Kelly Foscroft-Poirier hosts a session during an Art of Hosting we did at Tseshaht back in 2019.
I had a lovely call today with Sean Andrew, a colleague in the world of hosting, complexity and systems change work. At one point we were both sharing stories about what the Art of Hosting workshop meant to us as experienced practitioners. We both came to the Art of Hosting approach after years of facilitation and practice in other domains.
For experienced practitioners, the Art of Hosting, as a learning workshop can offer an important bridge between practices. Both Sean an I credit the Art of Hosting in part with moving our practice from methods-based to a broader capacity to work with groups and organizations. Many who come to the Art of Hosting as a “facilitation training” leave with skills related to design, personal work, and how to work with self-organization and emergence. It alos broadens the conversation to more strategic questions about how hosted interventions can be consequential in the broader context of the organization’s or community’s questions.
If you are a practitioner that is familiar with methods, or you have a long standing organizational development practice, the Art of Hosting may be one of those places where you find badging and connection between different approaches and some practice tools to help deep your work.
It certainly helps that our teams are quite diverse. In our Ontario offering on Reimagining Education (October 16-18 in Peterborough), we have Jennifer Williams who is education with an electic resume of teaching on tall ships and in wilderness settings and who supports organizational development as a consultant and host. Troy Maracle is a long time Indigenous educator and community builder amongst those supporting Indigenous students in the Ontario school system. Systems change is his life and he brings worlds together in his teaching and practice. Cedric Jamet teaches in the Human Systems Intervention program at Concordia and is a poet and musician and we share a love of theory and simplicity of practice.
In Vancouver (November 17-19) our team is likewise broadly experienced. Caitlin Frost, my partner, whose body of work has developed over thirty years of practice, helps us inquire into our own limiting beliefs to activate our own capacities to work with uncertainty and complexity. Kris Archie, who I have worked with for more then 20 years, is currently the CEO of The Circle, an Indigenous national organization working with settler philanthropic organizations around how they can use their resources well to support Indigenous work. Participatory practices are deeply embedded in her own life and organizational design. We have worked on massive systems change projects together and I live in awe of her commitment to grounding all of this work in Secwepmc culture and worldviews. The same goes for Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, a gifted artist, graphic recorder, host and language learner. She works in her own communities, which are the most challenging places to bring new practice and grounds her work in Nuu-Chah-Nulth principles and knowledge. She is a gifted host who is able to love the people in the rooms she supports no matter the work at hand.
We live those bridges and connections and new welcome all to these spaces of learning and connection as we all deepen our practices, in multiple ways for the benefit of the people wow are invited to support.
Join us at these upcoming workshops to build some new bridges yourself.
One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I’m working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I’ve been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container. It is also becoming a practice of discerning how to modulate my influence in the emergence of a container through working more deliberately and precisely with constraints, in general to see what happens when the emergence of dialogic containers happens largely through the Structure <-> Interaction relationship. What does it look and feel like in real time to withdraw Design (including intention and intervention and my own attention to what is happening) as far as possible into the background.
I’ve been engaging in the project with an LLM (ChatGPT 5.6 sol, currently). I offer this LLM my field notes and I’m able to explore areas where my theory work encounters praxis. The LLM also has access to my blog archive so it has nearly 25 years of field notes about my facilitation practice, and theory at hand. I’m able to track long term threads in my thinking, how things have evolved and generate summary reports that help me see where my practice has been coherent with theory and where it isn’t. It has allowed me to develop new experiments in hosting and group work that are always aimed at helping groups use more of their capability and less of mine, but which are helping me to find a set of practices and heuristics for facilitating, teaching, hosting and coaching.
I call this experiment a Praxis Log. Every mot I have the LLM write a learning report that summarizes my chats and notes. I’ll start publishing blog posts based on these learning reports and Praxis logs at the end of the month. A monthly cadence for this work is about right. I’m appreciating having an LLM to track and engage with the material and help me see things I would otherwise miss. And then as always, blog readers and commenters help tremendously.
In addition to improving my work, I’m appreciating the method of keeping a praxis log and using it to refine both my theory and practice. So stay tuned for the first set of learnings.
Corina Enache îs fast become one of my "must read" writers. Her perspective and reflective capacity as practitioner is inspiring. Her deep understanding of story and narrative and her wealth of experience gives her lots of material from which to generate beautiful essays. And her generous engagement with commentators and connections is exemplary.
Her latest post is about "making rules you are willing to be bound by" and has a number of gems. I encourage you to read the full thing, because among other things it will probably change your mind about pirates. But if you are a person who works with groups, this story will land with you:
…the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?
And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.
My colleague Jen Williams and I decided that we were going to try this. But it requires this of the host:
I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them…
Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.
That, dear reader, is really what is asked of us.
We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
I spent a few hours this morning reading about the Oxford Praxis Lab. I know of Rob Poynton who is the director of the Lab, and whose book, Everything’s An Offer was one of the seminal books I read 15-20 years ago as I was exploring improv and embodied exercises and the teaching and hosting practices that I was developing.
Praxis Lab is an interesting place where a number of the questions I have recently been in seem to have a good home, where they are watered and fed and well cared for.
Each of us are entangled in a series of systems – personal, familial, organisational, professional, societal and ecological – that are themselves interconnected. But the only point of view you have on any of those systems is your own – a point of view which has, built into it, a series of assumptions, values, beliefs, measures and metrics that you take for granted (if you even see them at all).
Grappling with such systems, seeking to understand them (so that you can disturb them in an intelligent way) requires you to look at yourself, in the context of that system. You have to understand how your own history, perspective, personality and so on, affect how you see and how you act.
This is not navel gazing. It is simply to recognise that we are all, always, in some measure, participant-observers. There is nowhere to stand that is neutral and no privileged or ‘correct’ level of analysis. Whichever perspective you adopt, it is always one of many.
Acknowledging that and learning from it means knowing yourself and your own predilections – which is also a valuable outcome in itself.
They are currently beginning a research project called “Pause Pairs” which I’m going to do with my friend Tenneson Woolf.
Following one of Rob’s links brought me to Nick Askew’s video page, which is another place to lose oneself in these questions and experiments. His collection includes a playlist of interviews with Complexity Facilitators as well as some interviews with my friend Ria Baeck.