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Listening is love

May 11, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Featured, Practice

Representatives from business associations around western Canada in deep listening to one another.

Erich Fromm studied love and connection as his life’s work.  Along the way he was able to study and learn about the art of some of the core capacities of loving. From a blog post today on Fromm’s work, comes this simple set of principles for deepening the art of listening (in his own words): The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to …

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The pithiest description of strategy in complexity you’ll ever need

May 1, 2018 By Uncategorized

Mark O Sullivan is a soccer coach in Sweden who does remarkable work using complexity theory, learning theory and cognitive science to develop youth footballers at AIK. Yesterday he shared a tweet that simply and directly captures everything you need to internalize and learn about working in complexity. Complicated machine-like systems follow 1 path to achieve a specific end are predictable and vulnerable. Complex systems achieve objectives through aprocess of exploratio, on-going adaptation, solving problems through trial- and-error, and flexibly adapting to changing circumstances.

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A journey towards mastery

April 30, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Being, Facilitation, Featured, Learning, Practice 2 Comments

Joe Martin, a master canoe carver, who knows a thing or two about using tools.

Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to develop artistic mastery in facilitation/hosting practice. It’s an important topic to me because I teach this work, and it’s not always easy to design deep learning when people are expecting to become instantly good at facilitation after a single workshop. The Art of Hosting is a practice founded on tools, rooted in theory. It takes time to understand and integrate this practice and become masterful at it. I often draw parallels between learning the practice and development of mastery in the arts. Today I …

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How complexity principles can inform participatory process design

March 28, 2018 By Cynefin, Emergence, Facilitation, Featured 7 Comments

Ice floes in Prince William Sound. Complexity in action.

Sonja Blignault has been blogging some terrific stuff on Paul Cilliers’ work on complexity.  Specifically she has been riffing on Cilliers’ seven characteristics of complex systems and the implications of complexity for organizations. Yesterday I was teaching an Art of Hosting here in Calgary, where we were looking at Cynefin and then followed with a discussion about how the nature of complex systems compels us to make important design choices when we are facilitating participatory processes to do work in organizations. This is a cursory list, but I thought it would be helpful to share here. Cilliers’ text is bold. …

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Safe enough in Open Space

March 19, 2018 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Featured, Open Space, Uncategorized One Comment

I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety.  What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double …

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