Part of a series. Part one: Just what I needed Part two: Where did this come from? Something Harrison Owen said to me somewhere along the line drove me to understand that facilitating Open Space Technology meetings required a tremendous amount of personal practice. He talked about rising at 4am the day of his Open Space meetings and meditating for an hour. The work of actively letting go takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially if, like most of us, you have control instincts to overcome. When one is facilitating an Open Space meeting the desire to control things, even …
To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does. Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share …
It has been thirty years since 14 women were killed at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, and every year I mark their passing here. I’ve always associated this song with that event, and I’ve even asked Lynn Miles about it, and she has said to me, despite her introduction in the above video, “yeah, I guess it’s also about that.” And let’s remember their names and what they were studying or working on that day because they were our peers and their deaths marked a whole generation of us. Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil …
One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together. Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my …
We’ve just completed our 17th annual Art of Hosting here on Bowen Island. For 17 years I have welcomed nearly 1000 people to our home place through more than 50 workshops we have conducted here. I always appreciate seeing the island through the eyes of our visitors. And so, coming fresh off of that experience, I responded today on our community facebook page to a question posed by a long time Islander, Rob Wall: What is “The Bowen Way.” This was my answer. It changes over time and with waves of people who come and go. As a person who …