Back in the fall I got to finally do some work with my friends Peggy Holman and Stephen Sliha (and Carol Daniel Kasbari too!) with the fabulous organization Journalism That Matters. I was able to do a little process hosting and participating in the developmental evaluation that was going on during the two day conference in Portland.
Last month Peggy published an overview of what we learned in that conference. Embedded in that report is this video made by some of the students on the evaluation team. It contains interviews with many of the participants who had epiphanies about what else journalism could be.
It seems obvious to think that journalists, being storytellers, can help communities tell their stories and represent themselves. But I’m interested in the “weak signal” of journalists actually doing the convening of conversations. Journalists don’t only have the power to tell stories, they also have the power to call together people in conversation. They do it whenever they call up a source for a comment on a story. They do it on radio or TV when they call a panel of people to discuss or debate something. They do it in print or online when they host opinions and curate comment sections (and they DON’T do it when they just leave comments sections open). Why don’t journalists call community meetings? Why don’t they host larger scale gatherings where people discuss their communities issues, even come up with solutions, find each other and work together? Sometimes journalists “moderate town halls” but that’s really not the same thing.
I think the new frontiers in journalism are not only in using their media tools in novel ways. I think journalists can now think about how to extend their hosting practice in new ways too, to help communities find the resources they need inside themselves to address the challenges they face. And that would be another way that journalism could matter.
Depending on who you ask, the Art of Hosting as a community of practice has been around since about 1999. Since that time, it has evolved and morphed and changed and developed. It does so based on the inquiries that come from practice and that are captured in the workshops that are delivered by various people all over the world. It is a community and a movement of learning that I have never quite seen the likes of, although I am sure that there are others. It focuses on dialogue, participatory leadership and making tools for these things accessible to everyone, while at the same time disrupting the field of facilitation with strange terms and language and ideas that are drawn from everything from organizational development, to sociology, psychology, anthropology, complexity theory and a variety of spiritual paths and experiences.
It’s is really hard to pin down, so I appreciate the efforts of the researchers out there who have been trying to understand the shape of this morphing mycellium of a community.
Elizabeth Hunt (@elizpercolab) is one of these researchers. Grounded in Frierian pedagogy, she has just submitted her Master’s thesis in which she explores the Art of Hosting pedagogy. Her research was based in interviews, reading and through being a practitioner with percolab in Montreal, one of my favourite groups of professional colleagues in my network. (Full disclosure: I really love these guys!). In her thesis she identifies four assumptions that underlie the bigger invitation that the Art of Hosting embodies:
- We are living a crisis of immense complexity;
- Finding appropriate solutions requires us to shift our thinking;
- Dialogue enables us to access collective intelligence;
- We can identify and learn from recurring patterns in our work
The more I look at these assumptions, the more I recognize them in my work. I can reflect on how each of these live in me and my work. The crisis I feel drives the urgency of my work, but it’s probably a different version of the crisis than it is for you. The shifts in thinking for me reflect my own shifts in thinking. I try to embody the changes in mindset that I speak up for without becoming an evangelist and a fundamentalist. that’s a hard line to tread when I believe so strongly that complexity thinking and conscious action are critical for survival in this world at any scale.
I also have often said that “I might be wrong, but I’m basically staking my life on the idea that dialogue is the social technology we need to all become good at.” At this point in my life, I’m pretty far down that road, and I’m not sure I’m going to be doing much else in the next half of my life. So that’s my bet. You go ahead let my epitaph be a pithy assessment of how well that worked.
And finally on the fourth assumption, I think the dynamic nature of this is what keeps this community of practice so rich for me. It is always changing and the patterns of dialogue are shifted by context, technology, thinking and the new challenges. Showing up at Occupy Wall Street is as illuminating for me as watching a Trump rally, helping organize participation in the supporter’s section of my beloved Vancouver Whitecaps FC, or sitting in the Snug Cafe here on Bowen Island, kicking around ideas with my neighbours. It is endlessly fascinating to see how participation, dialogue and leadership intersect. The richer my experience observing and experimenting in a variety of contexts, the more I learn. And that’s what makes this a worthy pursuit for the rest of my life.
So a huge thanks to Elizabeth for this research and being a high level observer of our community. And good luck with the thesis!
Over many years I have been using the chaordic stepping stones as the basis for all work I do with clients. This is a tool that I first heard of in the Art of Hosting community in about 2004. It was originally based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock developed to design organizations that took advantage of both order and chaos. It has been useful and rich and created all kinds of outcomes that would not have been possible other wise.
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech is best known for his statements of possibility and the energy with which he concluded his remarks. It is a compelling call to purpose, to a world in which the future is only currently imagined. It provided a generative image of what is possible, if not what is attainable, and it did what a good purpose does: it helped take the place of a charismatic leader. Internalized, that purpose drives the movement.