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Why it’s hard to talk about dialogic containers in English

March 14, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Organization, Poetry 9 Comments

On the Art of Hosting list today there has been a very interesting conversation about some of the Japanese words that are used to describe space and container. As I will be working this spring in Japan with these very concepts, I thought it would be interesting to hear from my colleagues Yurie Makihara and Kazuhiko Nakamura about these ideas of “wa,” “ma,” “ba,” and “tokoro.” Yurie shared her thoughts, on some of these words, including noting that the word “ba” is often cited by foreigners as an example of a word describing the quality of dialogic container that exists …

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“But what about naysayers?”

February 22, 2019 By Complexity, Facilitation, Featured, Organization 3 Comments

Perhaps I need to curate a series of posts called “The Whatabout Chronicles.” When I’m teaching participatory leadership or sharing complexity tools, folks who are wedded to traditional linear mind and tool sets often raise objections. “Complexity would be nice, but we haven’t got the time. We have to get this problem solved now, and we need a plan to do it.” It’s a hard one because often it’s obvious that the problem is complex and the desire for a linear solution, while urgent-feeling, is just not possible. But if you can’t see it that way, objections get raised. In …

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“But what if our people dominate?”

February 20, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, Power, World Cafe 7 Comments

Over the years I’ve noticed a trend in consultative facilitations that goes something like this: a client calls wanting to consult with the community about something. Sometimes this takes the form of a leader wanting to engage employees. The request is usually to design an event where we can hear from people without them being dominated by more powerful voices. At some point the client says something like “we’d like to have our people there as observers or table hosts or mixed in as silent listeners.” Often this looks like elected officials not wanting to dominate citizen meetings, government or …

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Differences are real; divisiveness is a choice

February 6, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Complexity, Culture, Facilitation, Featured, Power

I’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences. In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in …

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Planning in pure dialogue

January 26, 2019 By Art of Harvesting, Chaordic design, Conversation, Design, Emergence, Featured, Flow, Practice

I’m just coming home from a couple of days in Victoria where Caitlin and I were with colleagues Rebecca Ataya, Annemarie Travers, and Kelly Poirier. We spent two days working on what I can only call “polishing the core” of the Leadership 2020 program that we offer on behalf of the Federation of Community Social Service of BC. We have run this leadership program for 8 years now, putting around 400 people through a nine month intensive program of residential and applied learning. The program has built collaboration, trust, and connection between the Ministry of Children and Family Development, indigenous …

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