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Running a Pro Action Cafe for 300 people

September 20, 2017 By Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured 2 Comments

Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together in a traditional conference of panels, workshops and tours to learn and develop their own practices of social entrepreneurship, community development, planning and research.

The conference organizers, led by the courageous Barb Davies of Momentum Consulting were resolved to make at least part of the conference a participatory plenary. The idea was to put the intelligence of the network to use and to ground and apply the learning and experiences of the previous three days on actual projects. We secured 250 small tables that only seated four, which is essential for doing participatory work in a conference setting. Rounds of 6, 8 or 10 people are useless as people cannot hear each other and they are seated too far apart. The inimitable Avril Orloff designed some templates for us and Matt Mayer and Brenna Atnikov were on hand to help hold space and to be good sounding boards for design and harvesting ideas. Team, tools, physical set up all in place.  We had a plan.

Pro Action Cafe is a method that was invented by Rainer von Leoprechting and Ria Baeck in Brussels in the early 2000s.  It is now a core method in Art of Hosting trainings worldwide, as it is a brilliant combination of the self-organizing nature of an Open Space Technology meeting with the constraints of time, space and questions of a World Cafe. You can learn more about the core method by watching a short video or by downloading a user-guide to the process. While there is lots of scope for variation, the basic flow of questions: from need and purpose, through to what’s missing, to next steps, are as simple a planning framework as one can imagine. I’ve used the process in groups as big as 120, so 300 was going to be a new challenge.

For the conference we needed to customize the process in our planning and in real time. The initial idea was to have participants at the conference post project topics all week long on a long clothesline outside the plenary room.  This was intended to save time, as having 80 or more projects hosts identify and name their projects in a plenary room would be massively time consuming and boring.

It quickly became very clear to me that everyone had a very different idea of what that clothesline was, and soon it became filled with information about things people were doing in addition to projects that people were working on. It was a cool news wall, but it wasn’t serving our function of being an emerging agenda wall for the final day’s plenary session.

This meant that we had to adjust our work on the fly.  One important lesson for keynote facilitators when working with a conference is never expect people to remember instructions. When you are working with a group of people who are moving in 400 different directions, they can only respond together to directions for the next thing to do.  Give them one instruction at a time.  Conferences are bubbly and chaotic and participants are there for individual learning. Group activities need to take place within a well managed but not overly controlled container.

When it came time to begin our Pro Action Cafe on Friday morning following a panel presentation and some great rhythmic improv by Troo Knot. I knew we had to change our plan.  Instead of asking people to remember what they had posted on the clothesline we took the 40 or so cards and laid them on the stage.  I then led the group through these steps:

  1. Everyone move to a table of four.
  2. Anyone who posted a project on the clothesline who wants to work on it, retrieve it from the front and return to your table and sit down.
  3. At all the other tables, the first person to sit down gets to host a project for the morning. Host write there project on a table card
  4. Once every table had a host, participants had two minutes to cruise the room and find a group to work with.
  5. We then proceeded through a normal Pro-Action cafe.

This wasn’t a 100% ideal situation, as there may have been more than one person at a group of four that wanted to champion a project, but when you are working with a group of 300 people in an on the fly design, you simply can’t accommodate a very nuanced approach to individual desires. At any rate, there were no complaints at the end of the morning that people didn’t get to champion a project. One quarter of the room got to bring projects into the space and everyone else fulfilled the role of listeners and advisors. I let people find the projects they wanted to work on, but only a maximum of three advisers could join any round. I also encouraged people to just randomly sit at a table and offer a naive perspective to the work, one which can be very valuable.

Following three rounds of work (which included a short break) we had a popcorn feedback session where people stood to offer reflections and gratitudes on what they had received during the morning to the plenary

We had a number of really interesting projects emerge on the day covering the full spectrum of community economic development from food production to access to capital for entrepreneurs to community renewable energy models to creating labyrinths in a city.  Participants left with filled in templates that captured their need and purpose, new ideas to improve the project and a list of resources and people that might help them move forward.

It takes attention and a small team, but creating participatory and productive sessions in large conferences is possible. It means disrupting traditional conference organizing and conference hosting, but the upside is that participants get to work with the people in the room, get to exert agency over their learning agendas and everyone gets a chance to participate. I can’t overestimate how important it is work with good physical space set ups and to build in more time than you think you need in order for participants to not be rushed. Moving three hundred people around a room is a lot of work, and the herd moves slowly!

Keynote facilitation is  something I have done lost of in the past ten years. I’d be happy to chat with you about making your next conference more interactive and truly participatory beyond accepting questions to a panel from the floor, or having people tweet on a back channel to be engaged. Pro Action Cafe might just be the perfect tool to bring a conference to action in a short period of time and put the inspiration and learning to work.

Chaordic Stepping Stones now in Spanish

September 18, 2017 By Uncategorized One Comment

One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones.  Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work.

Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool.  The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for non-commercial use and with attribution..

This will be a useful tool for the Chaordic Design online course that I am offering with Beehive Productions in the new year.  And of course the English version, which is slightly expanded, is available for use by all.  

Appreciating John Ashbery

September 5, 2017 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius.
The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I think he’s still best experienced in his books, whether the long form poems of the 1990s or the shorter works of his earlier years.
I am astounded at the breadth of his inspiration and the way he was able to draw meaning from disparate images and weave them together in a way that presented a musical, rhythmic poem that had what the Irish fiddler Martin Hayes has called “The Lonesome Note.” In his work you can feel the pining for the meaning that is his alone, privately held, implied, offered to you to discover or, in the absence of your ability to relate to what he is saying, to leave you with a sensation, an in-breath, sometimes an uneasy feeling, sometimes a feeling of delight.
He was prolific and left a huge legacy of work and a massive imprint on American and world poetry.  Here’s one, sort of randomly picked, that talks about the sanitization of American life and reveals something of his poetics as well.
The One Thing That Can Save America
Is anything central?
Orchards flung out on the land,
Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?
Are place names central?
Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?
As they concur with a rush at eye level
Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough
Thank you, no more thank you.
And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness
The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,
Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.
These are connected to my version of America
But the juice is elsewhere.
This morning as I walked out of your room
After breakfast crosshatched with
Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
Forward into unfamiliar light,
Was it our doing, and was it
The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
We were measuring, counting?
A mood soon to be forgotten
In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow
In this morning that has seized us again?
I know that I braid too much on my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to bloom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you know instantly what I mean?
What remote orchard reached by winding roads
Hides them? Where are these roots?
It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

 

Appreciating Kauffman

August 7, 2017 By Art of Hosting, Being, Complexity, Featured 5 Comments

One of the things I am learning reading Stuart Kauffman’s book “Reinventing the Sacred” is just how powerful and pervasive the phenomenon of creative emergence is at every level in our world. From the very tiny chemical interactions that begin to define what life is, up to the order of the planetary biosphere and noosphere to the cosmic scale, emergence from pre-adaptions is a pattern that is everywhere, that offers a counterpoint to the reductionism of physics and yet does not violate the laws of physics at all.  This paragraph sums up his premise:

“We are beyond the hegemony of the reductionism of half a century ago. We have seen that Darwinian natural selection and biological functions are not reducible to physics. We have seen that my law of collectively autocatalytic sets in the origin of life is also not reducible to physics. We have seen creditable evidence that science is moving forward towards an explanation for the natural emergence of life, agency, meaning, value, and doing. We have, thus, seen emergence with respect to a pure reductionism. Thanks to the nonergodicity and historicity of the universe above the level of atoms, the evolution of the biosphere by Darwinian preadaptations cannot be foretold, and the familiar Newtonian way of doing science fails. Such preadaptations point to a ceaseless creativity in the evolution of the biosphere. If by a natural law we mean a compact prior description of the regularities of the phenomena in question, the evolution of the biosphere via preadaptations is not describable by law. We will soon find its analogues in economic and cultural evolution, which, like the biosphere, are self-consistently self-constructing but evolving wholes whose constituents are partially lawless. This is a radically different scientific worldview than we have known. I believe this new scientific worldview breaks the Galilean spell of the sufficiency of natural law. In its place is a freedom we do not yet understand, but ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human life are its talismans. I believe this creativity suffices to allow us to reinvent the sacred as the stunning reality we live in. But even more is at stake. Our incapacity to predict Darwinian preadaptations, when their analogues arise in our everyday life, demands of us that we rethink the role of reason itself, for reason cannot be a sufficient guide to live our lives forward, unknowing. We must come to see reason as part of a still mysterious entirety of our lives, when we often radically cannot know what will occur but must act anyway. We do, in fact, live forward into mystery. Thus we, too, are a part of the sacred we must reinvent.” (from “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion” by Stuart A. Kauffman)

Now I want to be clear that despite my interest in theology, I am not reading this book from a theological perspective. In fact I am wondering a bit why Kauffman insists on tying his amazing proposition to the idea of “the sacred” because it actually makes for something of a distraction in his narrative.  And as we get into the extension of his ideas into the economic and cultural realms, the idea of the sacred seems less and less interesting. What is more interesting is to see the parallels between the physical and biological acts of creative emergence and the way in which our cultural, social and economic lives are intertwined with natural processes.

To me this is the good part about this book. It validates that approaches to complexity and emergence are necessary parts of human social life and we need to relearn them (perhaps even re-place them as sacred epistemologies alongside the religion of reductionism) and put them to use to counter the dark stuff that has crept into our human world through our cleverness and addiction to a method of analysis that reduces the world and it’s problems to mere parts.

The creative challenge

August 3, 2017 By Design, Facilitation, Invitation, Uncategorized

Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo.  I like the way she puts this:

Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights.

I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have identified and invited are the ones with enough agency to take on the challenge, you really start cooking.