Rare that I completely reproduce a full post from someone else’s blog, but Doug Germann did a masterful job today of capturing the terror of dialogue:
There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might be tossed aside worthless. Our very being might be killed and it is not for sure that someone new will rise from the ashes, or that if such a one does we will want it. We might not recognize ourselves, indeed we might not survive in any form. This is why we hold back, not willing to lose who we are. We are afraid we die. This is why we argue for our position. Yet this is our test of faith: we put forth what reality beyond truth we see, not knowing whether it will bear any fruit. Have we done good or ill we cannot know. Ours is but to offer, trembling to offer. This is a test of faith for despite our past experience that something better arises from the ashes of dialogue, we can never be sure about this time. We risk it all.
So if you do not wish to risk, I will understand. I will not hold it against you. Great courage is not mine, either. I shrink from dialogue. I shrink from revealing myself and from receiving your revealings. I fear that I may have to give up myself and my pet plans and my comfortable ways of living. I may have to learn something new, change my way of working and living, meet new people, become a new person myself.
There is risk here: what else goes with it? A responsibility not just to accept what the others say and go along, but to meet what they say, to throw my offering into the mix, see where the similarities and dissimilarities and correlates are. How are we related, how are our ideas and our dreams related? Perhaps tonight the conversations will turn away from what I think will work into something else: it is my duty to listen; it is also my duty to share my vision; then it is my duty to bend so we can weave a new pattern. There might be a better form. I wrote that like I do not believe those words, but indeed there might be a clue to a fuller measure beyond this half measure, there might be indeed something grandly better. Prepare to be surprised.
It’s a near impossible task to describe to someone what will happen in a skillfully conducted dialogue where the participants agree to stray from their well manicured positions and enter into a world of complexity and difficulty that produces emergent learning. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of your perspective shifting and new insights streaming in. But it is scary, and we do well as facilitators when we remember that the best work is done when people agree to take themselves to that edge. We can meet them there, carefully and with compassion and invite that next step. So can we be that big?
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Many of the circles I travel in instersect in many intimate ways. People I meet here on the west coast of Canada months apart turn out to be co-authors of papers and books. Folks I hear about from others turn out to be partners in crome later on.
The Art of Hosting world is a little like that, touching as it does on many many different networks. And through these serendipitous connections, it turns out that I am personally acquainted with two of the three authors of a great little free e-book called Mapping Dialogue. I met Zaid Hassan last year as he was travelling through BC on business with Generon. Marianne Knuth, I haven’t met yet, but she is an amazing woman, a close friend of my friend Toke Moeller and we are hoping to have her join us for the Art of Hosting here in September.
So while I am relishing these connections, I want to put a strong plug in for this book on dialogue. It essentially suammarizes what we know and do with the Art of Hosting and is a great primer to using these processes and approaching this work no matter what context you find yourself in.
[tags]mapping dialogue, Toke Moeller, Zaid Hassan, Marianne Knuth, Art of Hosting[/tags]
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I have been working lately with friends and fellows Brenda Chaddock, Tennson Wolf and Teresa Posakony to co-create another Art of Hosting training. We will be gathering on Bowen Island here in British Columbia from September 24-28 in a practice retreat to deeply investigate these questions:
- What could my leadership also be?
- What if I would practice using collective intelligence and learning in my organisation and network?
- What could strategic conversations also be if I host them with wisdom and courage?
- How do I create authentic involvement that leads to real implementation?
The practice retreat is structured along the following principles:
- Our learning will grow out of participant contributions and presence – we will support each other as co-learners
- We will learn by observation, experience and practice, using interactive processes to build a safe and inspiring learning environment – we will explore Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Circle Council, reflective practices, World Cafe, and other participatory methodologies
- Taking a chance to explore – and experiment with – applying these tools to your own projects-in-progress will help you to apply your skills, as well as develop and continue a new practice that will last well beyond this training
And through a variety of processes and conversations, we will investigate:
- Hosting conversations as a core leadership practice and competence for leading change
- How the Art of Hosting is an organising pattern/culture that invites new ways of living and working
- The conditions needed to create space for meaningful conversations
- Specific interactive processes through which learning and creation can emerge
- Sensing and shaping the conditions and timing for using particular methods and tools
- How the practice of hosting can be applied to key strategic change projects in our lives and work
This is a powerful training, and we invite you to join us. For more information, or to register, visit the Art of Hosting page or contact me by email.
[tags]facilitation+training, art+of+hosting[/tags]
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Having a weblog in addition to having a regular website means that there are two front doors to my online home. There have been a lot of searches here lately for facilitation and Open Space resources, so I thought I would highlight the collections that I maintain through two pages here.
I hope you find these useful. Let me know how they are for you.
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Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations.
Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are:
- Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening)
- Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting
- Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding)
- Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding)
For me these are important because thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:
- Analyse the problem
- Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
- Fix any problems that might be around
- Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.
My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:
- Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
- Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
- Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
- Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.
The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.
So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.