Over the years the Art of Hosting community of practice has developed some methods for large group process facilitation that have become standards alongside the methods we have imported into our work, such as Circle Way, Open Space Technology and World Cafe. One of these, Pro Action Cafe, is one of my go to methods for hosting small and rapid fire project development. Ria Baeck, one of the co-developers of this method along with Rainer von Leoprechting shared the Pro Action Cafe origin story on the Art of Hosting list, and so here are her words and observations, for posterity: …
One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones. Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work. Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool. The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for …
John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius. The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I …
Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo. I like the way she puts this: Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights. I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have …
In Tofino for this week, today preparing for 60 people who will be joining us for an Art of Hosting. The beach here, as anyone living on the exposed west coast will know, is constantly buffeted by surf and there is an endless white noise created by the waves crashing on the four sets of reefs offshore. Once, when I was in Quinault in Washington State, I remarked to an Elder that this sound must have had a beginning at some time in the earth’s history and perhaps will have an end. But in the meantime, as long as human …