I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container.
Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular focus. The Designed container channels intention. The Built container provides retention and the Emergent container arises from, and demands, attention.
In facilitation practice, the language tends towards designed and built containers. We talk about holding space, we talk about the boundaries, the physical space, the beautiful question, the method. The role of the facilitator is often defined as a person that designs and holds containers.
Complexity however bids us to pay attention to what is happening. When humans meet, containers emerge, almost instantly. Our attention is directed and held, not with the help of a facilitator, but because the constraints of the situation shape what happens. Some constraints precede the encounter, like physical space, organizational history, culture, and power relations. Others emerge through interaction itself. Some are brought by the designer into the room. Together they constitute the container.
Every actual container is some combination of design, building and emergence. The space between these points is what matters, Asking where a container sits within the triangle tells us what work is being done by intention, what work has been stabilized in material, legal, or social structures, and what work must remain open to emergence.
Different types of containers need to do different work. A storage locker is a kind of built container whose work is only the retention of a space that can be filled. There is very little intention paid to the design of a storage locker, and once one is built, it doesn’t need to be designed again. Not much emerges within it. That’s a feature.
An emergent container is one that arises, for example, when two friends meet on the street. In the moment of encounter, a boundary begins to form and an attractor holds the attention of the interaction. When two friends are actively engaged in a conversation on the street there is stuff going on that an “outsider” would struggle to understand. What is at the centre of their shared attention might not be shared by others. You can feel how this little social space is carved out of the rest of the environment. A conversation between friends relies on attention to proceed, and both bring attention to the moment. No designer. No robust structure that must be held.
A designed container is something like a meeting method. When I am using Open Space for example, I am bringing a deliberate intention to the group. “We should meet this way. The conversations should flow like this. The outcomes can be harvested here.” This can be both helpful and extremely perilous.
When design makes contact with reality is the critical moment. Design is only the beginning. Once people begin interacting, the container inevitably shifts toward emergence. Good facilitation is less about preserving the design than noticing where the design is making contact with reality. If the design is held too tightly, the designer is privileged in the space and the group loses possibilities for true emergence. If the design proceeds from the use of constraints to shape interactions, that can be extremely helpful. If the work is complex, bringing attention to bear into the work is critical. The facilitator role shifts from being the process host to holding attention to what is emerging. Not to name it, or to synthesize, but to inform the next move of shifting constraints, including by enlisting the group in that work: “Should we take a break? Do we need more time? Is this the right question? What’s happening now?”
Design that contacts reality in a built container is one in which intention informs the retention. This is how architecture works. It’s about the deployment of pattern languages (in the Alexandrian sense) to the built environment. A living built environment begins with intention that translates into retention provided by stable structures in the built environment. It alos provides affordances for the attention of the users of space to learn and shape the space afterwards. Think of a community garden, or over longer scales, the built environments of towns and villages that shift and change over the years. Stuart Brand wrote about this in “How Buildings Learn.”
I’m exploring the idea that dialogic containers are spaces and moments (physical and non-physical) in which humans make meaning. Dialogic containers are not things facilitators create or hold. They are patterns of constraint within which meaning-making becomes possible. Good facilitation lies not in holding the container but in learning when to design with constraints, when to rely on built ones, and when to let emergent constraints lead.
The photo for this post was taken on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton last June when the Edmonton Oilers were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Everything in this photo can be mapped in the triangle above.
Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture.
I think the short answer is, yes…
Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers.
So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that answers are usually less helpful than good questions. The question often then becomes, what makes a question good?
For years in the Art of Hosting I have avoided teaching about good or powerful questions. My reticence to do so was based in the idea that knowing what a good question is is so context dependant that I couldn’t possibly tell you unless we had a context to work with. I think the role of hosts is not arrive bringing the powerful question but to arrive bringing the attention needed to notice the questions that are alive in a field of work.
There are however a few useful pieces of scaffolding that might hep a person get started in thinking about questions. At a recent Art of Hosting, my colleagues taught a short introduction to powerful questions using a kind of hierarchy of questions that is contained in Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.” It looks like this:
from Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.”
This hierarchy started me thinking about this post. In re-reading the Art of Powerful Questions, I could see that there were two distinct practices discussed there. One was the practice of designing questions. The other is the practice of discovering questions. As one source in the publication says:
“Discovering strategic questions is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts. And then you begin a disciplined search for the gold.”
THAT is what interests me.
A question does not have power on its own
Let’s stick with the first practice for a moment: designing questions. Every facilitator at some point has kept a journal of good questions. When you do you start to notice that it is impossible to speak with certainty about what makes a question powerful. What this hierarchy does is to put various English interrogatives into a kind of sequence, not of powerfulness actually, but ostensibly of openness. Yes/no questions are clearly more limiting than Why or What questions. But I don’t know if they are more powerful. One of the most powerful questions I ever asked was “Do you want to get married?” It was by far the most consequential question of my life and it really came down to yes or no. Likewise, one of the most debilitating questions I was ever asked was from a teacher who was frustrated by what I later learned was a classic presentation of ADHD who asked twelve year old me “Why do you disappoint me?” If a yes/no question has two answers, that Why question had zero. And perhaps it was powerful, but it wasn’t generative. It was, unknowingly to the frustrated teacher, cruel.
The other thing to note about how questions are skewed by context is that the questions above were put in a relational context. “What do you think you’re doing?” is not really a question, and it carries the overtones of disapproval from a person in power. Questions like that are carried in a medium of relationship that render the hierarchy of powerfulness almost useless.
There are lots of different kinds of questions. There are closed questions and open questions. There are questions that we have answers to, questions that lead us in a certain direction, and questions that invite us to keep uncertainty and openness and exploration alive. There are questions about the past, the present and the future. Lineal, circular, strategic and reflexive questions. Directed and undirected questions, and so on. I spend a lot of time helping people to NOT ask yes/no questions like “Did you receive good support for this problem? If no, please explain.” It’s better to ask “What kind of support did you receive?” and have people share a story and tell you themselves if it was good service or not. This is the basis of work with Participatory Narrative Inquiry
The Art of Powerful Questions as a document really came out of a conversation between a number of people involved in the World Cafe community as they were thinking about questions, and I recommend it as a good starting point. The World Cafe community continues to explore this question about questions.
After working with questions for many years and especially increasingly working in complex and emergent contexts, I think my practice has led me away from designing good questions to trying to discover them. As a leader in places where I have led sometimes framing the right question is the right thing to do, but it is about adopting the stance of inquiry that is ultimately more important that having a perfect, powerful question.
Questions are proposals embedded in contexts
Questions are embedded in contexts. The combination of the question and the context creates a kind of proposal for action. What has intrinsic power in a complex system is the questioner. As a facilitator, if I ask a question of a group, it collapses the field of possibilities in the room because I have made an implicit proposal about what is important right now. Even if I have spent time to craft that question with a bunch of people from the organization or group I am working with, the act of me asking that question is where the power lies. So, while it is important to pay attention to assumptions embedded in questions, it is also important to be aware of the proposals embedded in questions.
A question like “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is a beautiful question. But if I ask it in a group I am making as assumption that the people I am asking it about have similar thoughts about their lives as Mary Oliver does. I am also making a proposal, as Mary Oliver does, that I’m possibly not doing enough in my life to bring more attention or purpose or meaning. Or I may be assuming that folks, as she says
know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Not everybody has that kind of idleness at hand to be able to reflect on whether contemplating a grasshopper was a good use of time. Asking folks that question devoid of the context of their lives, the urgency of a situation, or the consent to be in that conversation is a hell of a proposal. Imagine asking a seasonal farm worker that question. Or the Dalai Lama.
Beautiful questions are not necessarily inviting questions
Mary Oliver’s question is beautiful. It stands on its own because it is a poetic statement. I’m not sure it actually wants an answer. It seems to invite a turning, a metanoia, a repentance. If it were offered in a therapeutic context, it might directly imply that I’m not doing the RIGHT thing with my one will and precious life. The question therefore intimidates me and subjugates me to the author’s intention. When that intention is hidden, I feel manipulated.
I do see this often in questions that come my way like “What would be possible if we trusted each other more?” That is a question that immediately drives me to thinking about its opposite. In my world, even as a person who tends to trust more than I should, there are definitely people I should be trusting less. The idea that MORE trust leads to more possibility contains an embedded assumption, an implicit proposal and a predetermined pathway of inquiry. It avoids the first principle of good complexity work and lets the framework determine the data and not the other way around. There is no new meaning to be made from a question like that, really. The conversation is likely to be abstract and opinionated at best. And might be a naive casting about in an unknown future at worst.
That’s not to say that we can’t learn from questions like that.
If we really wanted to examine trust I might start with having people tell stories about trust to each other. How trust operates in different contexts matters, and so if the exploration is not be useful, the stories have to be relevant to the context either because they are directly related to the context or they become connected to the context through reflection and collective sense-making. Nevertheless, it’s no good that assuming that MORE trust leads to MORE possibility if there is a chance that trusting some people less in order to opens up the possibilities for a field.
Good questions can be answered by everyone, and get the facilitator out of the centre.
Not all conversations are the same, but a lot of my work deals with looking at what’s happening and exploring change. This implies a trajectory to the questions, from the present state towards a direction of travel that we might discover together. My favourite questions for this, and still the ones I use as a basic template for work are Terry Borton’s reflective questions: “What? So what? Now what?” These are so simple, and yet they hold us, as facilitators, at a distance from the group’s work, which is a good thing. They ask of us to become hosts that works with the constraints of the system that shape actions, rather than the attractors that collapse what’s possible into a single, deep, valley of channeled conversation.
As basic source code these questions are helpful. Almost every change or planning process I work with starts with “What?” There is nothing better at getting directly to the urgency of a situation than by asking what the hell is going on and then shaping the constraints of the situation such that everyone can contribute to that conversation. There is not one answer. There is a survey of the field and the perspectives in the room that gives us enough information with which to act, because in complex situations that is what we need.
The “So What?” question invites the group to look at what they have said is the “What” and make sense of it. What does this mean for us? This is the area of exploration, negotiation, discussion, perspective sharing, learning. From this sense-making comes the turn to trying things out. “Now What?” is about the actions we might to take to address a problem, explore and option or move this into a new cycle of inquiry, Glenda Eoyang calls her version of this loop “Adaptive Action.”
There is a similar construction in the Technology of Participation body of work known as ORID, which helps people in inquiry look at Objective questions, Reflective questions, Interpretive questions and Decisional questions.
Again, these methods imply a directionality to an intervention, but as long as that intention is clear and transparent and lands a proposal for action, I think the direction is ethical. If the group refuses the proposal, then the question becomes “What do we do now?” I’ve had a few cases of these in my life and they are good lessons in humility and excellent examples of watching a group activate its collective capability to frame its own questions and inquiries.
The most consequential questions are often the ones the group recognize as their own
So this brings me around to the point. A question shapes the field of attention. In complexity terms it becomes a constraint and makes some things easier to notice and others easier to ignore. It channels attention and participation. If it is understood as a probe to that system, to see what else might emerge, it can be useful. If it is held tightly as The Thing We Are Here To Talk About then it becomes non-consensual and it suppresses the emergence that is needed for a group to discover and rely on its own capability and distributed knowledge. For complex and uncertain work, including planning, change, and culture, the questions are already in the field. They are the ones that everyone is asking in their minds. Not “What would be possible in five years if we became a more welcoming community?” but rather “What are we going to do about these damn tourists?” (That might be from a real situation. 😉 )
But what about my one wild and precious question?
So the most powerful question is not the one that the facilitator brings. In fact my advice would almost always be to start with “What’s happening?” and go from there. Bring attention, not intention. When a group develops enough shared attention sometimes the powerful question emerges there and it seems obvious. We need to not go looking for beautiful constructions, poetic and inspiring language, or even hierarchies of importance. We need to pay attention to the conversations that are already happening, the questions that people are asking themselves, the relational fields in which those questions are being asked and the larger context of need and purpose that forms the proposal for the intervention.
Practitioners intervene. That’s what we do. Letting go of the need to bring the powerful question helps us to do it better because it turns a predetermined intervention into a collectively help proposal for action, one that can be explored, contested, rejected, accepted, or changed. Start simple and be transparent. Start with a question that everyone can answer, one like “Can you share an experience of… What happened?” Take the answers to those questions and give them to people and ask them what they make of them. Then let the next question emerge from what the group has made visible together.
The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong currents coming in many directions. It produces some of the biggest waves in the world. Not easy to surf.
It’s not my title. It’s the title of a book/treatise by Mark Downham, who publishes very long treatises on issues of philosophy, organization, and complexity. This one looks at hosting containers as seen against ideas embedded in Classical Chinese philosophy and it’s going to occupy a big piece of my attention over the next little while.
This has been a spring of considering some of the deeper philosophical issues that meet in the intersection of complexity, hosting, and leadership. I’ve been beavering away a digesting a number of very, very long posts principally by Downham and Snowden in order to clarify my own thinking and practice as a process host, and a teacher of participatory process. It has been a case of getting very clear about the why and where the practice of hosting and holding containers in complexity lies, what is implied by those words and concepts, and why the deep inquiry into the theory brought by these thinkers this spring helps to challenge and sharpen my practice, and help us grow as a field.
It’s not easy. The texts I’ve been reading and engaging with have my mind spinning in several ways and I have been writing bits and pieces here and there to think out loud about them. For me a big benefit of this period of reflection has been to continue to refine the material we are teaching in Complexity Inside and Out, which is a body of work that represents Caitlin’s and my developing practice on working with complexity as and where we find it in our work and lives. That work has been an extension of the work we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops we run. It goes much deeper into practices of working with complexity and introduces people to the work of Snowden, Kurtz, and Eoyang as well as our own work. It is intended to introduce practitioners to complexity tools for working with change in the contexts in which they find themselves, including how to support a personal capacity to host and lead well in complex situations. It grew out of work that we did ten years ago and more when we offered Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics with Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera, in which each of us extended our own inquiries that started in the Art of Hosting community and took us out to other bodies of work and practice to look at change, complexity, power and personal practice.
So my restless mind and spirit of curiosity has been aroused and shaken and challenged by this rather mammoth collection of works that has appeared this spring. For background I’m going to gather the texts here.
First Downham. These are dense, unexpected texts that draw together strands from fields that are familiar to me and those that are completely outside of my experience. I told Mark he would be a great player of the Glass Bead Game:
- The Architecture of Held Space: The mountain that holds — and the host who learns to hold like one. Here Downham uses many of my writings on the Art of Hosting to discuss the idea of container, so it is getting most of my attention at the moment.
- The Geometry of the Vanishing Container: Breath and Form, Faerie and Field: Pneumatology, Gestalt, and the Liminal Topology of Emergence in the Work of Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw. which looks at issues of hosting and container work and is one of the few pieces I’ve ever read that sees Harrison Owen’s deep commitment to liturgy in its many forms and guises.
- Cynefin Dynamics and the Choreography of Organizational Change. A commentary on my favourite paper on Cynefin written by Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden in the early days
Snowden’s posts:
- Stacy Unresolved
- Leadership in the Estuary
- The whole series on estuarine thinking, beginning with part one
- Trialectics, or thinking in threes. Alos the start of a series which is inspiring me to think through some ways of talking about containers and de-binarizing some of the dualities we talk about in the art of hosting.
- Foreclosing the territory. A three part series on theories of change that is deeply important in describing the implications of anthro-complexity in change work
None of this is easy reading and these texts have been consuming my thinking over the past few months. I think they are important to my practice, and to the practice of the Art of Hosting community for these reasons, amongst others:
- They offer important claims about epistemic justice, power and subsequent practices of sense-making that help me thinking about positionally of the host, what is visible and what is invisible.
- They offer important reflections on what it means to “design” processes and what it means to host them.
- The offer oblique insights on the notion of theory and practice of working with dialogic containers, especially in complex spaces.
- They challenge the universality of methods, approaches, and tools and invite a more rigorous and context-focused consideration of what to do and how one might do it.
- They surprise me constantly and have offered illumination to some blind spots in my own understanding, generated some aha’s in my own practice, inspired some sharpness in my own thinking, and placed me in a position where I can say more clearly what it is that I do and why that matters.
- They invite us to a reflection on what has built up over time as “ways of doing things” that we take for granted, and invite us back to a renewed view of our works, its sources and the places that it might grow and evolve.
My blog is, as Mark Downham named it, is a field book of notes on practice and theory that I have assembled over the past 20 years. Taken in its totality it represents a journey of a practitioner formed in and adjacent to meaningful communities of practice, bodies of work, teachers and teachings. It is and always will be a place of half-formed thoughts and questions, offered to others as a way to connect and grow a field of practice that honours voice, agency, and community in the pursuit of a better world. It is, as Mark Woods named his blog back in the 1990s using a quote from Stendahl, “the fitful tracing of a portal.” And so I will continue musing out loud here and hope others will join the inquiry.
This inquiry is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is a theory-heavy string, and that theory is positioned in a narrow field of inquiry. It challenges and at times does not pull punches. These blog posts that Downham and Snowden have produced this spring are the deepest and most sophisticated responses to the Art of Hosting body of work I have ever seen in the 20+ plus years I have been around the community. They deserve a serious response, which I have promised to both people. This response though will come in a messy way, informed by practice, thinking, new ideas and conversation. I welcome partners in this. It’s a lot of work but I think this is a serious and important inquiry for those of us who identify, and are identified, as stewards of this work and who are willing to jump in. Just getting the questions right is going to be the first step!
I don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.
If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.
One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?
Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.
We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.
Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.
We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.
This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.
It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.
Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.