The four of us on the Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics team are all global stewards of the international Art of Hosting community of practice. We have all attended or hosted at least two of the global stewards gatherings and we have been deeply involved in the creation and growth of the Art of Hosting community over the past decade.
As such, the Art of Hosting is our lineage. It’s where we met. It’s the most important community of practice in our lives and it continues to shape our work. And Beyond the Basics is very much rooted in the Art of Hosting.
A couple of weeks ago in Minnesota while we were preparing our teachings I saw clearly how we were extending what we know about the Art of Hosting. It’s not just that Beyond the Basics focuses more on how the practice of participatory leadership extends past meeting facilitation into longer term and broader strategic initiatives. It’s that our work builds upon the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting the simple pattern that lies at the heart of this approach to facilitation, leadership and community work.
The four fold practice was the first pattern that gave rise to the Art of Hosting. It is simply an observation that great conversations happen when people are present, when they participate, when they are hosted well and when they co-create something. Some of the originators of the Art of Hosting, people like Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and Jan Hein Nielsen began asking the question, what if these patterns became practices? And in that moment the decades long inquiry that is the Art of Hosting was born.
Our Beyond the Basics offering refers to these practices, but only now have I seen what we are doing. Toke has always called the four fold practice “The Basics” and I have no need to creat new basics. But I can see now how deeply rooted we are in extending and deepening them.
Be present. For all hosts, personal practice is essential. Whatever you can do to bring yourself to be present with a group serves the group. In the Beyond the Basics offering, Caitlin is a deep practitioner of The Work of Byron Katie which is a powerful personal practice that we all use to get at what keeps us stuck, to address what we are afraid of, and to help us become resilient and quality hosts of uncertainty, complexity and confusion. The first clarity we need to address is our own, and we do that with the Work.
Participate. It is impossible to be a part of a participatory process without participating. And it is impossible to affect a complex system from the outside. Understanding how systems works helps us to be more effective participants in the strategic work we are called on to lead and host. Using theory from the science and sociology of complex adaptive systems creates a more powerful way to see and understand and leverage people’s participation in their own work. through teaching Cynefin and working with harvesting methods that are sense-making based, we extend the practice of participation to move beyond the acts of listening, speaking and learning and into the realms of sensing, interpreting and decision making.
Be a host, so everyone can make a contribution. Tim’s work with his Collaborative Advantage model extends this practice of hosting beyond the methods that for the core of the Art of Hosting practice. While we are deep practitioners of World Cafe, Circle, Pro-Action Cafe and Open Space, we know these methods alone are not enough to host large scale strategic change work. We need a framework to understand the levels of transformation that need to be hosted and the key design pieces (such as power, results and capacity) that need to be addressed so long term change can continue to be hosted from within systems and organizations.
Co-create. It is one thing to say “just work together” and quite another thing to do it when our communities and organizations are soaked in differences. Where power, privilege, race, economic opportunity and all kinds of other differences are at play we need a set of practices that can bring us to deeply transformative shared work. Tuesday has been developing this framework for many years now and it is taking form in a way that has fundamentally changed my own approach to co-creation. Moving to a place of shared work is taking co-creation beyond the basic level of just doing things together.
In our AoH Beyond the Basics offering we are addressing this extension of our lineage with teachings and reflective practice that help participants to dive more deeply into the four fold practice. You don’t have to have come nto an Art of Hosting to understand or work with what we are sharing, but if this framework makes sense to you, the three days we spend togther will help challenge and deepen your practice in these areas.
We would love to have you join us this July in Leicester, UK or in October in Kingston Ontario.
A couple of good blog posts in my feed this morning that provoked some thinking. These quotes reminded me how much evaluation and planning is directed towards goals, targets and patterns that cause us to look for data that supports what we want to see rather than learning what the data is telling us about what’s really going on. These helped me to reflect on a conversation I had with a client yesterday, where we designed a process for dealing with this.
The four fold practice meets the Diné healthy communities framework
Harvest from a three hour check in circle this morning, building a social field among 40 health promotion practitioners from across the Navajo Nation. The circle was at times tender and wickedly funny. It built a beautiful field to begin our three day training. Here’s the poem:
Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.I am here for the wellness of our nations;we have stationed ourselves inside our familieswhere we teach and learnreach each parent and turn aroundtheir minds to a kind of spacethat is safe to facewhat flies over our headsas we sit on our sheepskinsand keep the teachings in the home.It’s a warm feeling, healing evento be basking in being hostedwith a ticker that ticks and keeps on givingand my Converse laced up and I’m ready for livingI love growing the food my family is eatingpreventing cancer and diabeteswhispering the secret of healthy peopleteaching through recreation and schoolsreaching youth so they don’t act like foolsand see peace and respect as cool.I work in recovery which is a kind of discoveryfor the men coming back to us from the penbringing them back to the traditional lifeto be in harmony, connected to familyreceiving the gifts of community and ceremonyto counter the drama of trauma“Lying in the road hurt” means that my work is about healinggetting up and feeling the bodyfeeling the advocacy that I speakfixed by the gaze of a grazing sheepthat reminds me of my grandmother’s teaching:this is the way that it has to beto spread my wings and seehow I can develop me and then how we can move forwardto see possibility and leave our conversations happy.I start with myself, and build out from therecircles of care that come from the sheepskin,the ancient wisdom, and tools that help us weavethe stories that leave us tightly bound.Tighten up your buns, there’s work to be done,Doesn’t matter if it’s your hair or your derriere.And take a look and make sure your corn beef is cooked.I am a believer in hope and changefor a positive exchange of the art of the heartgrounding in respect so we can expectto find out why place matters.I help to bring wholeness with a focus on fooda wholesome and fullsome way to colludewith kids and youth who pick up the positive attitudethat comes from our cultureharmonize our bodies and our eyes.I’m a traveller, an unraveller ofunhealthy ways, weaving teachings about how to raisecommunities, raise gardens and harvest our bestbring our heart to everything we dodeal with our fears so we can be herepresent to what wants to appearwith minds clear.I’m a first generation relocation babythinking maybe I have a giftedness that will lift the peoplebring them to fitnessand give back what I have learned on this rideto see pride inside everyone in our tribes.It all comes down to helping otherscoaching kids, approaching mothers and grandmotherswho share their respect with usI’m from the beach boysand a blond haired grandma and traditional speakerswho infused in me a possibilityto change the dysfunction I see, conversationally,for the benefit of the community, to support the wellness that starts from me.We know our own patterns and carry them in our bloodtransport them everywhere flood of memoriesleaving this world better than how we found itbetter harmony, better family.I might be out of words.Overwhelmed at everything I’ve heardand here to hear with my ears and heartto get a head start on addressing the fearsHere, I can see where my prayers are going,and what has come to my knowing,my leadership is calling me backand I can see that I stack up.The talking happens at the rug,drawing people into the snug corner of the homewhere we share the honest lessons we have learnedpray the prayers that burn in our hearts.All over the world, we understand weaving(even though our sweater doesn’t meet five days from leaving)each one of us is teaching in this roomeach one bringing our strands to the loom.I work in the strugglecreating the space where families can face their challengeswith something as simple as readingor as powerful as seeking out the strengthsor going to great lengthsto build leaders who feed their own learningturning back to the language and values.I am related to the world my relations unfurledlike a ball of yarn that leads us to our toolsa school of weaving leaving us loved and movedcoming back to what was lostas we chased a living across the southnow I’m getting the language in my mouthand find myself at a junctionwhere I support functional communityand do the work of spirit.Yá’a tééh! It’s a good day.and good to start in a beautiful way.
Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and I are snuggled into the attic rooms at the Capitol Hill Mansion B&B in downtown Denver, listening to some jazz, eating some pasta and salad and finishing up a productive design day together. We are preparing to teach the Art of Hosting to 60 leaders from the community at St. John’s in the Wilderness Cathedral in Denver. St. John’s is a high Anglican Gothic Episcopalian cathedral in the heart of Denver. We have been working with the cathedral community over the past couple of years to build the capacity among the 1700 members to be able to host and engage in conversations that matter.
As we’ve done this work, I’m struck at once by how simple it really is and how little space we make for it in our lives. People are busy, rushed and worried about deadlines and results and as a collective society we tend to defer the slow and clear attention to the quality of how we are together. Quality gets sacrificed at the alter of timely outcomes.
And of course this is no more ironic than in the myriad church communities we have been working with over the years, which, at their best, host a place to slow down and consider the nature of the relationship between peoples and to attend to the sacred quality of the spaces in between.
For me there is something in the richness of returning to the simplest way we know of to slow down and host good conversations. This evening as I write by the fire, Caitlin and Tenneson are preparing a simple teaching of Circle practice. Earlier we were thinking about the simplest way we know of to discuss the relationship of our traditional notions of chaos and order.
While I have been diving deep into the nuanced explorations of the Cynefin framework, it is becoming necessary to find ways to invite people easily into the mind shift that complexity requires. In the Art of Hosting community we have, for a long time, been inspired by Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organization. At the simplest level noticing the polarity of chaos and order, and noticing how our reactions to chaos and uncertainty often take us to high levels of control becomes an entry way into a different way to think about strategies for achieving goals in the complex domain.
So tomorrow, I’m looking forward to Tenneson’s leading on the chaordic path, a simple teaching worth returning to.
The people at work
Tonight in Vancouver I’m acting as a provocateur at an event sponsored by my friends and colleagues at Waterlution. Water City 2040 is a ten-city scenario planning process which engages people about the future of water across 10 Canadian cities. Tonight’s event is part of a pilot cohort to see what the process can offer to the conversation nationally.
What’s powerful about this work is that it’s citizens convening, hosting and engaging with one another. This is not a local government engagement process or a formal consultation. This is a non-profit organization convening deliberative conversations. The advantage of that is that the process is free from the usual constraints that governments put on engagement. So tonight we are thinking about possibilities that push out 25 years into the future and absolutely everything is one the table. In fact I’m asking people to consider that in these kinds of complex systems the biggest problem you have in addressing change comes from your assumptions about what will remain the same. It’s one thing to confront demographic, economic and environmental change, but are we also questioning things we take for granted like governance models, planning mindsets, innovation processes, value systems and infrastructure?
Organizations like Waterlution offer an unconstrained look at the future and if local governments are smart, they will pay attention to what’s happening here. (And they are – Metro Vancouver has sent a film crew to document the evening!).
Waterlution teaches these skills to citizen practitioners, government employees and private sector staff through our Waterlution Art of Hosting Water Dialogues workshops. We have workshops happening in April 20-22 on Bowen Island and April 27-29 near Toronto. If this is work you want to do more of, think about joining us. And if you contact me to inquire, you might get a little incentive…