There is no way you can learn the art of facilitation, the art of hosting, by simply coming to a workshop. It happens from time to time that people show up for a three day workshop and expect that at the end they will be competent hosts of groups process in any situation. To get good at arts you have to practice. Last week in Montreal, I saw 120 people come to an Art of Hosting with an overwhelming desire to practice. The invitation to them was to attend if they were wanting to develop and improve their practice. It …
Very few of us have our hands on the real levers of power. We lack the money and influence to write policy, create tax codes, move resources around or start and stop wars. Most of us spend almost all of our time going along with the macro trends of the world. We might hate the implications of a fossil fuel economy, but everything we do is firmly embedded within it. We might despise colonization, but we know that we are alos guilty of it in many small ways, The reason challenges like that are difficult to resolve is that we …
Ten years ago on September 6, 2002 I launched this blog with an innocuous little link to an on lie art project ground through Euan Semple. I called the blog Parking Lot, which is the term facilitators use for a flip chart where we record things that are off topic to the subject at hand, but important enough to come back to. Since then I have used this space as my open source learning pad, to explore and grow in the field of facilitation, organizational and community development and random other bits and pieces of living. I’ve had long extended …
In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration. He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where “no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” …
UPDATED: To include Patricia Kambitsch’s beautiful doodle. We talk about the Art of Hosting as a practice. It is a way of being with self and other. This is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, because the world is full of lots of instructions about what to do. Telling me what to do is very useful in situations where I am doing things that can be repeated. For example, if I am building a cabinet, fixing a car, creating a budget or processing a claim, then you can give me a set of instructions that will be very helpful in …