Taholah, Washington
If this article is any indication, the future of management will require more hosts and less bosses. Hierarchies are disappearing, top-down and centralized is giving way to distributed, and organizations are becoming more open and engaging of stakeholders.
That is true everywhere in my experience, including here at the Quinault Indian Nation where we are reframing the tribal government’s strategic plan in several unique ways. First we have established a core team of stakeholders from the government and community who are willing to take responsibility for stewarding the plan. Second, the core team has proposed a new strategic plan model that organizes work not by the departments and programs of the Quinault government structure, but rather by “domains” which are yet to be determined but may end up being things like “prosperity” and “learning.” Organizing the aspirations and preferred futures of the nation this way means that the government departments need to talk to each other and the community to move the Nation forward. And finally the new plan requires engagement with many many people, to bring in the wisdom and ownership of the community so that the plan is theirs. Tomorrow for example we will be hosting an ongoing cafe in the lobby outside the Nation’s general council meeting, where we will be hosting conversations with community members and capturing wisdom with a graphic facilitator.
As a result, our planning sessions are a combination of work and facilitation training because the core team knows that to do this means that they have to talk to people. So we are exploring how to convene conversations that matter and that have an impact.
How is the shift in management changing the way you plan strategy?
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I’ve decided to start posting random links again, found through my uncontrollable surfing addiction. I’ll just publish these in lists of ten, to keep them manageable. Some recent noticings
- The internet is a black hole.
- Plep’s puzzels
- Get outside and look for Comet Holmes
- The only way to be above suspicion is to be completely open.
- Cool thinking tools from exploratree.
- How to learn together as peers, or as a core team
- Spin the Globe show archive and the Soundroots blog
- The history of sparrow killing in China…a cautionary tale.
- Organic learning for organic kiddies
- The leadership vacuum
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I’m on the road again, travelling to Burlington Vermont to Open Space at the CommunityMatters07 conference. This is a great conference, working with really interesting people focused on innovative and artistic practices for community planning.
It seems that I’m doing a fair amount of work these days with artists and with those who see themselves as practictioners of an art, whether it is my colleagues in the Art of Hosting, the community artists from the Art of Engagement or these community planners. I have a sense that there is an emerging consciousness around work: that people increasingly see themselves as practitioners and as artists, even in traditionally scientific disciplines like community planning.
I’m curious if you are thinking of your practice as an art, or, if you are an artist in other aspect of your life, what does it mean to bring your artistic sensibility to traditionally “non-artistic” fields?
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Back in March we ran an Art of Hosting for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team and all of our comunity partners. At the conclusion of that Art of Hosting we held an Open Space. One of the topics that I posted was about the pattern of our work with community based on the experiences that people had had over the three days of training. I was interested in seeing if anything we did over three days with forty people in an Art of Hosting could scale up to larger levels in the system. I had a couple of powerful insights during that session.
- The idea of “consultation” with community stakeholders is dead. This process is about inviting community members to take ownership over the structures and institutions that affect their lives. Instead of a one-way flow of advice from the community to VIATT, the new model is a gift exchange between cousins, relationships between familiy members who are putting children in the centre and looking after each other. As such there is expertise, care and ownership everywhere in the system and so we all must actively become “TeacherLearners.”
- The circle is the fundamental pattern for reflection: leadership at the rim and inquiry in the centre. The relationships in the Art of Hosting developed quickly because we established trust and openness in the beginning with an opening circle. We were able to establish a real sense that everyone was sitting on the rim of the circle together, facing inward at the question of how to do this work. The circle is a structure that opens up the possibility for leadership to come from anywhere, with inquiry at the centre. In this case the questions at the centre of the circle revolve around the principle that when the system puts children in the centre everything changes. This is a powerful organizing principle guiding our transformation of the child and family services system from a system that places resources and institutional interests at the centre while trying to keep families there. The proof of this is embodied in the idea that when the current system breaks down, and a child dies, the parts of the system fly apart and many different process are required to bring it back together. By contrast, when a child dies in a community, everyone comes together. There can be no one else in the centre, only the needs of the family. That is the ideal for our work: a system that places children in the centre.
It is interesting to see the way some of these insights have deepened into operating principles. The idea of Children at the Centre has become a simple but powerful organizing principle for all of our community linkage work with VIATT. The idea of TeacherLearners in the community has informed the way that we are developing community circles – policy and decision making bodies that will hold significantly more responsibility for the system that mere advisory committees. At the moment we are looking at using study circles as a methodology for running the community circles.
[tags]VIATT, community consultation, circles, children, child and family services, study circles[/tags]
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Today I ran into an interesting situation. I was in a conversation about a community process I have been designing and a potential participant took me aside and said that she would love to participate but that one of the people who had already agreed to also participate had committed some serous abuse against her partner. She wondered how I would do to resolve the situation.
That was a good one, a little bit out of the blue and somewhat unexpected. I thought for a moment and then, putting my best collaborative principles into practice said “I don’t know. What would you do if you were in my situation?” She wasn’t expecting this answer, but to her credit she stopped and thought about it. We stood next to each other in silence for a few moments.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Well then,” I said. “That makes two of us. Let’s think about this together.”
We shared a little laugh and then I started thinking out loud. I mused about the fact that we needed many perspectives in this process, and perhaps even the perspectives of “abusers” whatever that means. Having all voices in a process does not come cost-free. I also acknowledged her needs for both safety and a way to contribute to the process. The truth of things, as Christina Baldwin has said, is that as a facilitator I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety, but I can help a group create the conditions that would look after its own safety. In that spirit I invited her to join our process and be in dialogue with me about co-creating the conditions of safety and participation that would meet her needs and keep the group functioning well. This was an agreeable proposal to her and so we will be in conversation as our process unfolds to make sure that the group is doing its best possible work. She has taken some responsibility for helping us to understand her experience of the situation and we’ll deal with whatever comes up with inquiry, curiosity, imagination and patience.
It is a great gift when individuals in a group step up to take responsibility for co-creating conditions of safety and efficacy in their dialogic container. It pays to be honest with people and as for help when you don’t know what to do, and see if proposals forward can be co-created. I was reminded today how important that is to adopt as a world view and not just a facilitation trick.