Dave Pollard sees skillful conversation as a key to the kinds of communities he is trying to create. In this post he revisits his ideas about personal practices for being a good conversationalist. These are great:
- Tell the other person something you’re passionate about, and why. Tell them passionately.
- Tell them something they should know that they don’t, preferably as a story, and make it clear why it’s important.
- Tell them about a possibility you’ve imagined. A real possibility, not just an ideal, a wish or a dream.
- Tell them a different way of thinking about something, one that sheds new light on what it means.
- Don’t argue. Just don’t.
- In all of the above, make sure what you tell is actionable. But don’t tell them what to do.
- And above all, keep it short, clear, and simple or entertaining. A conversation is a mutual gift.
Those of you interested in exploring the Art of Hosting, our pattern language for working with conversational leadership in living systems, might consider joining Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea and I at teh Whidbey Institute near Seattle in the New Year.
Invitation and information is here. You presence is desired!
A combination of quotes from two different emails today on certainty. First from Ashley Cooper, quoting Daniel Sielgel:
“When we are certain we don’t feel the need to pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty is an illusion.”
And then this, from Tenneson Woolf, who currently has my copy of Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. From that books is this is a story of Keetsa, an Ahousaht whaling chief who runs into trouble when the space is no longer held for him:
Every protocol had been observed between the whaling chief and the spirit of the whale. Keesta had thrown the harpoon, and the whale had accepted it, had grabbed and held onto the harpoon according to the agreement they had made through prayers and petitions. Harmony prevailed, whaler and whale were one, heshook-ish tsawalk.
All of a sudden something went wrong, some disharmony arose, some disunity intruded, and the whale turned and began to tow Keesta and his paddlers straight off shore. Keesta took inventory. Everyone in the whaling canoe remained true to the protocols – cleansed, purified, and in harmony. Prayer songs intensified. Still, the great whale refused to turn toward the beach, heading straight off shore. Keesta and the paddlers had kept true to their agreements, and now there seemed nothing left to do except to cut the atlu, the rope attached to the whale.
Keesta took his knife, and as he moved to cut the rope, Ah-up-wha-eek (Wren) landed on the whale and spoke to Keesta: “Tell the whale to go back to where it was harpooned.” Keesta spoke to the whale, and immediately the great whale turned accourding to the word of Wren, the little brown bird, and returned to where it was first harpooned, and there it died.
After the whale had been towed ashore, Keesta discovered, as he had suspected, that the disharmony and disunity had intruded at home. When his wife had heard that the whale had taken the harpoon, she had roused herself and prematurely broken away from her ritual in order to make welcome preparations. At the point when she began to go about her life in disharmony from the rest was exactly when the great whale had begun to tow Keesta and his paddlers off shore.
A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system
Photo by alastairb
* NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it.
At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation.
At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or a wedding organizer, running around taking care of details, scripting the event and staying outside of the experience. A party host, by contrast, is inside the experience, invested in the outcome, bringing energy to conversations, not only form, and both affecting and being affected by the experience.
For the sports minded is the difference between a coach and a captain, the difference between being on a football team and an ultimate team. For musicians it is the difference between what happens when a conductor conducts an orchestra and how a string quartet hosts itself.
Scaled up to another level, facilitation and hosting can be seen as complimentary forms of leadership for two different systems. Facilitation comes from a mechanistic view of organizations, that they are machines that can be fixed. Facilitators typically take a neutral stand, bring their tools and tool kits to help things run easier. The facilitator is the mechanic and the group is the machine.
Hosting, on the other hand, is a practice of leading from within a living system. It’s like entering the machine, becoming a part of it and changing it by being there. In a living system you cannot enter the field without affecting the field. So the host enters the field with all of the resources and assets he or she has and offers what they can to the centre of the work. When I am working explicilty as a host (which is my practice most of the time now) I am actively involved in what is going on. Sometimes it loks like facilitation if I may be called to offer an outsider’s view, but I do that from INSIDE the field in which we are working. I bring my whole self to the work and host conversations that invite us to co-create the tools and forms and processes we need to move. Hosting is leading from the field, and it is a very different path from “facilitation” and it operates out of a very different worldview about the kinds of systems in which we live. Anyone can do it, and in fact it works better when there is more “hosting consciousness” in a group. That way the power of a traditional facilitator is not needed, and the group’s capacity to take itself to the next level is increased.
From a complexity stand point, facilitation is seen as a reductionist activity, reducing complexity to simple problems with simple outcomes and a simple path for getting there. Facilitators help groups to seek answers and end states. Hosting from within the field however is more aligned with the nature of complex systems, where there are no answers, but instead only choices to make around the next question, and the paths where those questions lead us. There are no end states. The idea of a healthy community is a vector, not a point. It is a direction to move, not something that can be acheived and then crossed off the list.
For me the critical need for hosting is in the fact that traditional approaches to systems problems are not working. The systemic problems themselves are now understood to be so interconnected and embedded in each other that they are impossible to disentangle. The mechanical world view is fading and the living systems world view is arising. We are in a period of transition in the world between these two ways of seeing things and I think the core capacity of groups, organizations, communities and nations to find sustainable futures lies in their ability to host themselves to their next level of responsibility and action. Consulting in the mode of the mechanic that fixes things is over. Hosting in living systems is here.
One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done.
At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field. On that one we have been working with a core organizing team to co-create the process and a workbook for the conference to use. Today on our last conference call before the meeting, the organizers asked about catastrophic plan in case something happened to me and I couldn’t make it on the day. I replied that in that unlikely event, we should reflect on the fact that we have planned this entire gathering collaboratively and that if I got hit by a truck next week, any one of them could hold space on the day, working with the group through the set of exercises and experiences we have planned together. Everyone immediately recognized the power of a core team and the power of co-creation. It reuslts in co-ownership.
Working with core teams is differnt from facilitating a planning committee. When I work with core teams I join them as a host to discover the heart of a project, and to develop a co-created capacity to host a project together. This is not the same as acting as a facilitator for a team, inmy experience. Core team work comes from the inside of the group, not the outside. This is especially true of the large scale change work, because those projects need more than one person to generate and hold the deepest need, and to create capacity that lasts, that holding must be within the project. The core team then becomes the host for the project and the project become the host for change in the world, or the organization or the community. These fractal levels of work are very interesting to me at the moment, and very important to learn about as well. We’ll be rolling a lot of this thinking into the module Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and I are leading at the Shambhala Institute this coming summer.