I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.”
This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in relatively stable situations, but such methods can also mask the qualitative, contextual and emerging aspects central to facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, stuckness and opportunity. Complexity entrepreneurs need to go beyond the analytical and gain experience in handling the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the co-evolving nature of context and action.
To brand these skills as entrepreneurial puts them in a positive light. It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking predominantly hard evidence and clear evaluation of alternatives to support conclusions and action strategies. And even with those intent on ‘embracing complexity’ there often lurks the hope that methods can be identified that will reduce that complexity sufficiently so that objective clarity is found. This can lead to a search for methods at the expense of enhancing and valuing the cognitive and emotional qualities needed to apprehend the terrain, judge what can be done and take action.
I’m sure some will seize on the brand title without seizing on the actual role, but I think there is some decent descriptions in this article that can help teams of researchers and others see the role of those who are skilled nd experienced at working with complexity. I especially like their description of the shadowy forces that drive our search for methods. We are teaching this week a cohort of labour educators in the Art of Hosting and we have a two day workshop that deliberately dives below methods. Even though we are sharing and using methods to ground the learning, the focus of the workshop is on the role of hosts as people who work with constraints to work with emergence.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this!
Kelly Foscroft-Poirier hosts a session during an Art of Hosting we did at Tseshaht back in 2019.
I had a lovely call today with Sean Andrew, a colleague in the world of hosting, complexity and systems change work. At one point we were both sharing stories about what the Art of Hosting workshop meant to us as experienced practitioners. We both came to the Art of Hosting approach after years of facilitation and practice in other domains.
For experienced practitioners, the Art of Hosting, as a learning workshop can offer an important bridge between practices. Both Sean an I credit the Art of Hosting in part with moving our practice from methods-based to a broader capacity to work with groups and organizations. Many who come to the Art of Hosting as a “facilitation training” leave with skills related to design, personal work, and how to work with self-organization and emergence. It alos broadens the conversation to more strategic questions about how hosted interventions can be consequential in the broader context of the organization’s or community’s questions.
If you are a practitioner that is familiar with methods, or you have a long standing organizational development practice, the Art of Hosting may be one of those places where you find badging and connection between different approaches and some practice tools to help deep your work.
It certainly helps that our teams are quite diverse. In our Ontario offering on Reimagining Education (October 16-18 in Peterborough), we have Jennifer Williams who is education with an electic resume of teaching on tall ships and in wilderness settings and who supports organizational development as a consultant and host. Troy Maracle is a long time Indigenous educator and community builder amongst those supporting Indigenous students in the Ontario school system. Systems change is his life and he brings worlds together in his teaching and practice. Cedric Jamet teaches in the Human Systems Intervention program at Concordia and is a poet and musician and we share a love of theory and simplicity of practice.
In Vancouver (November 17-19) our team is likewise broadly experienced. Caitlin Frost, my partner, whose body of work has developed over thirty years of practice, helps us inquire into our own limiting beliefs to activate our own capacities to work with uncertainty and complexity. Kris Archie, who I have worked with for more then 20 years, is currently the CEO of The Circle, an Indigenous national organization working with settler philanthropic organizations around how they can use their resources well to support Indigenous work. Participatory practices are deeply embedded in her own life and organizational design. We have worked on massive systems change projects together and I live in awe of her commitment to grounding all of this work in Secwepmc culture and worldviews. The same goes for Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, a gifted artist, graphic recorder, host and language learner. She works in her own communities, which are the most challenging places to bring new practice and grounds her work in Nuu-Chah-Nulth principles and knowledge. She is a gifted host who is able to love the people in the rooms she supports no matter the work at hand.
We live those bridges and connections and new welcome all to these spaces of learning and connection as we all deepen our practices, in multiple ways for the benefit of the people wow are invited to support.
Join us at these upcoming workshops to build some new bridges yourself.
One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I’m working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I’ve been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container. It is also becoming a practice of discerning how to modulate my influence in the emergence of a container through working more deliberately and precisely with constraints, in general to see what happens when the emergence of dialogic containers happens largely through the Structure <-> Interaction relationship. What does it look and feel like in real time to withdraw Design (including intention and intervention and my own attention to what is happening) as far as possible into the background.
I’ve been engaging in the project with an LLM (ChatGPT 5.6 sol, currently). I offer this LLM my field notes and I’m able to explore areas where my theory work encounters praxis. The LLM also has access to my blog archive so it has nearly 25 years of field notes about my facilitation practice, and theory at hand. I’m able to track long term threads in my thinking, how things have evolved and generate summary reports that help me see where my practice has been coherent with theory and where it isn’t. It has allowed me to develop new experiments in hosting and group work that are always aimed at helping groups use more of their capability and less of mine, but which are helping me to find a set of practices and heuristics for facilitating, teaching, hosting and coaching.
I call this experiment a Praxis Log. Every mot I have the LLM write a learning report that summarizes my chats and notes. I’ll start publishing blog posts based on these learning reports and Praxis logs at the end of the month. A monthly cadence for this work is about right. I’m appreciating having an LLM to track and engage with the material and help me see things I would otherwise miss. And then as always, blog readers and commenters help tremendously.
In addition to improving my work, I’m appreciating the method of keeping a praxis log and using it to refine both my theory and practice. So stay tuned for the first set of learnings.