Off to Salt Lake City Utah to work with Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony on another Art of Hosting. Taking an inquiry into this one about the dynamics and the work of co-hosting. I take for a given the relationships I have with my closest colleagues, and the ease with which we are able to work together. There is a magic to it born out of deep friendship for one another (we have a saying that friendship is the new organizational form). There is also something about sharing an inquiry together and living deeply in a community of practice where the language and ideas are shared and understood at an intuitive level. Within that we bring very different capacities and capabilities and inquiries, but there is a powerful centre that holds us together. It is not something we set out to work on…not a centre that arises from a deliberate scoping out…it is deeper, one that lives at the heart of all good teams, an ineffable and powerful but unspoken togetherness. Trying to do our best without this would be impossible, but it is also not something that, so far, I feel like I can bottle up and talk.
So as I go into this Art of Hosting, I’m going to do a little harvest on what working together is like, and try to take that to others. Chris Chapman – my Ireland based colleague – and I are looking to create something more descriptive about the practices of co-hosting, and so we have a little bit of a harvest plan going forward.
And if you are coming to Utah to be with us, you may well find yourself wrapped in this inquiry as well!
A birth announcement that might interest you. I have been a small part of a project over the past couple of years (along with a few other Art of Hosting stalwarts) to help co-create a pattern language for group process. Over the years we have been working away at discerning, writing and publishing this pattern language. The idea is to capture a limited number of patterns that, if practiced in a group context, bring life to gatherings. After years of work, I think we really have something.
The project has now resulted in it’s first product: a deck of cards that are wickedly fun to play with. Last week, Caitlin Frost, Teresa Posakony, Tenneson Woolf and I used these cards in working with a hosting team to design and hold the core of an Art of Hosting learning event. It was fantastic, and opened us up in so many ways to possibilities and potentials. As a co-creative design tool, these cards are wicked.
So attached is the birth announcement with information about where you can order the deck. I’ll always have them with me so next time we meet, ask me if you can play with them!
The Group Works card deck, the first product of the Group Pattern Language Project, is now out! You canorder copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about our upcoming mobile/phone app version of the deck on our website, groupworksdeck.org .
Image by Susan Stewart
The deck is designed to support your process as a group convenor, planner, facilitator, or participant. The developers spent several years pooling our knowledge of the best group events we have ever witnessed.
We looked at meetings, conferences, retreats, town halls, and other sessions that give organizations life, solve a longstanding dilemma, get stuck relationships flowing, result in clear decisions with wide support, and make a lasting difference. We also looked at routine, well-run meetings that simply bring people together and get lots of stuff done.
The deck consists of 91 full-colour cards (plus a few blanks to add your own patterns), a five-panel explanatory category/legend card, and an accompanying booklet explaining the purpose and history of the project and suggesting uses for the cards in group process work.
Each 3.5” x 5.5” card is laid out as follows:
These cards are yours, of course, to use in whatever ways make sense and work for you: in the workplace, in design and preparation of facilitated events, as a learning and teaching tool, for reflecting on how an event went, or just for fun. The website and booklet explain some of the ways they have been used by facilitators and students so far, to give you some ideas to get started with, and we invite users to share their experiences and stories with us.
Image by Ethan Honeywell
For more information on the deck, please visit our website: http://groupworksdeck.org
Just coming off an Art of Hosting with friends Tenneson Woolf, Caitlin Frost and Teresa Posakony. Something Tenneson said on our last day as we were hunkering down to do some action planning, has stayed with me. He said something like “it is easy to create actions that go off in a million different directions, but much more sensible to create actions that come from a common centre. There is something about holding that common centre together invites trust so that we can release responsibility to action conveners and known they are initiating works that comes from our common shared purpose.”
People often make the distinction between talk and action, largely in my experience as an objection to the amount of time it takes to be in conversation around complex topics. It seems that with complexity the conversation is endless and can go on forever. And almost by defintion, that is true. That can be a very frustrating experience if you consider the action – reflection process to be a linear one in which we spend time figuring out what we are going to do and then go and do it.
That approach works well in the complicated domain where everything can be known, or enough can be known that we can discern the wisest path forward. But the complex domain contains a number of features which makes that kind of linear thinking folly. First of all there is the prospect of emergence: things will happen as a result of interactions in the system which could never have been predicted and which may radically alter strategy and action. Secondly, actions undertaken in the complex domain cannot have their success or effectiveness guaranteed and therefore complex systems actually benefit from having many actions undertaken, with an ongoing developmental evaluation process as to the efficacy of these actions and the connection to the centre of action is constantly changing.
A lot of the work I do in hosting conversations is about both discerning what is our shared purpose as well as generating action that can come from that shared purpose. And, with the smart clients I have, we repeat that cycle over and over as they continue to operate in a changing and complex world. It creates strategy that represents a fine line between reacting and hedging your bets on some pretty good ideas. Conversation and time and a wicked question helps us to check into and explore a deeper core purpose that can lie at the centre of ideas for action. I have been lately calling this a generative core: an idea at the centre that is so powerful and compelling that it alone can inspire interesting and creative ideas. There is an energy to a generative core that is inviting, and that seems to make people WANT to be in conversation and relationship with it. There is a quality to the questions that lie in the generative core that open ourselves in exciting ways to new possibilities. Good conversation can help to illuminate this core purpose
Action planning from this place means coming up with good ideas and designing what David Snowden and others have called “safe-fail probes” which allows us to begin small. In the Berkana Institute we call this approach “start anywhere and follow it somewhere” indicating that this kind of action creates its own momentum over time and therefore needs to be shaped and carefully watched. Action that arises from agenerative core can be borne in conversation, and should be developmentally evaluated in conversation. Conversation becomes a key tool in designing, evaluating and making meaning of what is going on. And while actions and probes are being designed, tested and implemented, at the same time we have to pay attention to what we are learning about our core purpose, because that is always changing too.
This is not easy to understand, especially in a world where proceeding in an orderly direction from point A to point B is a desirable and seemingly sensible thing to do. But understanding the nature of complexity is important for action planning, because it can actually unleash the kinds of ideas that otherwise seem to never come to the surface. And it can make a community or organization powerfully resilient to shifts and changes that require retooling without stopping. It seems like a long investment of time to be in conversations that slow things down, but I invite slowing down to go fast, because the speed at which activities and ideas can be implemented on the other side of a well centred and well bounded discernment process can be breathtaking.
You know the ones. 3M, the makers of the greatest facilitation invention ever – the post it note – decided a number of years ago to do for the flipchart what they had done for the scrap of paper: add an adhesive to it.
Now instead of taping flipchart paper up on a wall, all you have to do is peel it from a pad and affix it to a wall. Neat and tidy.
And almost completely useless.
For anyone who does any amount of creative facilitation, the only thing better than a piece of white, clean, plain flipchart paper, is a roll of white clean, flipchart paper. With plain flipchart paper you can do the following:
- Take notes on an easel
- lay it on a table top and make mind maps
- write on the back of it
- tape it in landscape portrait on a wall to make mind maps
- cut it into pieces for Open Space topics
- fold it into huge paper airplanes
- lay it on top of cafe tables for participants to write notes and draw on
- fold it up and easily separate it later
- roll it up, and unroll it again
- tape together several pieces to make a mural.
It’s amazing. You can make it bigger or smaller, tape it any which way you like and write over every part of the surface. And the stuff is pretty cheap, coming in at 50 sheets for about $12 if you buy the pads individually, 24 cents a sheet.
Contrast this to the 3M sticky post-it flipchart. On the surface, these things seem to be the miracle we have all been waiting for. But unless you are using a single sheet and hanging it in a vertical position, and not needing to do anything with it later, these beasts are compromised by all kinds of design flaws:
- You can only hang them one way without using tape.
- You cannot write on the top, because there is a glossy strip there where the adhesive was stuck on the previous sheet.
- You can’t really use the back (at least people don’t).
- you can’t roll or fold them without a mess (and sometimes an impossible sticky tangle, with ripped sheets as a result).
- You can’t place them in a heap without them sticking together, making later sorting out a massive chore.
- You can’t cut them up without first removing the sticky top
- You can’t make them into murals (see glossy strip, above)
- Not useful for cafe table tops, as they stick and you can’t write something and then rotate the sheet.
And on top of that, for all that inconvenience, they will set you back a whopping $42 for only 30 sheets. More than a DOLLAR a sheet.
So, meeting organizers, I know you are trying to be professional and innovative by buying the latest and greatest from 3M (the post-it people after all!) but please take a pass on these pads. Plain white paper wins every single time.
Graphic from puramaryam.de
Last night as part of a leadership retreat we are doing for the the Federation of Community Social Services of BC, we took a bus into Vancouver from Bowen Island to listen to Adam Kahane speak. He spoke last night on the ten laws of love and power (the essence of which you can see amongst these Google results). There are a couple of new insights from the talk he gave which I appreciate.
Love and power as a complimentary system. Adam’s project is to recover useful definitions of love and power and to see them in a complimentary system. Seeing these two forces this way creates all kinds of important strategic imperatives in systems – moving from degenerative power to generative love, from degenerative love to generative power. This is polarity management in it’s core…the ability to keep a system of complimentary poles in a rhythm that oscillates between the upsides of both, but never rests in one or the other. This dynamic approach to love and power invites us to become skillful at both. The approach is fundamentally Taoist!
Turtles all the way down. We had a brief exchange about what is going on with the #Occupy movement in terms of this framework. A question was asked about whether #Occupy represented a love move or a power move. I said that I saw #Occupy representing a drive to wholeness, a unifying effort to unite the 99% – a love move. Much of the process evident at the three Occupy camps I have been to has been about inclusion and joining. Adam saw it differently. By distinguishing ourselves from the 100%, #Occupy is a power move because it is a drive towards the self-realization of the 99%. This is fascinating to me because it pointed out that love and power drives operate in different ways, in different scales even within the same process, This is what makes it so tricky to be in thiss dynamic. You have to understand at which level your love or power move is working. In everything we are involved in there are multiple levels of scale and focus (“turtles all the way down“) and skillful leadership is as much about knowing which scale you are at as it is about making the right move. Also Taoist: moving in line with the times and the context. This idea of acting in scale has come into our work today where we are looking at the living and dying systems model developed by Meg Wheatley, Deborah Frieze and a number of us in Berkana. Living systems scale, and exhibit similar patterns at each level.
Holons. That leads to the next insight, which is Adam’s use of the concept of holons to describe how systems are influenced by love and power. I like this a lot, because holons represent a stable structure at every level. I first was introduced to the idea of holons through Ken Wilber’s work, who developed the concept frost proposed by Arthur Koestler. Adam’s use of holons to illustrate love and power is very useful. Love in this case is the holon’s drive for connection and integration and power is the holon’s drive towards self-realization and differentiation. There can be many drives moving simultaneously, hence my use of the above graphic, which gets the picture across.
Power/love moves in process design. Adam spoke about “moves” that are called for when the power/love dynamic tips too far to ones side or the other. This comes from Barry Johnson’s work in polarity management, and for process designers, it has important implications. Using the love/power dynamic, we can make choices about the kinds of processes that we use to bring people together or to create the drive for self-realization. Adam mused that in process design and facilitation, World Cafe was a good example of a love move (as it tends the group to wholeness based on the fact that there is one questions that the whole group explores) and Open Space Technology as a good example of a power move (as it is dependant on agency and diverse streams of self-realization happening simultaneously). I though this was a pretty useful observation, and it behooves us as process designers and facilitators to think about this construction in the design choices we make.
Adam’s work on this stuff has legs because it is a very simple concept which becomes immensely complex in practice. But importantly, it is practice. Efforts to understand it in theory can be limited. The dynamic of practice, the complicated roughshod effort to get it right is where the reward is.