The last couple of weeks my deepening of perspective on the four fold practice of the art of hosting has continued. In the Art of Hosting Water Dialogues we are teaching the practice and inviting participants to reflect on what they already know about the practice. Here is a snippet of the harvest from our work this week:
Presensing and hosting yourself
- Be place based
- Sense what could be better
- Develop confidence
- Prepare for surprising outcomes
- Centering before entering
- Personal wellness: sleep, eat and hydrate
- Give yourself enough time
- Know your participants
- Remember that you are always a learner
Participating
- Connect people to purpose
- Learn and speak with a common language
- listen and ask questions and be curious
- Take notes and connect to learning from elsewhere
- Realize that you don’t need to know everything
- Celebrate and reinforce commonalities
- Ask good questions
- Empathize and synthesize
- Notice your projections on to other people
- Response-ability
- Act on your beliefs and values in a positive way
- Trust yourself
Contributing and hosting conversations
- Create space for dialogue and for a community that cares.
- Bring together diversity for better innovation
- Make people comfortable and invite them to push their boundaries
- Invite respect
- Pay attention to logistics and the quality of space
- Create a space for invitation and learning, where disagreement is legitimate
- Work from common purpose
- Recognize and name the elephants in the room
- be clear about the purpose of and the intended harvest of a conversation
- provide the minimum structure to focus work while allowing for emergence
- Host people to enable them to engage in uncertain cisrcumstances
- Level the playing field for wisdom
- Use methods that bring in diverse voices
Co-creating the community
- Create collaborative buy in
- Change must come from the margins of the system, sustained by a core that is willing to co-create
- Do activities that connect rather than prescribe answers
- Always plan with an eye to sustaining momentum
- Develop a close network of mates and work together
- Work with people and have fun with them too.
- Collect and share stories
- Collaborate with complimentary allies
- Seek inspiration across disciplines.
Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.
The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.
The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.
The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.
The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting:
- on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own,
- participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something
- the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold.
- the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, opportunities and knowledge.
- as we move through the four fold practice we evolve from a learner to a community of learners to a community that learns. This last shift is often the hardest.
- at the core of this practice is intention. To come to the practice with intention is to activate it.
- it is surprising how quickly we can move to co-creation when we have practiced together once, we did a signing exercise that took the group through two rounds of co-creation and we quickly moved to creating music together that was unimaginable 10 minutes before.
I love how groups just spark insights. You can teach this stuff dozens of dozens of times and there is always something new to learn.
This video on The Four-Fold Practice was made by Kevin McKeever for InCommons, the initaitve we were working with last month in Minnesota.
This video really captures why we feel that this simple four folded practice lies at the heart of what the Art of Hosting is. Everything we teach and practice under the name “Art of Hosting” springs from an integrated practice of these four things. Enjoy.
Yesterday I was giving a webinar and talking about some core Art of Hosting practices. We spent a while covering the four fold practice and then looked at the way in which various archetypal organizational paradigms play out in different organizational settings. I was trying to emphasize the idea of “practice” so that the participants would know that there is no right way of doing this work but rather the work itself is engaging in a constant practice, a constant searching for mastery.
Towards the end of the call a participant reflected that all of this was rather too much to take in all at once. She wondered aloud how she would be able to implement it all.
This is a common problem with learning, I find. Somewhere along the line many people imagine that being in a learning situation – a class, a course, a webinar or so on – means that they will receive a direct transfer of skill which they can then go and apply. While there are some kinds of learning that work like this, most learning, especially as it applies to leadership or facilitation is rather an invitation to practice, meaning that you begin and develop a competence over your craft in application.
So how to begin?
The advice I gave our participant yesterday was to begin by noticing first of all. Take two weeks and notice where the four fold practice appears in your own life, what you do unconsciously to become present, to participate in conversation, to host space and to co-create. Make a list of places whee you do this and notice how you do this. Raise your own natural practice to the level of conscious practice so that you can use that as a basis to extend it in new ways.
Beginning a learning journey helps to set a learning cycle into practice. It starts with noticing, with acting and then with reflecting before repeating again. I sometimes think that beyond any particular skill that can be learned, the skill of active reflective learning is perhaps the most important. It is how we create a learning journey for ourselves that has the possibility of taking us to mastery.