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.
First of all there is no such thing.
Second, a friend asked me the question “What is the idea group size for collaborative process?” and in trying to answert the question I emailed him the following (please note that this is all off the top of my head, and in practice I usually go with intuition, relying more on patterns than rules):
Innovation generally starts with individuals, so I like to build time into to processes for people to just be quiet and think for a bit. Small groups can help refine and test good ideas, and large groups can help propagate ideas and connect them to larger patterns. In small group work, in general, working with an odd number is helpful because it creates an instability that keeps the group moving. If you want solidity, you work with even numbers. So it goes like something this:
1 = innovation, idea generation, inspiration and commitment
2 = Pairs are good for long and exploratory conversations, interviews, and partnering
3 = Good number for a small team to rapidly prototype a new idea
4 = A good number for a deep exploration. You benefit from having two pairs together, and from having a little more diversity in the group than in two.
5 = good number for a design team; there is always an instability in a group of five and good diversity, but the group is not so large that people get left out.
6 = Good for noticing patterns, and summing up. A group of six can be entered from three pairs coming together as well, allowing for insights gathered in pairs to be rolled up.
7 = At this scale we are losing the intimacy we need for conversation, and so generally I will work a group of seven into 3 and 4 if we need to break up.
8 = is too big. And it is no coincidence that big conferences are boring, because most hotels have tables that can accomodate 8, 9, or 10 people which is too many for real conversation. At these scales, people start to be able to dominate and introverts dry right up.
It is a good practice to use a huge group (like in the dozens or hundreds) to source the diversity that is needed for good dynamic small groups, and then to find ways to propagate ideas from the very small to the very large.
Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.
Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,
Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.
The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.
So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.
To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.
In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.
Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.
And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.