For those of you curious about exploring the Art of Hosting, our emerging pattern language on leadership and facilitation in living systems, you are invited to join me, Tenneson Woolf, Peggy Holman Sharon Joy Klietsch and Francis Baldwin in Tampa Bay, Florida from May 7-10. We’ll spend three plus days learning about chaos and order, living systems, the role of group work with Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry and World Cafe, and many other aspects of working with human relations to do good things in challenging and complex times. This will be our first Art of Hosting in the southeastern United States.
You can download the invitation here: AoH Tampa Bay Invitation.pdf.
So I’m a map maker. I am a cartographer of my own learning, and I love making maps to help me understand where I am, where I have been, and where I might go.
Since being an active participant in the community of learners working with what we call the Art of Hosting, I have been fascinated with the maps we use that represent our ways of making sense of the world. I have been trying various ways to draw a grand map of all of these things, and here is my latest effort, a sketch I did today based on learning as recent as last week. Click here to get the large version of this, so you can read it.
These are drawn as a circle, to address the idea that the way we have been drawing our maps was too linear. This is a map that charts the territory of working in long term, large scale change efforts within complex living systems.
There is a lot here, so let me go through it is some detail. It’s a draft, a sketch and it changes about as fast as the territory does, so I’d appreciate your thoughts and noticings about it.
Circles within circles (black)
The two black circles are where we begin the one with the cross in it stands for the individual and the larger one stands for the social sphere. The personal sphere is divided into four quadrants and these extend out into the social sphere as well. Wilber’s integral quadrants map on to here if you put individual at the bottom and collective at the top and internal at the left and external at the right. It is this interaction that is what the Art of Hosting is all about.
The four stages of developing leadership in community
The naming of the quadrants in this map comes from Meg Wheatley’s and Debbie Frieze’s work with the Berkana Institute on the Lifecycle of Emergence. The green words are four stages for developing leadership in community and they translate well into individual leadership practices as well . These four stages are naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating. These are practices that are alive in the relationship between people and the lives of groups.
Navajo concepts (light brown)
The light brown words delineate five spaces that reflect the Navajo cycle of collaboration, moving from Creation Space to Intention Space to Vision Space to Action Space to Renewal Space, again coming around to Creation Space again. In actual fact, this is a map of the unfolding of Creation Space, so if it helps, picture the point at which the two circles intersect as an infinite point.
These concepts are based on Navajo philosophy but are not orthodox interpretations of the same. They are simply the way Navajo facilitators and hosts are making sense of their work from a traditional context. These concepts were developed by the Shuprock Health Promotion team that we have been working with over the past year.
The Diamond of Participation redrawn (dark blue)
While the circles do look nested one within the other there is another shape tat they create together that is important. Travelling clockwise from the bottom of the diagram you will notice that the space between the circles grows and then shrinks away again. This is intentional. I have named these three phases after Sam Kaner’s three zones in the Diamond of Participation: Divergent phase, Groan Zone and Convergent Phase. This is the shape of an overall project, and it is a pattern that scales.
The Five Breaths (red)
In looking at large scale change, we work with a pattern called “The Five Breaths” which is a pattern of the life of a project, be it a meeting or a systemic shift. The five phases of this process are Call, Clarify, Invite/Design, Meet and Act. Each of the breaths is nested in the other and each one is experienced as diamond, with a divergent, emergent and convergent phase to it. Hosting and Harvesting as practice grounds live deeply in these diamonds.
On either side of the five breaths, in the spaces that are called Intention Space and Renewal Space, there is a think thread. On the left, this thread represents the call that is alive in someone from the moment of inspiration (or the threshold of longing, that red line at the bottom left) until the call is made. This thread, even held as an intention grows and attracts attention to work until a call blossoms. On the other side, beyond action, the thread fades away in what could be called the art of stewardship, an art that is about letting go of things once they are done. This line grows ever fainter until the thread of consciousness passes over the threshold of memory and all of our work is gone and forgotten. The ideal result of such a fading away is ripples of action and influence that emanate out as the legacy of a project or a life.
The Chaord (purple)
Chaos and order interact in Creation Space, where the chaos of the world intersects with the order we as individuals bring to making meaning of our world. This dance is generative and is both the source of all great work and the place to which it all returns. The chaord lives in the space between the threshold of memory and the threshold of longing, on the other side of doing. It is unintentional but conscious being-space.
The Chaordic Stepping Stones (light blue)
The chaordic stepping stones are some ways we help make sense of the journey. We use different stepping stones, and there are some that aren’t on this sketch that are listed elsewhere. All of them emerge from the lenses developed by the Chaordic Commons. They lie on the outside of the model more because they are tools. They are points of order in the chaos that surrounds work.
If anyone wants to take a crack at a more beautiful way to draw this, I’d love it. We could probably use it for the module Monica Nissen, Toke Moeller and I are doing at the Shambhala Institute this June, where we will be teaching much of what is on here.
Note: I’ve updated this post to reflect Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s ideas here. I had wrongly attributed them to my Navajo friends.
Navajo people call human beings “five-fingered” people. This refers to the way that Navajos relate their clan connections using the fingers of their hands. The thumb is “shay”, myself. And each one is imprinted with a unique spiral pattern. This spiral pattern is said to emerge when a child has spirit blown into it be the ye’i – the ancestors, who also produce the spiral of hair on the top of each person’s head. The spiral gives life. From there, each person can recite their clan heritage through the remaining four fingers, their father and mother, their father’s mother and mother;s father.
In reciting these clans, Navajo people tell their names and clan and then say “born for the” clans of their ancestors. This recitation is an acknowledgement of k’e – the relationship that binds us together. When you say the word k’e in Navajo country, the first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to your clans.
When we were designing this particular Art of Hosting gathering with our friends from the Healthy Native Communities Fellowship at the Shiprock Medical Centre, Orlando Pioche, Karen Sandoval, Tina Tso and Chris Percy, we dived very deeply into the idea of k’e. In seeking to understand more about this concept, we began to realize that the word refers to a quality of connection that flow between people and indeed between people and all living things including the land. It is this particular connection that we decided to explore in this Art of Hosting. Indeed, it might be said that the essence of the Art of Hosting in general is about how we work with the space between people to produce good in the world. It quickly became clear that we were designing a four day learning laboratory on how to use k’e.
In the context of a facilitation and leadership training, I began to think of k’e as the water that flows in a river. That water flows all the time, and if you want to use it, you have to use appropriate tools. You can build a turbine to produce power, build a sluice gate to channel it into a field, dip into it to drink it. The water does not change but it does different things depending on how to use it. In fact as we talked about this, Orlando, a spiritual man and a man moving beautifully into his Eldership, made the connection between this idea and the iina twho the river of life.
As we explored this further in the design day, lights came on in all of us. We lit up with the idea that the art of working with groups was the artful use of tools and processes that worked with k’e to shape the changes that were needed in the world. We designed a four day process to enter a learning journey on this idea. (see the photo gallery for images).
Our first day was really about wrapping our heads around the concepts we were discovering. The 63 people that joined us I think weren’t expecting us to be working so explicitly with k’e but as we moved through a day of storytelling, appreciative inquiry and world cafe we explored the concept very deeply By the end of the day everyone was excited about what they were discovering about a concept that they had forgotten that they knew about. K’e is everywhere in Navajo families and communities and it was perhaps this close proximity, this fabulous intimacy, that had made the concept so common place that few people remembered that it was the Navajo’s strongest resources for building wellness and sustainable communities.
On day two, after exploring the idea in depth, we began to talk about working with it, spending much of the day in Open Space to see how k’e applied to real word projects. This was followed on day three by grounding these projects in real commitments, a process which deepened on day four when we worked with a smaller community of practice who were actively facilitating community wellness projects and who were looking for ways to bring k’e deeply into the relationships that they need to cultivate with on another.
I learned a huge amount in this Art of Hosting. I learned that in fact k’e,like the Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of heshook ish tsawalk (everything is one) and teechma (the heart path) or the Nisga’a and Tsimshian idea of sayt k’uulum goot (of one heart) is the essential element that produces all things. It is what illuminates the social spaces between us, what allows us to produce quality work together. In fact, if you think of all human endeavour, there is nothing you can think of that was not produced by k’e. We sometimes think it is great people or great teams that produce great results, but more and more I am seeing that it is great k’e that is the source. I’m willing to be that everything – peace, food, shopping malls, aircraft, marketing campaigns, shoes, families, buildings, art – arises from this source. It is love and power combined, to use Adam Kahane’s framing. We can choose how to work with k’e using it to produce acts of beauty or terror. Our Navajo friends warned us that k’e on it’s own is no guarantee of wellness or peace. We must work skilfully with these connections to produce what the call nizhooni – beauty. K’e itself is beautiful, but only with attention can we work with it to produce more beauty. This is wazhonshay the Navajo “beauty way.”
It is simple. When we give attention to the ways in which we work together, connecting as deeply as we can and paying attention to the quality of the relationships between us, we produce good things. If the Art of Hosting is about anything – indeed if working with groups at all is about anything essential – it is that. Beyond methodology, beyond concept, beyond language.
Update: Tenneson has posted some reflections and a photo set as well
K’e.
Last wekk I was working with some good friends – Kyra Mason, Thomas Ufer, Ruth Lyall, Jennifer Charlesworth and Nanette Taylor. Together we designed and delivered a one day workshop on what we called “Chaordic Leadership in Changing Times.” The focus of the workshop was collaborative leadership practice and we were asking questions about collaborating around a movement in the child and family services sector in British Columbia.
Collaborative leadership practice has a couple of key capacities. First is the ability to be in and hold space for conversations that matter. The second is the practice of developing and holding a centre. Conversation practice is important because the nature of the systems we are a part of is entirely determined by the quality of the relationships between people in those systems. Quality relationships are important and central to those are quality conversations. That is why I put a lot of emphasis on helping people talk together creatively, generatively and with excitement and energy.
But to build a movement, it’s important to share a centre. That centre is both an individual centre as well as a collective one. In our workshop we were playing a lot with the idea of building a centre, especially as it related to children. We began by learning that the Kwa’kwa’la word for child is “Gwaliyu” which means something like “precious one” or “treasure of my heart.” It implies a treasure that you would give your life for. We began our day by asking people to imagine what it must be like to have that definition of a child in mind every time your used the word “child.” In our workshop no one in the room could describe the etymology of the English word “child.” We had devoted our lives to a word and we weren’t even sure what that word meant. So to find our own centre, the place to which we could always return, we began the workshop with an exercise. We asked people to first write on a piece of paper what the treasure about the children in their lives. We next asked them to write, on another piece, what those treasures expect of them. The first piece of paper then became a definition of child that we could really sink into “curious, innocent and playful” and the second sheet of paer contained our mission statement in the child and family services world: “to make safe space for children to grow and flourish.” It’s simple but what it does is to help us find a centre that we can return to especially when things are pushing us around. From this centre it is a simple matter to come to a conversational space in which we invite a similar set of principles to be at our centre.
This is how, over the past year we have settled on “Children at the centre” as a basic organizing principles for the work we are doing with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transistion Team as we build a new system for Aboriginal child and family services. What would a system look like that put children in the centre?
The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba was famously quoted as saying that his advantage in a fight was his ability to return to his centre faster than that of his opponent. In the body, the centre lies just below the navel, in the area the Japanese call the hara, or what Koreans called “tan jun” or “tan tien “ in Chinese. This is both a pivot point for the body’s centre of gravity – a fact well known to martial artists and athletes – as well as the central point from which one’s life force – “ki” or “chi” is projected. Likewise in a group, which is just a body operating at another level, the centre is the pivot point around which we act – our purpose or intention – and the source to which we always return.
Today I am on board a plane heading down to the Navajo Nation to work with a wonderful community of Navajo facilitators involved in health promotion. We are looking at, among other things, these concepts and I have much to consider about the notion of centr ein Navajo thought and practice. I am most curious about how this can be brought to the simplest form of knowing, in the body, heart and mind, to be useful for leadership and hosting practice.
If you would like a flavour of what happens at workshops on the Art of Hosting, here are some links to give you a sense of things.
- Audio from the Art of Hosting workshop in southern Indiana last fall. These files were made by Jeneal King, one of the participants who took an active role in harvesting the event. Lots to listen to here. Best I think to download and listen off line. Update: No longer up as of August 12, 2008.
- Ravi Tangri in Nova Scotia has been making a number of videos about Art of Hosting teachings on the chaordic stepping stones, harvesting, world cafe and the art of calling. Browse ArtOfHostingTV.net for more.
- A video from my mate Thomas Ufer of the meta harvest from a recent Art of Hosting workshop in Brazil. This path that he is walking on has notable quotes from the whole three days. Participants walked the path, reflecting on ther experience and then contributed a further thought on the meaning of the experience. THis is a really creative way of find higher and higher levels of collective meaning making.
- Andy Himes made a short video of a number of us playing with candles and music at last week’s gathering on Whidbey Island. In the evenings there is often creative play and chilling out that we get into. When the weather is nice we often build a fire outside and sit around telling stories of hosting. On Whidbey we did it inside.
This just gives you a sense of the diversity of the experience. If you are interested in attending an Art of Hosting workshop contact me, or check in at the website to see if there is one coming up near where you live.