The 1987 McWhirter translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco’s selected poems is reviewed in the current issue of the Literary Review of Canada. I have been sitting this morning by the ocean with poems from his first book, The Elements of the Night.
You can read these poems at the Internet Archive. Beautiful. Simple language, reflection on very few elements of his world but occasionally drilling deep into an undiscovered image. Poems worth sitting with.
A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep.
Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and practice into a new shape. If you have been following along here since January, you have seen this thinking taking place in the open. At the heart of the matter is my desire to wrestle with questions of power, epistemic justice and humility, and a desire to become a better teacher and host/facilitator.
It has been quite a year of reflection! A number of factors launched me into this work, and one in particular was an important set of blog posts from Dave Snowden that named the Art of Hosting along side other communities of practices and lineages who make a claim that they work with complexity. His posts sought to distinguish his approach to anthro-complexity from the systems thinking lineages out of which many of us come, knowingly or unknowingly. I think there is merit in this distinction and as a person that has been formed in my practice by both the Art of Hosting community (which does indeed owe a debt of lineage to these practices) and the anthro-complexity community, I felt it was important to wrestle with the similarities and distinctions between these bodies of knowledge and practice.
I recognize for many people that this conversation seems very abstract and theoretical, but I think it has deeply important practical questions to ask us as facilitators, consultants and Art of Hosting practitioners, and that is why I have spent the year thinking this through.
This is the first of a few pieces I will be writing about this. This post is an open letter to Dave Snowden, fulfilling a promise I made to him to take his critiques seriously and understand them through the lens of practice. I promised him my response would be messy, and it certainly has been over the past few months! But this letter gathers up what I have learned from his writing, and returns it to him. I find myself agreeing with much of his critique while also becoming clearer about the value I continue to find in the Art of Hosting as a practice, a community and a way of approaching these questions.
The global Art of Hosting community is a massive, distributed group of people who explore this practice from a myriad of perspectives. It is a community that learns and shares with one another and hangs together around a simple and generative practice framework, along with a set of hosting methods that largely informed that framework. Even saying that, it is almost impossible to make a general statement about how Art of Hosting practitioners practice. The community is more of a collision of experience than a settled and regulated body of work.
Having said that, here is my response to Dave, written after considering my notes, learnings and practical applications of ideas inspired by his work.
Dave,
Your estuary work sharpened something I had already been wrestling with: the danger of confusing a hosted gathering with the system of which it is a part. A workshop is not a representative miniature of an organization or a system just because we have gathered a diverse group of people. A powerful conversation is not evidence of system change. What happens under the temporary conditions of a facilitated gathering may have very little effect on the structures, incentives, networks and relationships that operate when people leave. It is easy to be seduced by what happens in a good conversation to believe that change and transformation can occur there.
As I was feeling my way through this, and trying to figure out how to write about it, your blog posts came along. I started to pay much more attention to whether the work we do survives contact with the context it is supposed to affect. I also became more reflective and precise about some of the language I use about emergence. We can choose the people, frame the question, select the method, set the time, establish the boundaries and decide how the work will be harvested, and then marvel at the emergence that happens inside those conditions. Of course humans interacting under any set of constraints will produce things nobody predicted. The more useful question, from both a practical and ethical perspective, is whether what emerges is relevant to the field from which those people came and whether it has any life once they return to it. That was the question I was beginning to ask in The Inundated Delta.
Your critique of the helper has landed too. I recognize in my own practice that facilitators and hosts can become far too important in our own accounts of what happened. We can frame the problem, interpret the group, name the pattern, harvest the meaning and then explain people’s experience back to them. The practitioner who is supposed to be enabling agency can become the central epistemic authority in the room.
The gift of this collision of ideas, and the directness with which they were offered, is that I became much more curious about what I think I am doing when I facilitate. Over the past number of months this has become the core research project of my hosting and teaching practice, and it will continue to be.
Where I now place the work of hosting dialogic containers
I think a hosted gathering is a temporary intervention in an existing field. People arrive already entangled in histories, relationships, identities, authority, obligations, institutions and material conditions. They don’t leave these things at the door. The organization doesn’t disappear because we put the chairs in a circle, and hierarchy doesn’t vanish because everyone gets equal time with a talking piece. I think broadly speaking many of my experienced colleagues in the Art of Hosting community know this too.
As a student of the phenomenon of dialogic containers, this has always been interesting to me, and my own thinking about containers has followed this curiosity for decades. Your work has massively contributed to this thinking.
Over that time I have changed my language about containers. I am much less inclined now to say that I create or hold a container, a common idea in facilitation practice. For me, a container is something that emerges from the constraints operating in a situation. As hosts we can influence some of those constraints, sometimes quite significantly, but we don’t control the pattern that results. For me, the practice of hosting lies largely in learning how to work responsibly with the constraints we can influence while becoming more attentive to those we can’t.
Over the past few months I have been developing a simple triangle as a diagnostic tool to help me pay attention to this. It distinguishes three sources of constraint in hosted work: structure, interactions and design. Structure includes what is already shaping the situation: authority, history, policy, resources, organizational roles, physical arrangements and cultural expectations. Interactions are what people actually do together, including resistance, relationship, coalition, interpretation, novelty and all the self-organization that nobody controls. Design concerns intentional constraints introduced by people who have enough power to make those intentions consequential: the invitation, the question, the boundaries, the process, the timing and the ways participation is organized.
I don’t think this is an ontology of human systems. It is a diagnostic for hosted work. It helps me ask what is already shaping this situation, what people are doing together, and what I am introducing through my own choices. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow the facilitator to disappear.
Design is an exercise of power
This is perhaps the biggest change in my practice this year. It has always been clear to me that facilitator’s and hosts have a tremendous amount of power in a room. This is an important fact and pre-occupation of the facilitation world in general. But through this inquiry I have become much more explicit about design as an exercise of power. If I ask a question, I constrain attention. If I choose Open Space instead of presentations, I change the affordances for interaction. If I decide who is invited, I make a consequential intervention before anyone enters the room. If a leader invites people to “co-create” something while retaining the authority to reject everything they produce, that shapes the container too.
In the Art of Hosting world we talk a lot about design, and we have developed tools and practices for bringing multiple perspectives into the design process and connecting the design to the field in which we are working. We work in hosting teams, and we use tools like the Chaordic Stepping Stones to create designs that can remain flexible and responsive.
However, I don’t think I have paid enough attention to design as a vector of power and constraint that can influence a dialogic container in ways that suppress emergence and distributed intelligence. Design as “fjordic,” you might say.
This isn’t a reason not to design. Somebody is going to design the gathering. Our work – my work o is to to become more conscious of the power involved in doing it.
Throughout my career I have found myself doing work inside channels already carved by power: some structural, through legislation, policy, resources and institutional authority; others intentionally created through the mandates and purposes held by people with power. And still others exercised by the distributed power of the people in the room. Until recently, I’m not sure I had a way to distinguish these clearly from the design choices I was then making inside them. In recent months I have found myself asking some very simple questions much more often: What is already fixed? What is genuinely open? Who can say no? What can these people actually influence? What will happen to what they produce? What does the person convening this work have the authority to change, and what are they prepared to let go of?
Those questions often tell me more about the possibilities for participation than a method ever could. They also make it harder to use participatory language to disguise a process in which the consequential decisions have already been made.
Why I think the Art of Hosting matters
Human beings gather deliberately. We gather to decide things, learn together, negotiate, organize, inquire, coordinate, grieve, celebrate, reconcile and make sense of what is happening. Some of those gatherings are attempts to intervene in complex systems and some aren’t. A community meeting, a strategy session, a memorial, a learning event and a group trying to figure out what to do next are different kinds of gatherings with different purposes.
In many of them somebody has consequential choices to make about how people will meet. I think learning to make those choices well is a legitimate domain of practice.
The Art of Hosting has given me a community in which to spend more than twenty years developing that practice. It taught me to pay attention to my own presence and power, to participate in the systems in which I work rather than pretend to stand outside them, to create conditions for people to exercise agency, and to work with self-organization instead of assuming that everything needs to be directed. These commitments were part of my practice before I encountered Cynefin. Anthro-complexity has made me much more precise about them.
I wrote in Control, facilitation, and the Golden Rule about the effect Open Space had on me thirty years ago. It changed my understanding of facilitation from managing conversation to working with constraints that allow people much more freedom to organize their own interactions. That remains one of the foundations of my practice. I don’t know what people will talk about, what relationship will form, what difference will become important or what somebody will learn. I don’t need to know. My responsibility is to make good choices about the constraints I actually have the authority to influence and then pay attention to what happens.
That seems to me entirely coherent with complexity. And it puts me in need of a heuristic to understand how to orient myself in this form of facilitation that we call hosting. The Art of Hosting community sprang from an inquiry into the forms of facilitation that are helpful to a group’s needs in the moment, and the work that needs to be done to ensure that whatever we do as hosts remains in contact with the context in which it is embedded. Complexity theory provides useful guidance for this stance when the work is complex.
Methods are not the practice
When I began my career as a facilitator of large group methods, I became enamoured with the process. Open Space in particular shows us what facilitation can also be, when one is not standing at a flipchart, listing and reframing ideas, or guiding the substance or tone of a conversation. One thing I am teaching differently now is the relationship between practice and methods. I am less interested in teaching people that participatory methods are preferable to other forms. Sometimes Open Space is exactly what is needed. Sometimes people need a tightly structured meeting. Sometimes they need to sit in a circle and listen carefully to one another. Sometimes they shouldn’t be in a meeting at all; they need to go out and observe what is actually happening before they have anything useful to talk about.
The idea of bounded applicability is critical. There is no intrinsically good facilitation method outside of the context in which it is useful. And so the question becomes one of practice simply choosing from a menu of methods. A method changes the constraints on interaction. That is why we use it. The question isn’t whether a method is participatory or emergent. The questions are: what does this make possible, what does it make harder, and is that useful here?
This is changing how I teach and use the Chaordic Stepping Stones as well. I am increasingly interested in the questions as ways of helping practitioners encounter context before making design choices: What is the need? Who are the people? What is already given? What principles or constraints matter? Who can say no? What will happen to the work afterwards? Each question can change what the practitioner sees, and therefore change what they choose to do. The framework improves the inquiry. In the next few months I’ll be updating that framework, because the current version is nearly ten years old, and we’ve learned so much in its use and application over the past decade. It’s time for a major version change.
How do I know what to do?
This has become one of the central questions in my teaching this year. If methods aren’t answers, and frameworks can’t prescribe action in a complex situation, how does a practitioner know what to do?
The answer, of course, is that we never know completely. We make choices, act and pay attention to what happens. But we can become better at making those choices.
That is where I now locate much of the value of practice. I want practitioners who can notice before interpreting, read context, understand constraints, see their own power, distinguish what is given from what is genuinely open, make an intervention without becoming attached to it, and recognize when less facilitation is needed. I want people who can learn from the response of the field rather than explain it away when their design doesn’t produce what they expected.
No framework can do that for us. Cynefin can’t. The Four Fold Practice can’t. The Chaordic Stepping Stones can’t. My triangle certainly can’t. They can all help us notice things we might otherwise miss, but practical judgment is something we develop by practising.
This is where I think the Four Fold Practice has considerable value. Presence, participation, hosting and co-creation aren’t a checklist of required conditions. They invite us into practices through which our judgment might become better.
What I have learned from you
When you wrote Leadership in the Estuary, you put Art of Hosting, systems leadership and anthro-complexity alongside one another and said that these traditions share more common ground than their internal debates sometimes suggest. I think that is right.
I don’t need Art of Hosting to become anthro-complexity, and anthro-complexity certainly doesn’t need to validate Art of Hosting. They are different bodies of practice with different histories, purposes and claims. But your work has given people in my practice community some important things to attend to: context before intervention, distributed rather than facilitator-centred sensemaking, constraints and affordances, epistemic humility, the brown-field nature of change, and a sharper account of power.
The effect on me has been quite practical, not just this year, but going back to where I first encountered your ideas. I am more circumspect about facilitation. I make fewer claims about collective intelligence and emergence. I pay more attention to what is already shaping a situation before I introduce a process. I am more explicit about power. I am more interested in what happens after people leave the room. I teach methods less as answers and questions more as ways of developing attention. And I have become increasingly interested in helping practitioners develop judgment rather than simply expand their repertoires.
I think Art of Hosting has something useful to offer in the other direction too. It has accumulated a substantial body of practical knowledge about convening: how invitations work, how participation can be structured, how hosts cultivate attention, how groups can be given room to organize themselves, and how practitioners can develop enough confidence to intervene lightly and get out of the way when they are no longer needed.
Neither body of work needs to swallow the other. Your critique has made me a better Art of Hosting practitioner because it has forced me to become clearer about what the practice can and cannot do, more modest about what I claim for it, and more attentive to the consequences of my own design choices. I am grateful for that.
At the same time, I remain committed to the idea that the practice of hosting itself is worth taking seriously. If human beings are going to keep gathering intentionally to do things together, then there is value in learning how to shape those gatherings with skill, humility and attention to the fields in which they actually live.
So this is my letter back to you, a promised report, with thanks, on where your work has directed my attention. And it is also a stand upon the ground of what we have built and developed together in the Art of Hosting world. I’ll compose a similar letter to colleagues in that community, because I think there is learning to carry in both directions. The work for me now is to keep developing the practice: testing it, adjusting it, being clearer about its limits, and continuing to build our capacity to meet the work that presents itself.
The current issue of the New Yorker has a poem by Adrienne Su called “Lament” which ends with the lines “the reasons to gather/have never been clearer/The dinner is gravy.” Reading the poem sent me down a little rabbit hole of her work and stumbled into her writing about food and culture.
Her website offers me an essay called “The Last Bite: A Culinary Meditation on Arlene Schechet’s “Head on a Plate” Porcelains” which conjures up:
A head on a plate initially evokes a stray Brussels sprout—the last bite, which the diner could not finish. It is not the despised Brussels sprout of yore but the aspirational appetizer or side in a good restaurant: tumbled with bacon, pecans, or blue cheese (or all three), or seared with honey and soy sauce and a sprinkling of white pepper. It remains alone on the plate not because it is unappealing but because the eater took or received too many and now must contemplate throwing it away, which incites guilt. It is too small to justify a take-out container, but stuffing oneself when not hungry is also a form of waste, so the conscientious restaurant patron sits, shooing away the server attempting to clear the table, hoping to feel hunger again before others start talking about dessert or calling for the check.
This piece also contains a recipe,
A search in Libby for her books offers me several samples from recent works including Peach State in which the poem “Substitutions” offers couplets that contrast life in traditional human community with the modernity of an immigrant’s reality in Atlanta: “Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar/Letters ,for a family gathered//A Cuisinart, for many hands/Petty burglars for warring bands//A baby’s room, for tight quarters/Passing cars, for neighbours”
I love her work.
The seventh cohort of this program launches on October 1. Registration is now open.
Over the past 26 years we have worked with all kinds of organizations and communities facing change, conflict, growth, uncertainty and the need to make important decisions together. Increasingly, we find ourselves working with people who are facing situations where there is no obvious answer, even when there is plenty of expertise in the room.
Sometimes the challenge is organizational culture or leadership. Sometimes it is strategy or systems change. Sometimes it is simply the difficulty of trying to work well together when circumstances keep changing, or finding new ways to approach a problem that seems intractable.
These are complex situations, and one of the most useful things we have learned is that complexity requires different ways of working. There are lots of problems for which expertise, analysis and planning are exactly what is needed. But when people are involved, conditions are changing, and every action we take changes the situation itself, it becomes much harder to know in advance what will work.
For us, a key question has become: How do we do good work when we don’t know what to do?
Complexity practice helps us distinguish between situations where we can rely on what we know and situations where we need to learn our way forward.
Complexity informed approaches help us to develop more ways of seeing what is happening and having more choices about how to respond.
In practice, that means developing our capacity to:
Over the years we have also come to understand that this work isn’t only about what is happening in organizations and systems. We are part of the complexity too.
The uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of control that characterize complex situations can provoke some very familiar responses in human beings. We can become attached to certainty, defend what we think we know, narrow our attention, stop listening well, or reach for control precisely when the situation requires curiosity and openness to other possibilities.
This is why we call the course Complexity Inside & Out.
We pay attention to three interconnected areas of practice: what happens inside ourselves, what happens between us, and what happens in the larger structures and systems in which we are working. Our beliefs, emotions, identities and reactions influence how we listen, speak, make decisions and use power. Those interactions create patterns between us, while the structures and histories of the systems we inhabit shape what is possible and influence us in return.
There is a useful correspondence between the practices we use across all three. Whether we are working with ourselves, a team or a larger system, we learn to notice patterns, get curious about what is holding them in place, seek perspectives we don’t already have, make small moves in a direction we want to go, and pay attention to what happens next.
Complexity Inside & Out is our attempt to bring much of this practice together in one place. During the program we work with:
This is not primarily a course in complexity theory. We use theory where it helps us see and act differently, but the emphasis is on practice.
Participants bring their own work and questions into the program. We spend time applying the ideas, trying practices together, reflecting on what happens and learning from the different contexts and experiences in the group.
The course is especially useful for people who have some responsibility for helping others navigate uncertainty: leaders and managers, facilitators, consultants, coaches, evaluators, community organizers, and people doing organizational and systems change work. You don’t need a background in complexity theory. You might simply recognize the experience of being responsible for something important and realizing that nobody really knows what to do next.
We don’t expect people to leave with a formula for complexity, because there isn’t one. What we hope you leave with is a richer repertoire of ways to notice, make sense and act; a stronger capacity to work with your own responses when things become difficult; and more confidence in finding a way forward with others when there is no map to follow.
Increasingly, that seems to us to be an essential part of leadership and good work in the world we are living in.
Join us for our seventh cohort of Working with Complexity from the Inside Out and please share this invitation with anyone you know who might benefit from this deep dive into practice.
Over the last month I have been working with this diagram that depicts the architecture of held space. You can read much more detail about this at the post I wrote earlier in the month, including some of the comments that helped me to think it through a little more.
One very helpful set of comments from Corina Enache came during a good discussion at LinkedIn. I’d like to quote them at length so they are preserved here. Her main point was clear. If I’m trying to get the facilitator out of the centre, I’m doing what I want to do if I give the facilitator a specific place of their own in the diagram. Corina argued that the facilitator’s power can already be understood by the expression of Interaction and structure, and that the facilitator can be seen a a thick node or connections in that space. We both agree that power and authority are inevitable and potentially useful aspects of group work. We shouldn’t ignore or try to transcend them, but make them visible.
These are great points and I found that what I really needed was some field testing. Since that discussion took place I have worked with two clients in teaching and hosting retreats, and have brought a set of observations to this work. I promised Corina a reply and here it is.
The triangle helps us to understand the source of constraints in hosted spaces. The first observation is that this triangle is not a claim about the reality (ontology) of social fields. I agree with her that social fields can be described sufficiently with the structure – interaction axis. The triangle is however a way of looking at what I call dialogic containers (or “hosted spaces), and the three corners are sources of constraints on those spaces. Structure is a source of inherited constraints. Interactions are a source of emergent constraints. And Design is a source of intentional constraints. So I’m not looking to develop a new theory of social fields. I’m looking at creating a way of accounting for what happens in a field when someone says “Welcome” or “we’re here for…” or “This is what will happen next…” That could be anything from a courtroom to a party to a conversation to a pub, to a public meeting, a strategy session or a workshop.
The role of the facilitator should be visible. As a person who has worked for decades in facilitation, I think it’s important that we bring our attention to the practice of hosting but also the way in which we affect social fields. In my work with the Evans School of Public Policy last week, the director of the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC), Amanda Bankston, mentioned to me that there is very little in the literature on public policy that describes the role of the facilitator on policy making or democracy. This is an astonishing fact to me, and so true. For decades I have helped design and facilitate hosted spaces that have had impacts on policy issues like health care, fisheries, child and family services, Indigenous rights and title, poverty, forestry. marine stewardship and other issues. And in not one case can I ever remember that the design choices we made, and the facilitation itself being named as a source of what happened. Adam Kahane in particular writes about this function a lot and is always careful to say that the involvement of the facilitation team in his work, while important, must be held up against many other things that are happening in the social fields in which the process is located. He wisely guards against facilitators taking his own observations as universal truths about “how to do it.” Instead his books are about the thorny challenges of how to do it, and how to make some sense of what has been done. I appreciate his work so much, because he is one of the most honest voices in thinking about the role of facilitation in public policy and social change, especially at the scales at which he and his teams work.
Of course, it is impossible to assign any single cause to any single effect in a policy initiative. But the absence of the host and the process design in any kind of analysis about public policy making means that consulting firms, and facilitators become invisible in the work. Furthermore, the host isn’t the only source of intentional constraints, but is most often the vector through which other intentional constraints arrive in the room. The power and privilege behind the shaping of the process can enter a hosted container through design differently from the way they enter through structures that authorize them or interactions that change when leaders are in the room. I think this deserves to be distinguished in our work.
In complex work we are asked to be responsible for the foreseen and unforeseen outcomes of our choices. We need a way of seeing and accounting for this effect. Hence, the third corner of this triangle, one which lifts the hosted container out of the social field and provides a lens through which we can interrogate and understand what intentional constraints that are brought to the work.
Design is not sovereign. It exists in relationship with Structure and Interaction. So the Design corner of this triangle is not “the facilitator” per se, but rather represents the choices that are made in crafting a process. When I work with a client, I always try to learn as much as possible about the existing social field we are working with. What structures are already in place? What are the interactions that are important to understand? In long-term initiatives, especially those related to issues of culture, conflict or leadership development, we use detailed narrative captures before entering into the substantive work, and we continue to use narrative capture so the group can make sense of it’s own reality. At some point, we make a choice. We design a workshop. We make a proposal. The leadership makes a decision. A hosted space becomes a part of the work and what happens there collapses the potential of the social field into a dialogic container, one in which intention is introduced and which works with and influences structure and interaction.
The choice of how much or how little constraint in a container is brought to bear on this situation is an important ethical consideration. If I come into an organization or community with “a great meeting method that will solve all your problems” my intention may colonize the very real capacity in the room that could emerge from the interactions between people. A lecture delivered on how an organization’s culture should change will have a particular effect. Many leaders, consultants and facilitators may see the Design corner as a way to get their own way and introduce power and influence into a room backed by some amount of authority that comes from their role, positionally or privilege. The “dense node” or Corina’s observation has history to it, and I think that needs to be accounted for.
The triangle therefore gives us a diagnostic tool in which we can honestly weigh the sources of constraint in a hosted space.
The triangle as a diagnostic tool. By diagnosis here I don’t mean a tool that helps us somehow patholigize and organization before we set to work solving a problem. I mean the practice. Diagnosis is useful when it helps us see differences that matter. And so the triangle does that.
It makes a set of questions visible to practitioners to help understand what is needed and what is going on in a dialogic container. If a process is stuck or failing, it might not be sufficient to blame the people or the room or the agenda or the relationships. We can also ask what is shaping the conversation. This helps us to shine a light on some of less visible aspect of what is at play.
This is what I got to field test last week in Seattle. I convened a breakout session on working with the power that exists in the fields in which we are hosting. I didn’t draw the triangle. Instead we had a participant offer up a case – a long term and highly distributed culture change initiative she and her team were asked to lead. It was struggling and so we explored the different sources of constraints in the initiative to see what ways the work might be changed. The overwhelming thought was that “it’s just too hard to change people’s behaviour.” I thought this was a good observation! The question is why are we trying to do that?
I asked questions, informed by the triangle. These included questions like this:
I think the main learning was that the group was able to examine to role of the mandate holder – in this case a committee doing the work of a senior leader through the responsible implementation team – and see it both with empathy and curiosity. The mandate comes strongly through design and provides a massive amount of influence on a process. With something as significant as culture change, the mandate holder can be holding a very tight set of constraints that are impossible to deliver on and that rob the people of their own agency in creating and sustaining the kind of culture that is desired. In fact, in the absence of a decent narrative collection from the field it can be hard to know if the mandate is even an appropriate response to the situation. Are there NO examples in the field that prove the exception to what people think is going on?
The triangle is an instrument of attention, not a map of reality. So, this little triangle, at the end of the day, is a way to guide attention to what is already shaping a container, what is happening between people inside it and what is being deliberately introduced through the design. It might seem like overkill to spend so many words and thoughts on this, but the challenge that I have been grappling with over the past year is trying to figure out a way to honestly account for the influence of the host.
Facilitators, hosts, designers and leaders are not neutral participants in a dialogic containers. They are in fact the reason why a hosted dialogic container exists. Without their injection of constants on a social field, we don not have a hosted space. A leader does not just show up in a room and “hide in the corner.” Open Space Technology is not a value-free method that refreshingly makes everything possible. A desired outcome for a process narrows what can be observed and requires those holding power to scaffold their attention open so that they do not foreclose the work of the work of group.
This is my attempt to offer something to our field of practice to help us see the way a dialogic container arises from the different weights of constraint on a field. There is no ideal place for a process to live within this triangle. There is only the question of what is needed now. And now. And now.
Thoughts, comments, critiques and questions all welcome.
Corina’s comments in full:
…structure and interaction are group processes, they belong to no one but design, as you’ve drawn it, is a role held by a person. So the triad puts two field-level phenomena and one individual actor at the same altitude, and I don’t think that holds… The facilitator’s power isn’t a third source of constraint entering from its own corner, it’s already expressed in structure (the chairs in a circle) and interaction (naming the method). Giving it a separate spot double-counts it, and might do the thing you say you want to avoid: it puts the facilitator back at the centre.. i look at it as one field of structure and interaction in which power is unevenly distributed, and the facilitator is just a dense node in it, to be named and tracked, not given its own axis…
… I think we both want the same thing: power made visible and accountable. Where we might diverge – and tell me if I’ve got you wrong – is in the underlying stance. I read the post as treating authority as presumptively suspect, something to be caught before it does harm. I look at authority as a natural feature of any field, something to be held well rather than guarded against. – for example I really like your threshold idea and once the crossing can be held by a compelling shared purpose, or what lingers after the host goes invisible in Open Space you’ve stopped describing a role and started describing something already in the field because uneven influence is what fields do. Someone becomes a dense node long before any facilitator arrives; the facilitator is just a dense node who came on purpose…
For me the absence of explicit authority isn’t neutrality. When a facilitator disowns their power, “I’m only holding space” , it doesn’t leave the room. It flows to whoever was already dense in the field, now the least accountable authority present. Disavowed authority is the most dangerous kind, because you can’t track what insists it isn’t there…Which is uncomfortable because if power is in the chairs and the invitation, there’s no outside. Self-effacement is a technique. Even “stewardship” is a form of power, maybe the most effective, because it works while feeling like care. So if I can’t purify my way out 🙂 [then] the question is, given that uneven power is unavoidable and productive, the medium, not the contaminant, what distribution do we want, and by what criteria do we judge it?
…one more reflection on your triangle coming from our exchange. For me structure and interaction are what a container is made of. They’re always fully there, even your pub group, with no design at all, has both. But intention isn’t like that. Its weight varies with the work and sometimes it’s near zero. That’s not a third thing the container is made of, it’s a way the made-of-stuff can be oriented, a direction the field leans, not a substance alongside the two others. And every case you reach for to justify the pole dissolves back into the two, when I let power sit unevenly across them. The threshold is the field reconfiguring, structure and interaction shifting as people cross into “being in something.” The Open Space is persistent structure: patterns that outlast the people. The leader’s intention is a dense node bending interaction. None of them is a third kind of thing, each is the existing field, unevenly weighted and pointed somewhere. So I don’t think intention needs a corner but what it does need is to be named. A corner says it’s a different dimension but i dont think it is. It’s the direction I’m leaning a field I’m already standing inside. And I think the corner actually works against the intention you named in our exchange because it gives the facilitator a place to stand. A clean, legitimate-looking spot off to the side, as if design were something I bring to the room rather than something I’m doing to it from within. That’s the separation you rejected, “design acts upon the field”, but the geometry actually reproduces it if you add it as a third pillar. draw intention as its own pole and I get to mistake my lean for a location…
