All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community. Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. …
Bowen Island is where I live and work. Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues. Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here. Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.
When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things. These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see. At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff. On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to: If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their …
Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop. The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts. Today I …
Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity. Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications of complexity for organizations. Yesterday I was teaching an Art of Hosting here in Calgary, where we were looking at Cynefin and then followed with a discussion about how the nature of complex systems compels us to make important design choices when we are facilitating participatory processes to do work in organizations. This is a cursory list, but I thought it would be helpful to share here. Cilliers’ text is bold. …