Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together. In the past …
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old. It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content …
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time: “While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.” That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over …
Years ago I wrote a little book called the Tao of Holding Space which was an interpretation of the Tao te Ching as applied to Open Space Technology and the facilitation of other participatory practices. Annick Corriveau is an Open Space Facilitator and she interviewed me a couple of months ago about my nearly 30 year history with Open Space Technology and the origins of this little book. She has a series of interviews with OST practitioners that are well worth checking out. You can download the book for free from the Internet Archive in English or in Chinese or …
One of the quotes I keep rolling out all the time is this one from Christina Baldwin: No group can prove itself safe by the definition of one member; it can only prove itself healthy and responsive to the the needs of different people over time Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle, p. 172 I sometimes reframe this quote as “No one person can be responsible for safety in a group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for its own safety.” For a group to work well, especially if it is confronting challenges, uncertainty, complexity, or conflict, it needs …