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.
When the US government took down its climate science site a group of scientists put all the material back online at Climate.us
Dave Snowden has been at his favourite knowledge management conference and offers blog posts with many reflections that caught my eye on intergenerational management cultures (older workers attend to contexts; younger workers to rules), the inability to preserve implicit knowledge through compression, the fundamental question of what is lost between wisdom, knowledge and information, and the journey of the experiences practitioner who has won wisdom through wading through the maze of transactional work.
Alice Jing Shan was there too!
It is always helpful to see how the long arc of history often bends towards justice. The fight to protect west coast ecosystems and Indigenous rights and title has spanned my entire life and I will tell anyone who will listen that Clayoquot Sound and Haida Gwaii (and the north coast of BC) are some of the best examples of what can happen when First Nations assert their rights authority and recover the ability to properly govern their territories.
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.
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
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.