to be had, the inquiry of which is the basis of our Complexity Inside and Out program.

I also recognize that I am very nearly alone in this inquiry. Many folks in the Art of Hosting community disagree or just don’t understand some of what is core to my practice, and Snowden has made it clear where he understands the limits of the Art of Hosting to be, as he understands them. The confluence of anthro-complexity and the Art of Hosting has distorted my own practice in a way that I feel honours the depth of what both bodies of work are getting at, but it hasn’t left me too many close colleagues. I am still and active member and global steward of the Art of Hosting community of practice, but my stewardship focuses on the Four Fold Practice. I believe that, with use and experience, that framework is incredible helpful for facilitators and leaders to expand their practices deeply into complexity. It helps us to convene better participatory meetings and it helps leaders to lead more engaged teams and organizations, all of which is much desired. Learning to convene well, to host dialogue and to lead in an inclusive way is worthy work.

This commitment to the Four Fold Practice is shaped by what I have learned from anthro-complexity over the years. My next post will dive into some of the specific ways that principles and practices of Snowden’s (and Cynthia Kurtz’s) work have influenced mine, and why I feel like these are important lesson for Art of Hosting practitioners to take on board, especially those of us working explicitly with complexity and change. And following that, I’ll write more on what I think are valuable and important contributions that the Art of Hosting makes on it’s own with respect to convening and learning.

So this post is one of a series that is seeking to describe some of this development in a little more detail. It is also intended to invite Art of Hosting practitioners to further develop our practice especially as we use it within organizations and communities to support change and strategy work. More to come.