Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.
This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.
Dear mates:
For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.
As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.
These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”
The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system
Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”
For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.
A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:
- People from a system are not THE system.
- Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
- Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
- Changed relationships are not changed structures.
- Powerful experiences are not system change.
This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.
My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.
Reconsidering the container
I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.
This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.
It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.
For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.
But what is the cost of that?
Hosting is an exercise of power
One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.
However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.
Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.
Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.
If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.
The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.
Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power
If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.
Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:
Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.
Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.
Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.
Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.
In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.
Contact with context
The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.
But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.
But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.
What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.
When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.
When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.
My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.
The invitation
So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.
Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.
Questions like:
- What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
- What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
- What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
- What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
- What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?
This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.
You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one can play.
I’ll introduce this in stages, and use language that speaks to facilitators, hosts, participatory leaders. Folks who read this blog, who practice the Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures or other forms facilitation that treats groups as complex. I want this framework to help us inquire into some of things we take for granted such as the role of the host, the helpfulness of methods. the belief in the collective capacity of the group, and in the notion and idea of what a container is and how to work with it.
The title of this post is a nod to Mark Downham’s long treatise The Architecture of Held Space, which is a very generous discussion of these questions too and which deserves a full response on it’s own. But his work and Snowden’s work previously pointed at in this series ask the questions that I am trying to answer here. Here’s a post that links to those writings.
Starting with basics.
Let’s start here. Groups of people are constantly meeting, working, talking and living their lives without the role of a facilitator. Most of human history, historically and in the present day has unfolded without facilitators and consultant working with groups of people to optimize processes, introduce new ways of working together or saving people from the everyday chaos of their lives. I say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s a serious observation. We – the consulting industry, the hosting world, the facilitation community – are a lot less necessary than we believe.
So we start with the above polarity. There are interactions and there is structure. Pause for a moment and think about where you live. It could be a village, and island, a neighbourhood, a building or a city. Think of ways that people have problems solved together, introduced new ideas, created new things. How neighbours are helped when a new child is born. Or how conflicts arise in the public conversation and how they are resolved or how they cage over time. Novelty in societies and groups springs from interactions between people. They come out of who knows whom, who is connected or not, what gets talked about. Communities and groups are bubbling cauldrons of connections and exchanges. You can never fully understand them, you can never fully see what they are capable of. But beautiful things emerge.
Interactions between people do not happen randomly however. Thing of the place you live and think of the built environment. Think of how folks get around, where they meet and where they don’t meet. Think about the “way we always do things” the traditions, languages, and implicit ways of being that are unique to each place. Think of what it feels like to visit a new place and know that you don’t completely belong there. There are structural elements that shape humans experiences. These structures are physical, psychological, social, and cultural. They are patterns that persist over time that makes some things more likely to happen than other things. These structures can change, but the do so slowly.
The structures and the interactions are continually in relationship. The structure influences what’s easy for people to do wan what is hard for them to do. In complexity, we call these affordances. People who are skilled at working within their own environments often have a good understanding of some of these structures and affordances are are able to work with them in a way that makes things happen. Others might have great ideas, but they always seem to get nowhere. Structures can provide resistance – “that’s not how we do things around here” – or they can provide hard boundaries – “you can’t walk from Bowen Island to the mainland, no matter how much you want to.”
SO the question to ask when learning about a group of people, or when a group of people is learning about themselves is “How do enduring structures shape interactions and how to repeated interactions become structural?”
If you are coming into a community or organization to do work and you don’t start here you are treating each group as a blank canvas upon which your influence can be exerted. This applies especially to consultants but it alos applies to leaders who “drop in” to their teams or departments without any understanding of what is really happening. The field of pre-existing interactions, the ways that people respond to change or generate it, and the pre-existing structures – physical and cultural, immutable and changeable – provide the landscape inside of which any intervention takes place.
Take a breath while I tell you why three is better than two.
Pause here. I’m going to tell you why I’m going to make the next move.
A favoured tool of many consultants is working with polarities. I use them all the time to look at things. Structure and Interaction is a classic polarity. Both exist at the same time, both are helpful, positive states. In the Art of Hosting work we use Chaos and Order. I’ve also used others like Individual and Team, and Organization and Stakeholders. Often conflicts in organizations are about contested ends of a polarity. That’s helpful to see.
But the problem with polarities is that it places a situation on a scale and asks us to maybe balance the upsides of both or do things that will slide the problem more towards on end or the other.
The bigger PROBLEM with pairs like this is that it tends to introduce either/or thinking. Even if we are using a tool like polarity management (which promotes Both/And thinking) we are still highly entrained to see the ends as more important than the middle. That can have the effect of embedding the conflict even deeper and make it feel like maximizing the upsides of one is a compromise or a value tradeoff for people that prefer the other.
And so, what about three?
Snowden has written recently on this, but for decades he has used triads in sense-making in a way that helps us see that a complex situation exists in a space that is influenced by multiple sources of constraints that make some things more possible than others. Triads are a feature of his software, SenseMaker and although they are sometimes hard to understand, I find them helpful for getting beyond simple dichotomies.
And so the next section of this essay will be about the third part of this system, the one that turns a group of people into a facilitated group, a led group, a team, an organization. It is the acknowledgement of an intention, backed with privileged power, that provides an important source of constraints.
The designer
In a recent LinkedIn post responding to an earlier blog post in this series, Natalia Treninya offers a gentle disagreement with my offering of this third source of constraints. She writes: “I find it hard to accept that the design of a dialogue, or of any other creative process, stands as an equal third vertex of the trialectic. Stability and emergence describe the state of the field, whereas design acts upon the field, so to me it belongs to a different level.” (translation from Ukrainian provided by LinkedIn).
I get that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of introducing this third corner is to be honest about the work that intention does when it is coupled with a position of privileged power in a pre-existing field of interactions and structure. Snowden’s constant challenge to the Art of Hosting community, let alone the broader facilitation community as a whole, is to get the facilitator out of the centre of the work. But the facilitator is never removed from the work. That is exactly another problem: cloaking the role of power in good intentions, or a wonderful design, or a set of brilliant exercises.
Even in “complex facilitation“, which is the approach to methods used by the Cynefin community, the role of the facilitator has to be accounted for. Methods are used, each with an intention. Interactions are shaped. Strutures and patterns appear and the facilitator manages the process.
But how and why is the facilitator able to “manage the process?” Because the position comes with the power to do so. That power is accorded by the consent of the group (or not, in which case something else takes over). “Yes, we will do the Future Backwards exercise or the Word Cafe or the Circle or the Paired Walk or the 1-2-4-All” is what the group says to the facilitator, but never completely.. There is always someone in the room who thinks this is bullshit, or who has to suspend their scepticism to go along with the group. We all carry memories of being told what to do that elicit responses ranging from compliance and approval seeking to outright rebellion.
So the unique position of the facilitator influences both the structure of the moment and the interactions. In complex facilitation approaches, the facilitator/host does not get involved in the content of the work, but only manages the interactions between people in the space. That is an important and influential role and so it has to be accounted for.
Time for a break
Let’s watch a video together. Let’s see what happens when the person with the power to shape the process comes into a room ignoring the structures and interactions that are already present in the group and imposes a his own ideas about what should happen. This is a scene from West Side Story where Glad Hand, the community social worker, embodies the bumbling leadership role we have probably all occupied at one time or another. You can read my commentary on this scene here.
Poor Glad Hand. He was convicted that this new method of his would break the group up, introduce new relationships and solve the gang problem. My favourite part of the scene happens after the group rebels and becomes even more entrenched. The police officer makes a bee line for Glad Hand and desperately points out to him how bad he has just made the situation.
Answering the challenge
There are groups interacting in the present moment. There are pre-existing structures that embed and embody the residue and habits of historical practice. And there is the p[ractitioner, the consultant, the teacher, the facilitator, the leader. The one who holds the design that is accompanied by an intention that speaks to a preferred future.
So let’s explore this third point in the triangle in relation to the other two.
Now we are looking at a dynamic space bounded by three sides inside of which dialogic containers exist and move. The Design point can be occupied by a facilitator who brings a method, or a leader, or an authority, or anyone else who has the power and ability to enter the space with intention that can shape the space. The introduction of this third point introduces two new tensions and space in which we can map what emerges from these three tensions.
From a facilitation perspective, the left hand side asks the question of how the method or intention being brought relates to the existing patterns at play. Anyone who has set the chairs up in a circle, while working with an organization used to sitting around a table, will be familiar with this questions. There are ways of doing things. If you are going to be introducing a new intention that results in a new structure, something interesting will happen in contact with the pre-existing structures.
On the other side, the tension is between the intention of the facilitator and what the group is attending to. The group holds the capability for designing and choosing change and a design and intention introduced on top of them runs the risk of being patronizing, disempowering or colonizing in its effect. In complexity, It is not methods or good facilitation or leadership that creates novelty or good responses to the problem at hand but rather the distributed knowledge, capability and capacity of the group itself to address its conditions. This has important implications for what we choose to do. As a facilitator when I am too in love with my method, I impose it in a way that disables the group’s capacity, even while I speak praises to the group’s collective intelligence and capacity.
The space
So this diagram is finally a space represented by three distinct source of constraint that affect and influence the dialogic container. The facilitator’s role then is to constantly attend to the work of the container within this space. In an expert driven process, where for example an engineer is directing a team to install a building system, the interactions of the team members are highly controlled. The engineer might need a detail or two from the front line, but in general, the design and implementation of a knowable system will proceed very close to the left hand edge of the triangle.
On the other hand, a group that is trying to design a new organizational structure for itself might not need any facilitation or design at all beyond an agreement to meet in a pub and kick around answers to the question “how should we make decisions together?” It doesn’t need facilitation, and the intention and design can be entirely co-owned by the group itself. The pub provides a structure, especially if said pub is a part of the ritual space in which the group often decamps to consider the bigger questions in life.
On yet another hand, a consulting intervention for a strategic plan might start with an intention from the Board and quickly move to a narrative capture of the staff, clients and partners of the organization, followed by collective sense-making. This immediately works with the capability of the group to sense opportunities, to name the structural affordances and blockages for development of change and to change the interactions from “working together” to “planning together” which wakes up the latent capacity to a group to make collective decisions and choose pathways forward into the unknown. The consultant becomes responsible for hosting the methods to do that, paying attention all the time to the preferred direction of travel introduced and held by the Board as an intention (“we need a plan to help us move into the future and we need everyone to be involved”). The consultant’s role is to constantly work to attend to and shape the interactions, with consent, with transparency and with accountability.
Dialogic containers arise all the time. As each of the points in the triangle take on great or lesser effect on that container, the container’s life can be mapped in this space. The lifecycle of a container is not linear, it’s not universal and it is context free. Each one appears from the interactions of these constraints and is shifted and influenced over time until it dissolves again. While it exists, the facilitator continually attends to the changing relationship between Design, Structure and Interactions. When the work is done, to put it in Taoist terms, the facilitator disappears along with the container and the people see that they did it themselves.
So play with this a little. Tell me what it evokes in you. I am especially interested in how this challenges your practice, rather than how it validates it? What question for yourself does this open up?
The Var River below the high village of Touët in France.
This is going to continue the series of posts that began with The Inundated Delta, which was a response to Dave Snowden’s thoughtful position of the Art of Hosting in the context of anthro-complexity.
I want to name the four most influential streams that have shaped my professional life. This is important because it names my intellectual and practitioner lineage so people understand where I am coming from and what questions have formed my practice. This post focusses especially on how I arrived at anthro-complexity as a theory-informed dialogue practitioner and it connects it to the longest standing curiosity I have had which is essentially “What are you going to do about it?” That question has driven every inquiry in my life. It is important to talk about where one is coming from.
The first: my work with Friendship Centres and other Indigenous organizations through the 1990s gave me a practical experience of applying what I learned during the five years I spent at Trent University in what was then called Native Studies, with an emphasis on community and organizational culture. That already shaped much of the way I approached working with people. My practice was further formed by the organizers, facilitators and leaders in the Friendship Centre movement who had built an influential national grassroots movement in Canada.
The second: I’ve talked before about how Open Space completely changed my approach to group facilitation by introducing my to a mode of working with groups that was rooted in the people, their own intelligence and knowledge and not the performative or interventionist nature of the facilitator. Learning about Open Space fundamentally changed the way I looked at organizations, governance and facilitation, and it led me into an inquiry with a wider group of people who were asking questions about what self-organization, complexity and participation meant for these milleaux.
The third: In 2003, at a gathering called by Harrison Owen and others we spent five days in Open Space and I came into the Art of Hosting community through an explicit invitation from Toke Møller who was one of a small number of people forming a community of of practice around the idea of the Four Fold Practice. This appealed to me because I recognized right away that the communities of practice associated with process methodologies were too limiting in terms of trying to understand what happens in a groups space that is truly complex. I was looking for what I later called “communities of praxis” where theory and practice were meeting.
The Art of Hosting itself – the four fold practice – provided a useful heuristic for facilitating practice (and design of participatory facilitation work) and was disruptive enough to the understood norms of facilitation that it was named “hosting.” This naming pointed at the idea that it wasn’t the people or the process that was being actively facilitated by the host. Rather it was the conditions of interaction that were being shaped by the host. The work of the dialogic container was done by the people themselves. The work was not just tools, but rather developing principles of practice.
Several threads from different large group method practice found their way into this nascent understanding of what hosting seeks to generate. It is about highly participatory work, rooted in dialogue and shared meaning-making. From the World Cafe, it was about the “magic in the middle: as Finn Voldtofte named it: the emergent possibilities of what happens in truly participatory spaces. From The Circle Way practice of Baldwin and Linnea, it was “leadership in every seat.” From Harrison Owen and Open Space it was about self-organization and “trust the people, not the process.” All of these point to something that didn’t yet have a mainstream frame of reference, but we understood them to be rooted in complexity.
At that time complexity in humans systems was tied more to the chaos science world, and my own understanding had been informed by the sources the Open Space practitioner community pointed to: Capra, Gleick, Kauffmann, Isaacs, and Bohm. I was less enamoured with Senge et. all’s systems thinking stuff with its causal loops and leverages and flows. In the Art of Hosting world, Tøke and Monica had spent some time with Dee Hock in a Kaos Pilot cohort in San Francisco in the late 1990s and his idea of the dynamic relationship between chaos and order (producing chaordic space) helped us to understand that hosting was a process that helped address the volatile and unknowable nature of true complexity. Hock formulated that thinking in the 1960s when he was trying to create a currency – the VISA cared – and he struggled to find organizational structures that could provide some stability while allowing for self organization. Hock’s work, formed in the 1960s, was more in line with the living systems/chaos theory approach to complexity rather than the more mechanistic systems thinking stuff that Senge and Meadows and others were producing.
Still my curiosity about how complexity happened in groups and organizations and what implications it had for facilitation practice and leadership – and what I was going to do about it – continue to seek deeper understanding And that’s where the fourth big pivotal shift in my practice happened.
Sometime in 2008 I became aware of Dave Snowden’s work and the Cynefin framework entered my awareness. I had been searching for a framework that helped me to understand all the different ways humans systems work and in particular the need to be context specific when doing all of this. My degree in Native Studies had taught me that; context is so much bigger and more important that anything that might happen within it. Maps were central to this understanding.
During my years at Trent, the medicine wheel was perhaps the first framework that was introduced to me to help me understand how context operates. We talked about holistic ways of seeing and working, and be aware of the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of all that we do. Medicine wheels were extremely powerful frameworks used in the cultural revitalization movements of the 1970s and 1980s when I was studying this work. They represented a way of seeing that recovered Indigenous perspectives on conditions and situations and demanded a deeper accountability to the interconnectedness of living and non-living things in order to create healthy lives. HOW they were used was important though.
I actually wrote my honours these on this, looking two Indigenous organizations and how they were expressing Indigenous culture in the their work. One used the medicine wheel in an almost fundamentalist way, structuring everything according to directions. So it assigned roles to people who lived in the north, east, south and west not according to ability but according to where they lived. Action, healing, vision and strategy had nothing to do with competencies or need, and everything to do with the structure. This was an abject failure and created confusion, conflict and despair in the organization. It was led by two Anishinaabe Elders and cultural practitioners and it was a blanket application of an Anishinaabe values onto a national organization made up of people from many different cultures, spiritual traditions and ways of working.
By contrast, the other organization – the National Association of Friendship Centres, for whom I later worked – organized itself along traditional non-profit ways of doing things. It had a representative board, a standard staffing model, with an Executive Director and a small staff and a pretty clear mandate. The form was light, the staff was small, and it allowed for the organization to be agile and flexible in pursuing funding and program opportunities with the federal government. The work was deeply cultural as well, and the organization had many different cultural practitioners, spiritual leaders and Elders within its ranks and every meeting was supported by this role. We had Elders like Bruce Elijah who attended to our national board meetings and our AGMs were full of ceremony, appropriate to the territory in which we were meeting or supported by people who stepped up to take responsibility for caring for the spiritual and cultural life of the organization. The light, grassroots, member driven structure gave rise to a rich organizational cultural life that was able to handle depression conflicts, emergencies and crises, but also to create a movement in which people were cared for and chose to spend their careers.
The conclusions that stayed with me from the year long piece of research were essentially that culture does not live in imposed frameworks, no matter how sacred or rigidly applied they are, but rather lives in the ways in which people can bring their skills, themselves, and their experiences to bear on the situation at hand. There were many medicine wheels used at the NAFC, but they were used to orient us and make sense of what was happening and to ask questions about what we might do, not to prescribe action or, horror, demand outcome accountability.
This is the backdrop to how I saw and used maps. (I even mashed them all together at one point in what is clearly a whimsical folly.)
Of all the maps I saw, Cynefin said this most explicitly: “horses for courses.” And also, one of Dave’s important principles “data precedes the framework.” Do the appropriate thing given the context you are working with. Don’t impose anything on people that forces them to make meaning according to your frame. And beyond that, Snowden’s work on complexity was exactly what I was looking for to explain how to work with human systems. Hock’s chaord and the way we talked about it in the Art of Hosting mapped well enough onto what Snowden called “linear Cynefin.” I still use this framing to lightly introduce people to complexity, becasue the idea that we default to control when confusing things get unpredictable rather than leaning into a “shallow dive into chaos” is still – and maybe increasingly – radical to most people. The Chaord and Cynenfin are NOT the same thing at all though, and this point will be explored in a subsequent post.
After many years of reading, teaching, and trying stuff out, I took my first Cynefin course in London in 2014. I was especially interested in how complexity would change my approach to harvesting and evaluation, but it did so much more than that. What became “anthro-complexity” offered a significant redirection to my own hosting practice and changed (and continues to inform) my practice of the Art of Hosting. This redirection was strong enough that it knocked me outside of the mainstream practice of the Art of Hosting community of practice. This included the way methods are used (and the primacy of methods), the way training happens, and the way we use this approach for making change. The lessons of that course still resonate with me to this day and have shaped my Art of Hosting practice.
I find myself now in a world that straddles both approaches to this work and I believe that there is a very fruitful area of overlap and generative engagement to be had, the inquiry of which is the basis of our Complexity Inside and Out program.
I also recognize that I am very nearly alone in this inquiry. Many folks in the Art of Hosting community disagree or just don’t understand some of what is core to my practice, and Snowden has made it clear where he understands the limits of the Art of Hosting to be, as he understands them. The confluence of anthro-complexity and the Art of Hosting has distorted my own practice in a way that I feel honours the depth of what both bodies of work are getting at, but it hasn’t left me too many close colleagues. I am still and active member and global steward of the Art of Hosting community of practice, but my stewardship focuses on the Four Fold Practice. I believe that, with use and experience, that framework is incredible helpful for facilitators and leaders to expand their practices deeply into complexity. It helps us to convene better participatory meetings and it helps leaders to lead more engaged teams and organizations, all of which is much desired. Learning to convene well, to host dialogue and to lead in an inclusive way is worthy work.
This commitment to the Four Fold Practice is shaped by what I have learned from anthro-complexity over the years. My next post will dive into some of the specific ways that principles and practices of Snowden’s (and Cynthia Kurtz’s) work have influenced mine, and why I feel like these are important lesson for Art of Hosting practitioners to take on board, especially those of us working explicitly with complexity and change. And following that, I’ll write more on what I think are valuable and important contributions that the Art of Hosting makes on it’s own with respect to convening and learning.
So this post is one of a series that is seeking to describe some of this development in a little more detail. It is also intended to invite Art of Hosting practitioners to further develop our practice especially as we use it within organizations and communities to support change and strategy work. More to come.
In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.
Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.
Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.
Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.
This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.
Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.
Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.
On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.
In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.
Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.
Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.
At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.
But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.
In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.
So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.
While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.
Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.
For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.
I had a lovely call with my old friend Johnnie Moore the other day. We catch up a couple of times a year and our mutual friendship with Rob Paterson, caused us to connect up on Zoom and raise a virtual glass to Rob’s life and in particular the ways we knew each other, through work, ideas and good friendship. Johnnie’s got a great post up on his blog today about “Facilitation Antlers” in which, as usual, he manages to speak the thing that occupies my mind too: the pitfall of facilitators feeling the need to explain what they are doing, instead of just getting on with it. It’s one we all have to dance around. Johnnie is offering a facilitation training in November in Cambridge, UK. I highly recommend you sign up for it. I would if I was there.
Another friend, Sally Swarthout Wolf, is also birthing an offering into the world. I’ve just had a chance to review and provide a blurb for her new book “Restorative Justice Up Close” which is a broad collection of stories of restorative justice practice, primarily from across the USA. These are the kinds of stories that experienced practitioners crave, becasue it helps to inspire us in our own work. It’s not a how-to manual, but a how-did-I collection. Even if you are aren’t a facilitator of restorative justice, if you work with people in groups, there is a lot in this book to learn from, especially when conflict is afoot. I worked closely with Sally over a number of years when we were running Art of Hosting trainings in Illinois in part with the Illinois Balanced and Restorative Justice Project. I adore her and her colleagues. The book is available for pre-order now.
And while I’m at it, here is a list of the facilitation training offerings I’m involved in the fall. We have spots for both of our Art of Hosting trainings in Vancouver and in Elgin, Ontario, and you can still register for the Stories and System Change workshop I’m doing alongside Donna Brown and my SFU one-day course in the new year.