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Four streams that have taken me to the margins of every community of practice to which I belong

May 27, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Evaluation, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, World Cafe 2 Comments

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.

Spurs by the skins of their teeth

May 26, 2026 By Football No Comments

Coming to the end of our holidays here in France and after a short day of walking some 13kms around Monaco, I made it back to our rental to watch Spurs battle Everton in the final Premier League match of the season.

It should never have come to this, but a win or a draw was necessary to stave off relegation and with West Ham winning 3-0, we could not afford to lose.

It was a match which offered mostly one way traffic from Spurs but this season has had enough counter attacking disappointments that the nervous supporter could take nothing for granted. Kinsky made a crucial late save to fully redeem his performance in Madrid and Paulinha’s goal, just barely knocked over the line was the difference between two very different futures.

The Championship is not a league I would have wanted us to play in. A team built to compete in the Championship League was never going to retain the talent we have to play second division domestic football. Roberto di Zerbi did the business keeping us up but his job has been made so much easier next year by being back in the Premier League.

As for West Ham, Jacob Steinberg’s excellent piece in The Guardian describes how West Ham are in serious peril as they fall for the first time in 23 years. We so narrowly avoided that fate although we are much better positioned to return had we been relegated. Still. Sunderland and Leicester and ahandful of other teams can tell you that the path to hell begins at the gates of relegation, especially if your management isn’t up to scratch.

I’ll be home in a few days although travelling again to Ontario for work, but my sporting focus now becomes TSS Rovers as our shortened season enters its final five weeks of play. The men’s team are chasing Langley United for the title agains but we need them to drop points. For the women, a team that has gone through a squad transition sits mid table but even in defeat plays outstanding football. They really are a joy to watch.

Reading Mistral in Provence

May 24, 2026 By Being, Featured No Comments

Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie

I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing.

It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet story, of star crossed lovers. The plot is simple enough: boy and girl fall in love but their class differences make marriage impossible. The girl repels all suitors, and her parents angrily forbid her from ever seeing her true love. She runs away across the bleak plains and salt marshes of The Crau and the Camargue until she takes sanctuary in the chapel of the Saintes Maries. She is pursued by her father’s harvestmen and by Vincen but by the time everyone catches up with her, she has succumbed to heat stroke and dies in the arms of her true love.

The poem is structured across 12 cantos. The extended form allows Mistral to slowly move the action across the various regions of his beloved homeland in Provence. The poem is a love letter to the land and is written in Provençal, as an artistic expression of his cultural work, to revitalize the language and tell the stories of the land and the people in their own tongue. It was largely on the basis of this work that Mistral received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904. The poem is a love story, a geographic meditation, a travelogue, a history and a collection of myths and magical experiences.

Mistral’s very name is soaked in Provencal lore. The mistral wind is the strong cold northwesterly that blows down the Rhone and clears everything away, especially in the winter months. It is the predominant atmospheric feature of the region and even in mid May, as we were walking between hill towns, it blew relentlessly for several days, a few hours at a time, but with a force and character that was unmistakable.

We weren’t walking through the region that Mistral describes in Mirèio; we were walking further north in the Luberon and Vaucluse, but we did visit the Camargue and stayed a night in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the town in which Mary Magdalene and her entourage were said to have been blown to in a storm as they escaped the Holy Land after Jesus’ crucifixion.

Nevertheless, the landscape, the architecture, and the way of life that Mistral describes in Mirèio are all present to this day in some ways in this part of the world. Having his words and impressions, lovingly committed to the page with dedication to his people, history and culture that is unparalleled. It was a beautiful gift to walk with.

Purpose really is the invisible leader

May 21, 2026 By Complexity, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Leadership, Organization No Comments

Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog.

This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence.

Here is a long quote:

Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to do the work but to feel good about it on terms someone else defined.

The tell is what happens when you don’t feel it, when the “purpose” doesn’t land for you, when the why feels thin or disconnected from your daily reality, that becomes your problem. A coaching conversation, a culture fit question. The purpose is never interrogated but you for sure will be.

Here is the alternative: stop writing purpose statements and start asking purpose questions. What do the people doing the work think this organisation is actually for? What would they protect if they could? What makes the work feel worth doing from where they sit, not from the executive floor? You might find your purpose statement survives that conversation and you might find it needs a complete rewrite.

Purpose that is handed down is a message and purpose that is built together is a belief.

This is the best argument for taking a narrative approach to planning work. Many organizations are approaching me these days to get folks clear on purpose and it largely comes from the planning committee or the leadership and a desire for coherence or — shudder — alignment. Of course good leaders can sense a moment when a group of people feels incoherent, when they seem to be at odds with one another or somehow drifting. That’s often when consultants get called.

Enache’s antidote is probably the wisest thing that one can do to begin the process of finding purpose. Purpose hasn’t disappeared. It just shows up at different scales and in different ways. If your organization pays well to keep people around but treats them badly, expect to have a lot of employees who are there for a pay check that funds their lives rather than whatever higher or loftier goals you have.

On the other hand be wary of using purpose to coerce people into working for you and putting up with poor job conditions or underpaid labour. I see this in non-profit and other settings where an appeal to a person’s sense of duty is sometimes used as a cudgel to get them to settle for a lower standards and pay.

Mary Parker Follett famously said that “purpose is the invisible leader.” This is true. But it is true in the sense that purpose is everywhere and unless you can surface it in some way any attempt to superimpose a purpose on what’s already there will set your people at odds with one another and with the strategic decision makers. They are already being led by purpose. Do you know what it is?

Starting with a narrative capture doesn’t always give the results leaders want. One organization I worked with did this as a prequel to some focuses planning and they learned a lot of uncomfortable truths about why their staff worked the way they did and especially, why their senior staff seemed so individually focussed. It had to do with how much control the executives held. There was nothing room for anyone else to contribute and so each person just didn’t their own thing. No amount of conversation could undo the structure of the field that had been laid down for many years.

For that organization the retreat became a pro forma offsite, with the leaders unwilling to have the conversations that needed to be had. But the narrative work we did offered a repository of questions and insights that they can back to over the years and helped them let go of the control they held so tightly. It let the organization evolve through successorship phase as a few left and a few felt the shift in an invitation to step deeper into stewarding the future of the organization.

The lesson is that purpose lives in the texture of the field, not in the aspirational statements people sometimes use to structure accountabilities. Surface and explore it and it becomes possible to work with it.

Getting the shivers of reverence

May 6, 2026 By Uncategorized One Comment

Above Calanque Port-Pin looking back to the Cap Canaille near Cassis.

I’m in the south of France on the first leg of a holiday that combines a few days in Cassis, a seven day walk through the villages of Provence and then some travelling and visiting of places like Arles, Avignon and elsewhere in the region. While we are in Cassis we have been hiking on the sea cliffs, which is my very favourite form of walking. Around here the cliffs are limestone escarpments that rise up out of the Mediterranean to heights of almost 400 meters. The Cap Canaille that I’m looking at now is considered the highest sea cliff on the French coast.

Last year we visited the west coast of Italy and although I have been to the Mediterranean several times, each time I visit I am more struck and more taken with the history of these waters. Of course its all around you, in the architecture, the most notable of which is the defence constructions because this place has long been the sight of conflict, war, invasion and piracy, and those things last.

But especially here in The Calanques, a set of limestone inlets that serrate the coast east of Marseille, the more ancient history is at play. Geologically, the Mediterranean is interesting becasue it has experienced cataclymisc floods and events for millions of years. There were times it was cut off from the Atlantic, giving rise to what is know as the Messinian salinity crisis . This was followed by the Zanclean deluge when the Atlantic Ocean rushed in and filled the basin in a mega flooding event that are almost unimaginable at scale.

And there were ice ages that lowered the sea level by hundreds of meters.

Now the coolest thing I thing I have learned on this trip so far has to do with the rising and falling sea levels induced by the ice ages and the nature of the limestone all around. Limestone of course is porus and highly soluble, and when water drips through it from the surface it can carve out vast cave complexes. All over this region are caves which have been used as hermitages, wine cellars, protection and food storage up to the present day. Some of these caves were formed when the sea level was much lower, and now that it has risen again, these underwater caves are incredible grottos for divers to explore.

There is a cave not too far from here that was discovered 37 meters below the surface of the sea, at the base of a cliff by a diving guide called Henri Cosquer. He discovered the cave which now bears his name through a series of solo dives. The cave has a small opening and is big and long, and extends for 175 meters, slightly upward until you come to the surface of the water, which forms a small lake inside a cavernous hall. Cosquer spent many years following the cave to this lake, nearly dying a few times. Mostly he did this solo and kept the location a secret. When he finally found the chamber he was amazed by the limestone formations inside. There were the usual stalictites and stalagmites that one associates with limestone caves. There were mushroom shaped rocks and all kinds of interesting features. Cosquer and his friends kept exploring the cave and enjoying these sights privately.

One day in 1991, accompanied by his niece and two members of the local diving club, he was exploring the cave when they found a stencilled hand print on the cave wall. This moment, when they realized that they were not the first people to have been here must have been absolutely hair raising. Here is a cave millions of years old, submerged beneath 37 meters of water on a rough part of the coast, requiring a treacherous and technical swim into the dry gallery and here was evidence that a person had been here already. I keep thinking about what the feeling must have been like. Words cannot describe it.

It turns out that the handprint they found was not singular. This cave was ornately and liberally decorated with hundreds of prehistoric drawings dating back to between 19,000 and 27,000 years ago. There are 65 hand stencils, and 177 animal drawings all made when the sea level was lower and access to the cave was easily made one dry land. There are remnants of fires built for illumination and warmth and there are tools sitting where they were placed by the artists that carved and drew on the wall. Cosquer reported the find to the government and from that point on it was protected, studied and recognized as an archeological marvel.

All of this is captured in a museum in Marseille we visited that offers a kind of kitschy amusement park ride through a simulation of the cave. The story of Cosquer’s rediscovery of the cave though is incredibly compelling and I simply can’t shake the feeling that he must have had upon seeing that first hand print in the dark. Terror, awe, confusion, reverence…all of it probably. There is something about connecting beyond massive epochs and moments of history and geology that, as these most intimate scales, seems so profoundly deep.