On the road again to co-host

Off to Salt Lake City Utah to work with Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony on another Art of Hosting.  Taking an inquiry into this one about the dynamics and the work of co-hosting.  I take for a given the relationships I have with my closest colleagues, and the ease with which we are able to work together.  There is a magic to it born out of deep friendship for one another (we have a saying that friendship is the new organizational form).  There is also something about sharing an inquiry together and living deeply in a community of practice where the language and ideas are shared and understood at an intuitive level.  Within that we bring very different capacities and capabilities and inquiries, but there is a powerful centre that holds us together.  It is not something we set out to work on…not a centre that arises from a deliberate scoping out…it is deeper, one that lives at the heart of all good teams, an ineffable and powerful but unspoken togetherness.  Trying to do our best without this would be impossible, but it is also not something that, so far, I feel like I can bottle up and talk.

So as I go into this Art of Hosting, I’m going to do a little harvest on what working together is like, and try to take that to others.  Chris Chapman – my Ireland based colleague – and I are looking to create something more descriptive about the practices of co-hosting, and so we have a little bit of a harvest plan going forward.

And if you are coming to Utah to be with us, you may well find yourself wrapped in this inquiry as well!