
Yesterday I came across a paper that was published in a well-respected journal discussing how a group of computer scientists had discovered that participatory methods are much better way of organizing a conference that traditional methods of presentations, panels, and concurrent sessions (which are often just smaller presentations). They took the time to document their work and share it with their community of scientists, which is excellent. The conference itself seems to have included a great deal of dialogue and conversation around topics that were chose in advance by the participants and scheduled by the organizers. But, I won’t share the paper because it has significant issues with the name it uses for the method involved.
The paper refers to “World Cafe” and then proceeds to describe a process where over the course of the conference, two 45 minute sessions were held during which participants talked about topics that had been submitted weeks in advance and selected by organizers who then also appointed people to lead these discussions There were also panel discussions and social events.
On its own this is a fine conference design. Not especially ground breaking in the world of conferences, but novel to the organizers, and the feedback was positive from the participants which is what really matters. The issue I have is what appears to be the misattribution of the term “World Cafe” to the dialogue method that the organizers used. In defining the term, the paper references a website (now a dead link, but archived here) which does indeed provide a reference to the World Cafe method, but I don’t think they used the method per se in the conference itself.
Here’s why this matters.
I do believe that methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology are powerful and extremely useful ways of organizing and working wth large groups of people in dialogue. It is the core of my work – convening large groups for strategic learning and engagement. There are many ways of working with large groups, but these methods are well established and they share a common feature: leadership or facilitation of these methods is a very particular act, one that has a very different relationship to control and power than working with small groups. Being able to “hold space” in these processes involves using enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergence. Technically speaking: enabling constraints are boundaries that contain an activity such that certain kinds of things can happen within the dialogic container. That is, in the context of a World Cafe for example, organizers and process hosts make decisions about what the conversation is to be about and design questions that enable every person in the process to participate. We also provide the conditions so that conversations can be self-hosted by small groups by making it as easy as possible for people to engage. What happens in these contexts is therefore emergent.
Sometimes I use a metaphor like this: classical facilitation is like sailing a boat – you respond to the wind and the waves to help guide the vessel on its journey towards its destination. Large group facilitation is more like pushing a boat out onto a lake in such a way that it also ends up travelling towards its destination. Once you’ve pushed the boat out, you have no more contact with it, practically speaking. Whatever will happen will happen (or as Harrison Owen wrote, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”) Therefore, the art of facilitating large group methods is very much in how the container and the participants are prepared, how the first few moments of hosting are framed, how the room and space is set up to enable the work, and then it is very much about NOT doing anything after you have let people get down to it. This is extremely difficult, but the results can be extraordinary in terms of ideas, engagement, and the overall revelation of capacity of the group itself. This is the heart of participatory work. The Art of Hosting, if you will.
The methods that have arisen around this common garden of practice and experience are well documented. When a person uses a term like “World Cafe” or “Open Space Technology” I would expect them to reference the primary material that exists in published form and use that method with some fidelity. I don’t mind if people change or create new methods from the world that has gone before, and in fact, as long as one has a good understanding of the basic principles and practice of participatory work, this kind of thing is to be encouraged, so that the needs of the group can be best met. But I have significant issues with what happens when this is done poorly.
Many people over the years have asked me to run an Open Space meeting and what they then describe is something that is far from Open Space. Commonly they describe a process whereby some or all of these kinds of features are present: people submit topics in advance, or organizers choose from a list of topics, or there is some voting on which topics will be discussed on the day, or perhaps organizers look at the agenda and then cluster conversations. All of these “modified Open Space events” are not just modified Open Space events. They actually are different kinds of events. They reveal an unstated limiting belief held by the organizers. They take the form of Open Space and introduce some level of facilitator control that is deliberately NOT a part of Open Space Technology facilitation. Why this happens, I think, largely depends on organizers’ feeling that they cannot fulfill Harrison Owen’s oft stated but rarely recorded admonition to “trust the people, not the process.” Open Space Technology in particular is a method that enables facilitators and leaders to fully trust the participants. Ironically, if you follow the method very closely (trusting the process), it initiates radical trust in the people. If you find yourself afraid of some outcome or another happening that you won’t have control over, then you are more likely to take Harrison’s original method and introduce a point of control there. That MIGHT be fine, but I always coach people to do this very mindfully and consciously and not to call what they have done “Open Space”
In its worst case, I have seen so much of the unexamined limiting belief creep into a process that the process is no longer “Open Space” or “World Cafe” but something else entirely. And once again, that is fine, but if you insist on still using the term “Open Space” or “World Cafe” to describe what you are doing (or even using the world “modified” before those terms) then you are doing the field a great disservice, and you are risking having knowledgeable participants view your motives with suspicion. These methods are not new, even though most people in the world don’t know the jargon or technical language associated with our field (and they don’t need to at all to be able to participate.) But if someone thinks they are coming to an Open Space Technology gathering and they are then met with a process whereby they have to pitch their idea to a large group of people who may vote to reject it from the agenda, they are going to be confused at best, and probably angry at worst.
So I want to leave this with a couple of encouraging ideas. First, use the methods. They are amazing. They have been honed in grounded practice, they are grounded in good theory and they work. They are widely and freely shared by the founders or designers and they are useful because they don’t need any modification beyond choosing the theme or questions for your own context. When you use them with fidelity to the original work, let people know that is what you are doing and share your sources.
Second, make up new methods. Go for it! There is nothing to stop you from really thinking through what a groups needs and creating a new method that will help people meet the urgent necessity of the moment. Use a good design tool like the chaordic stepping stones to help you think through your design. If you alight on something really good that no one else has ever done, make it replicable and share it in the myriad of communities of practice, like the Art of Hosting community, that are interested in such things.
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PS. If you are going to publish a paper on your work and your findings, using participatory methods for large scale self-organized dialogue, here is a good example, with proper references and a discussion of the methods and how the final design relates to those methods. Please do publish! I have contacted the lead author of the paper I referenced at the beginning of this post to help make peer-reviewed changes to the paper to have it better reflect the knowledge in the field of participatory dialogue methods, so that it can be more widely shared without skewing academic references to World Cafe. If we get to make those changes, I’ll happily share their work.
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Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.
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Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
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Here’s where our Working in Complexity course comes from.
For more than 30 years, Caitlin Frost and I have been collaborating on raising a family, running a business, and building community. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to work with ourselves and others in a participatory, relational and resourceful way, especially as we face emergence and uncertainty. A few years ago we sat down and mapped out how we work with complexity. Because my work was mostly with groups, organizations and communities and hers mostly with individuals we looked for characteristics of complexity that crossed that boundary between what we think of “inner” or personal work and what we think of as “outer” or collective, social, or systems change work We settled on eight characteristics – we could have chosen dozens – and started seeing how our practices of working with complexity have correlations in these different contexts, and especially noticing that it is easier to work with these characteristics of complexity when we do both the personal work and the collective work, coherent with the nature of the problems and challenges we are facing.
The program we are running, starting February 20, dives into theory around these and shares tools and practices for personal work and collective work with these phenomena.
Smash this link the learn more and register to join us.
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Some notes from three days of teaching a small cohort of leaders in the art of participatory leadership.
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When we teach the four fold practice of the art of hosting (also the art of participatory leadership) I’ve taken to doing it in a World Cafe. We use Cafe to essentially recreate the conditions that created the insights of the four fold practice 25 or so years ago. We invite people to tell stories of engaging and meaningful conversations they have experienced, look at these stories together for insights about what made them engaging and meaningful and provide and three pieces of advice to aspiring hosts and leaders about how to create engaging and meaningful conversations.
This not only helps a group discover the practice – which we teach only AFTER the World Cafe – but it also shows that the World Cafe is itself a powerful process for sharing stories, collective sensemaking and knowledge creation. In the context of our work this week, with academic researchers , leaders and administrators at a university, this can be a powerful experience as they experience first hand what it feels like to be hosted in what is essentially participatory research.
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Tennesson’s check in questions this morning featured a question that I love. “Who is a person for whom you are here this week?” I love a question like that. It focuses a learner for a moment on the fact that leadership development is not just personal development. It is learning you do to make the world a better place for others.
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Chaos and order and the Chaordic path is an important and basic introduction to complexity. It is the basic teaching that helps folks to see the polarity between ordered and unordered systems and how our work as hosts is essentially determining what move is required to bring a process into more or less order so that good work can be done. Complex facilitation, a term from the Cynefin world, is all about working with constraints, to loosen or tighten, to expand or contract, in order to create the conditions to catalyse actions or behaviours that take us in a preferred direction of travel. Its is about working with constraints to fashion a container that can become a place for emergence and then managing that emergence by harvesting, shaping, grounding or eliminating it.
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Personal work is critical for people working in complexity, or walking the Chaordic path. When confronting uncertainty and emergence, we run into reactions and emotions. Understanding the reactivity cycle and having a tool to create a subject-object shift that can first recognize the connection between the emotion and the situation and then examine that reaction helps to interrupt the cycle of rumination or fixation that can reinforce unhelpful patterns of behaviour which can make a person less resourceful in a space of uncertainty, leading to reactions like controlling, fleeing or tearing it all down.
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Adrenaline does not just create a flight/fight response. It can also induce freeze, appease, control, and comply response. None of these are helpful in leadership situations especially where there are triggering events like conflict, chaos, tough decisions, accountability and other issues on the line. Understanding the reactivity loop is the first step in shifting our responses. Working consciously with our patterns of reaction is how to disrupt those patterns and discover better ones. And it helps us stay more present and aware when we are in situations in which we are more likely to become reactive.
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My father in law Peter Frost, in his book Toxic Emotions at Work, worked from the premise that leadership creates pain. Decisions create lines and boundaries and good leaders make good decisions with an awareness of some of what will NOT happen while being committed to what will happen. This commitment to a core, once a decision is made, can free a leader up to handle the turbulence at the edge of the chosen path. There will always be those who disagree or dissent from a decision. There will sometimes be winners and losers, at subtle political levels as well as more obvious material levels. Taking the time to hear voices and build as much collaboration as possible before hand, and then working at managing the pain afterwards while committing to the decision is a really key skill. It’s never either or. It’s a dance. And the moment of a decision is a kind of madness, but some of the best leaders I have seen in action are able to do it this way.
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A half day spent on Chaordic design. There is nothing more indicative of the intention to create truly participatory meetings than the willingness to make design them collaboratively. As one young person once said to me about Open Space “I love this process because I know that whoever controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Collaborative design is fractal and can happen at all levels of an initiative. It can also be initiated at all levels of an initiative. My hypothesis is that the extent to which people will participate in a meeting is directly related to the extent to which they are connected to the necessity for and purpose of a meeting. Taking time to name these helps ensure high degrees of engagement. Literally, nothing about us without us.
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A good question that came after I taught the Chaordic stepping stones: “This seems like it would work in an egalitarian environment but what about when there are real issues of power?” Mapping the urgent necessity of the moment should surface that reality. Naming the people who need to be involved is an important moment to name who has the power to say “no” and shut this down. In my experience every new initiative has a window of opportunity and a sponsor who will keep it open for a while. Until they don’t. Knowing you have limited time is helpful to focus on what’s really important and WHO is really important to include and HOW.
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How is Open Space a leadership practice? The moment of posting and the hosting a conversation that matters is what does it. A person responds to a call and takes responsibility for something important. For calling a conversation that needs to be called. They write it up and stick it on the wall and then show up to host. In these simple acts are the hallmarks of participatory practice. Post and host. Take responsibility for what’s important.
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One of the features of things like Pro Action Cafe is the way the constraints some times force naive expertise to be present. Having four at every table means sometimes people don’t get their first choice of projects to work on. They might end up a table where they have no idea what’s happening. We always encourage them to participate anyway because these are where the oddball questions, the “dumb questions” and the new ideas come from. Never underestimate naive expertise. If you want some try to explain what you are doing at work to our 16 year old niece. You will instantly learn some new things.