The 30 day learning journey harvest

So it’s been more than thirty days that I have been on my 30 day learning journey, but here is a harvest from some significant conversations. Consider this the tender early sproing greens. There is more to follow.

I began this learning journey leaning into thinking about what role I can play in taking change to scale. My reasons for this inquiry have to do with the fact that I am increasingly working with systems, beyond organizations and beyond groups. Also, some of us in the Art of Hosting community and the Berkana Institute are deep in this inquiry as well, wondering how we extend to influencing systems.

Two major insights have come to me this past month. First, working with my deep friends Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Phil Cass and Tim Merry on the Food and Society conference in Phoenix back in April we found ourselves very much playing at various levels of scale. This was a gathering of the Good Food Movement, and our intention as designers and process artists was to create a container in which the movement could experience itself as a movement, as a learning community working towards shifting a large food system. We were brought in not just to work with the conference as facilitators, but to help build a field among the hosting team and the organizations involved to do this work of having the movement expereince itself. For a number of years, Kellogg has had an intention to shift the percentage of healthy, fair, affordable and green food from 2% to 10% of the total amount of food in the American system. It is the Good Food Movement, such as it is, that is doing this work.

Moving from pioneers to systems of influence.

On the final day of the conference we had Debbie Frieze and Tom Hurley share the Berkana perspective on taking change to scale. Debbie and Meg Wheatley cracked a very simple model, called the “Lifecycle of Emergence” of doing this that names four phases in evolving a system of influence. First, pioneers in an emerging system give themselves a NAME which makes it much easier to find one another. Before the local food movement started to take hold there was no name for the people that were running farmers markets, creating community shared agriculture, and promoting local menus. Through the 1990s, a movement sprang up, which we now know as the local food movement (and some people are becoming increasingly “locavores,” promoting 100 mile diets and such). Once a network of practitioners is named it can find itself and begin to CONNECT.

Humberto Maturana is quoted as saying that the way to make a system more healthy is to connect it to more of itself. In this model of emergent scale, connecting is how the network emerges. Think of all the networks that have propagated through web technology since blogging began a new practice of naming, which Google helps along by making it easy to find one another. Networks themselves are useful, but it is only when they deepen to communities of practice, do they begin to exert influence. Community of practice form when people NOURISH networks, by offering to a shared centre for example. A network is relationship neutral, a community has a quality of relationship that takes it to another level. At this level we are able to do work together, support each other and create opportunities for new things to happen, born in the social space of collaboration.

As communities of practice do more and more, and they tell their stories and ILLUMINATE their work, they become systems of influence. A system of influence is able to do more than a community of practice, and it strikes me that it is less intentional. There are however, a set of practices that are useful for journeying through this ever scaling world. Tom Hurley spoke to those at the Food and Society conference, and Toke, Monica and I have been thinking about them from the perspective of what Hosting practice has to offer.

The journey of the practitioner at increasing levels of scale
As people move from facilitation to organizational development and beyond, I think there are five kind of archetypal levels on which facilitators or hosting practitioners work. There is a strong correlation between our own learning journey and through the ways in which works moves to scale. Of course there are many ways that people come to the work of large sclae change, through management, activism, advocacy, spiritual tradition and systemic analytics.   he journey I am describing here is the one I am on and seems widely shared by people who learn about organizations and systems by first working with groups.

So this journey can be summarized by five basic archetypal fields.   in short these are individual, one on one, group, organization, system.

In many Art of Hosting retreats we talk about hosting oneself. This basically means being in active inquiry with oneself.   A thirty day learning journey is one way of hosting oneself, as is Byron Katie’s work, Otto Scharmer’s Presencing and Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. These are all ways of conversing with oneself, staying open and in inquiry and noticing what is alive.

When we bring ourselves from this space into conversational space, we show up present and open and able to see new things emerging, even in small one on one conversations. We enter these conversations as open listeners, which is what Adam Kahane’s work has been about. To enter a social space as a listener is to attend to what could be born in the possibility of open social space. This is the beginning of a journey that takes us to a different place than if we show up talking.

The next level, the level of hosting the group, is the first experience we have of letting go. If we host as listeners, we begin to cultivate the practice of holding space, which is fundamentally different from showing up in a group as a directive, authoritarian presence. The host – the one who can hold space – practices a form of leadership that is able to attend to the emergent, exactly the capacity that is needed to see how work can scale. As we move through these levels we begin to let go more and more into these social spaces, while staying very rooted and present to our own self.

Once we have worked with groups, a consciousness emerges that asks the question about whether what we know about groups can apply to organizations. Harrison Owen made this leap with his Inspired Organization, seeing the scaling up from one Open Space meeting to a way of working together. Michael Herman did the same with the Inviting Organization. The Appreciative Inquiry world seeks to apply this worldview to asset-based community development and positive organizational scholarship. We start seeing that the things we know about self-organization, emergence and collaborative creativity can actually be encoded into organizational structures. Chaordic design becomes possible.

Finally there comes a time when we begin to ask if large systems can operate this way, and of course many do. Harrison points to the work of Stuart Kaufman who has studied self-organization for decades as evidence that Open Space is the operating system of the universe. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs and the World Cafe community are exploring the implications for conversational leadership and “the world as cafe.” Systems CAN and DO operate according to these principles, but at the level of the practitioner, we fall further and further away from controlling outcomes.

Instead, what we need to learn to do is to give up entirely to “the field.” My friend Monica has been saying “only a field can hold a field” and this is our experience from the Food and Society conference. We are still holding space for the emergent results of the Food and Society gathering, and we are finding it impossible to do this except in a field of practitioners. No one person is capable of this work alone.

And so our journey comes to this: host oneself into inquiry, listen with others, host conversations that matter, co-create organizations together, and participate in the field that can host the field, doing work that is greater than any one person can do. This is how we can show up in initiatives that begin to scale quickly to the level of systems of influence. Control will act as a brake on the acceleration of scale, letting go propels it forward.

There is a saying in the Tao te Ching: know the male, but keep to the female. In other words, know power and creativity, and keep to the receptive and open. Know creation, be open to emergence. This small phrase sums up everything I have been learning about how to practice to create shift. If you want to change the world you have to be able to disappear into the field that is doing the work without losing your capabilities, your contributions and your gifts and without being tied to your personal vision for what the shift will be.