Toke and I along with our Estonian colleagues, Piret, Robert and Ivika, began our three day participatory leadershipworkshop today. We were join at Altmoisa by 20 young-ish leaders who have been training together since the summer in the Art of Hosting and who have been using participatory meeting methodologies in the places of work. Tis workshop is intended to take the exploration of those practices deeper, and extend the learning that comes from hosting into the realms of leadership.
This is the first Art of Hosting workshop I have done in a language different from mine. Although most participants speak English (and I speak no Eesti) a few need whisper translation to follow along and Toke and I have someone whispering in our ears when others are speaking. It’s going well, and I’m getting used to connecting with the speaker rather than the translater when folks are sharing thoughts and insights.
In the opening circle, which was around the questions of Who am I today and What has been a recent example of participatory leadership, I made a long poem harvest from the stories that were shared. It’s clear here that people are both pressed for time, and feeling the need to feed a hunder in their organizations and communities for more participation. Like everywhere, when folks get a taste of participation, they want more of it, and most folks are here to continue their learning and sharpen their skills in offering.
One thing Toke and I are doing is trying to reduce all of these concepts and practices to basics. What are the basics that you need to host participation, whether in a meeting, and organization or a community? We riffed today on the four fold practice of the art of hosting, and explored the basic practices of being present, cultivating participation, being purposeful and practicing co-creation. We taught for a while, combining a little aikido in with our work and then the group met in triads to crack questions for their learning agenda together. We taught a little more and then went into a cafe to ground our learning, discovering where these basics show up in our lives and work and what the next level is regarding cultivating a deeper practice of these ways of working.
I like this idea of going back to basics, teaching the essence of practice and then having people find out how those things can take root and grow in different ways in their own lives. It is a lovely way to take what ones learns as a host and extend it to other parts of one’s life, whether its parenting, living in community or be a participatory leader.
From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic:
I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”:
The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.
One imagines a whole new sub-field of traffic engineering, with myriad questions: Do certain buildings or even architectural styles affect driver behavior? Can beautiful people literally “stop traffic”?
This is a lovely observation.
Lately I have been working as much as possible with graphic recorders who bring a level of beauty into a meeting that has a similar effect. When people work with graphic recorders, they approach the wall reflectively, take care to choose their words and make sure that what they are adding to the record is somehow commensurate with the aesthetic experience being captured.
People want more effective meetings and gatherings and I think a key way to get to effectiveness is to slow down. Slowing down can only happen in a physical environment where there is beauty that can catch our eye, catch ahold of the flow of conversations and cause little swirls and eddies that invite it to loop back on itself, become reflective and therefore effective.
Today John Inman had a great post on using the world cafe for a five hour strategic planning session with a non-profit. His process works as follows:
First I asked that the whole system be in the retreat. We had board members, a customer, grant writer, community member, and contractors.
1. Introduction in group setting
2. Introduce the process
3. Pose the question
4. Three cafe tables with three people each, start the cafe
5. Three rounds of conversation each 20 minutes
6. Returned people to original table and asked them to capture the main themes at each table. 20 minutes
7. Harvested main themes in group
8. Group process for prioritization and assessing performance on each focus
9. Opportunity map outcomes
10. Group process to explore opportunities to work on and time frames
11. Assign teams to develop tactical plans to address opportunities
12. Used affinity process to capture everyone’s values, and group into value titles
13. Developed the values for the non-profit from this harvest
14. From conversation developed mission for the non-profit
15. Created list of what the non-profit is and is not for them to develop a story about their organization and it role in the community
16. Provided a foundation for a vision statement to be drafted.
17. Reflection session and adjournAnd all of this in 5 hours. It was the most productive planning session I have ever had and I believe that is in no small part due to driving them into conversation early and the power of conversation transformed the session.
Years ago I developed a process for doing something similar in Open Space. the challenge was how to hold an open planning conversation on the future of the organization, but address key areas without being controlling. We designed a day and a half strategic planning retreat with a non-profit by first identifying the key areas which the plan needed to cover. In this case the organization needed to plan in five basic areas: services, funding, human resources, government relations and labour relations. We then issued an invitation to everyone who needed to come. Our process ran like this:
- Prepare a harvest wall with five blank spots for reporting, each with one of the five topic headings.
- Open Space and invite any conversations to take place but point out that only those conversations that touch on the five planning topics will go forward into the plan.
- Open Space as usual with convenors hosting sessions and taking notes. Convenors type notes up on laptops and print them out, placing the printed copy in one of the five topic areas (or outside the five topic areas, if the conversation was not relevant to planning).
- Overnight, compile the reports from each of the five groups and print a copy for each participant.
- In the morning, there are five breakout spaces in the meeting room each one focusing on one of the five topics.
- People self-organize their participation in a 1.5 to 2 hour conversation on each of these five areas. I think we asked them to undertake specific tasks such as identifying key priorities, and planning action (including preliminary resource estimates and communications implications). Also we asked them to identify initial implementation steps. Rules of Open Space applied, especially the law of two feet.
- Groups met and then reported back. Their initial plans were then sent to the executive of the organization for refining and more detailed resource costing (everyone knew that going in).
Like John, my experience of the process was incredibly productive and the plans were excellent, and sustainable over the long term because there was a huge amount of buy-in from the co-creation process.
These participatory processes are far more than “just talk” and with wise planning and focussed harvests, they are a very fast way to make headway on what can otherwise be tedious planning processes.
A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes:
Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over the past several years as the work the community had done to set up and govern the education system had gone sideways. They expressed frustration at the lack of communication and transparency and a perceived lack of respect for the community’s voice and the hard work that the community had done over the years. They talked about having more meetings, and more process to include people deep in the work of building support for the education system.
When people are stuck, you cannot move forward without acknowledging where they hurt. You cannot sweep pain and feelings of injustice under the carpet. People who are willing to stand for principles and stand for their beliefs need to be heard and acknowledged. No amount of defending or apologizing for the past will always do the trick either. In fact defending leads to more stuckness and no one ends up getting what they want. Concerns need to be heard as interests and as rooted in deeply held views about how things should work. The Elders in this gathering are talking about a process that they can be involved in and an education system that they can be involved in. It’s clear and to avoid that or design a system that does not makes space for their voice or passion does not transcend the pain and bad feelings that are the residue of the catastrophic collapse of the education board in years past.
To get through messes, simply listen, acknowledge, suspend beliefs and assumptions and make sure you hear people clearly and that they are heard clearly.
What do we want for education in this community?
We began with this question. The first two rounds of conversation focused on it. From there we asked: In a perfect world, how would our community be involved in education? We then finished in a circle again.
Part of the art of hosting is dealing with fear. I am so sure of the importance of a strong field being in place that when I work in a place where the field is weak or wobbly I fear that nothing will take root. But good questions are like weed seeds. The can thrive in some of the most depleted environments. And those first seeds that fall and sprout in depleted or barren ground make plants that make more soil. Lichens and mosses break down rock and create mineral soils that larger plants can grow in. Likewise, sometimes you just need to work with what you’ve got – design a question that assumes the best intentions of a community and drop it in and see what happens. People choose their engagement in cafe, they make decisions all the time about who to be with. In many subtle ways those decisions actually work towards optimal. During the evening, the law of two feet took over in this cafe. Many people were visiting with the Elders to hear what they have to say and the Elders were strategically visiting with others to make sure people understood their perspective. This is the field of good soil that is created by a good question and the freedom for people to engage. It’s by no means a garden of rare and wonderous plants, but with careful tending, the meager harvest from tonight could at least represent a change in the life of the community around this issue.
Really interesting gig this week. Steven Wright and I are working together here in Vancouver at an international conference on restorative practices, the kinds of things that people do to bring relationship and community to the justice, education and community systems that more often than not drive us apart. There are some real heros here and leaders in the field including Howard Zehr, one of the founders of the restorative justice movement, and many leading practitioners from around the world.
The conference itself is a pretty standard set up with plenary discussions dotting a schedule of concurrent sessions. Steven and I are putting into practice an idea that a number of us have been playing with for a could of years, namely hosting a reflective conversation space in which the conference participants can help create the harvest and meaning making about the whole event.
We have a little conversation space set up in the foyer of the hotel, with table tops covered with flipchart paper on which we are writing questions for reflection. All of the insight is being harvested every day on two large murals that Steven is creating, based on a three panel image of a river emerging from the headwaters, travelling through fertile lands and emptying into the ocean. This metaphor is charting the learning journey of the 280 people here. Yesterday we were interested in the questions that were coming up, the droplets of water and insight that lie in the multiple headwaters of our mainstream of restorative practices. Our question for our space was “What are the questions you are hearing today?” From that question we harvest three main tributaries that flow into our mainstream: people are curious about conceptual questions (What are the values and deep practices of restorative community?), contextual questions (How do we do this in education/community/social services?) and individual practice questions (Where do I start? What are the essential capacities?). At the end of each day, Steven, Howard and I have been reporting what we have been hearing and seeing back to the whole.
Today our river is moving into the rich plains and fields of established practice and we are asking the question “What patterns give life to restorative practice?” Already people are engaged in questions of process, listening, showing up, facilitating and working that are suggesting a pattern language of restorative practice. That is our goal for today – to surface that learning for the community. Tomorrow we are looking at the ocean of possibility and the new ground that is created as we extend these practices into new places.
This is not a standard conference facilitation job for sure. Rather we are inviting people into a deeper reflective space, harvesting collective meaning and learning and giving a context for a shared learning journey. Lots to come.