When you worry that something you care about is going out of fashion, but you have no evidence for such a thing happening, the best course is to make the best argument you can for it as if the decline were happening. And then, if the decline is not happening, your best argument will still be useful.
So I thought: What is my best argument for participation? What would entice a listening-weary, stay-at-home population to leave home and travel to the other earths of the people around them? How about an appeal to enlightened self-interest? Let’s see what I can write along those lines.
— Cynthia Kurtz, Why — and whither — participation.
Cynthia Kurtz has crafted a long and important blog post that brings her usual clarity and approachable manner to the question of why we should be doing more participatory work. Along the way she explores some thoughts about why we AREN'T doing it much right now and what it takes to do more. It's a beautiful post and I encourage you to set aside 20 minutes or so and read it thoughtfully.
I’m writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it’s important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world “container” to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialogic organizational development. In the Dialogic Organization Development book there are several metaphors employed by several of my co-authors to describe containers. What I’m finding is that we commonly refer to containers in four distinct ways…
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
I don't love using Jeff Bezos as an example of anything virtuous, and the anecdote in this post may just be apocrophal, so let's treat it like that, but this is a useful quote:
A group that gathers but doesn’t know how to fight without ‘un-gathering’ won’t remain a group for long. A group that can’t disagree and commit will disagree and dissolve.
The point here is that "conflict preservation" is much more useful to a group than "conflict resolution" for most things. When clients ask me to help people come to "alignment" on things like the organization's vision or mission statement, they often talk about a river, with everyone travelling in the same direction. My response is often to unpack that image.
If "alignment" is like a river, let's really look at how a river flows. When you do you will see that healthy rivers flow slowly, and in many different directions. There are pools of still water, eddies that cause the flow to reverse itself, vertical upwellings, places of rapid flow and others where the flow is slow. And yet, everything is going in the same direction.
It's a question of scale. At fine levels of granularity, conflict and difference are critical. Held skillfully it can also create and sustain the relational capacity that can withstand times when the river goes over a waterfall. In those moments, relationships can come apart just when they are needed the most. Simmering conflict embedded in a reluctance to work with difference requires a tremendous amount of energy to later resolve.
It's a practice.
One of the projects I’m engaged in is a rigorous exploration of my own theory-informed facilitation and hosting practice. I have been keeping extensive field notes of my work, in a hand written journal, that contains observations about myself and the group I’m working with in real time. It is an effort to refine my practice along the lines of the triangle I’ve been working on, to notice deeply the ways in which Structure, Interactions and Design coalesce into a container. It is also becoming a practice of discerning how to modulate my influence in the emergence of a container through working more deliberately and precisely with constraints, in general to see what happens when the emergence of dialogic containers happens largely through the Structure <-> Interaction relationship. What does it look and feel like in real time to withdraw Design (including intention and intervention and my own attention to what is happening) as far as possible into the background.
I’ve been engaging in the project with an LLM (ChatGPT 5.6 sol, currently). I offer this LLM my field notes and I’m able to explore areas where my theory work encounters praxis. The LLM also has access to my blog archive so it has nearly 25 years of field notes about my facilitation practice, and theory at hand. I’m able to track long term threads in my thinking, how things have evolved and generate summary reports that help me see where my practice has been coherent with theory and where it isn’t. It has allowed me to develop new experiments in hosting and group work that are always aimed at helping groups use more of their capability and less of mine, but which are helping me to find a set of practices and heuristics for facilitating, teaching, hosting and coaching.
I call this experiment a Praxis Log. Every mot I have the LLM write a learning report that summarizes my chats and notes. I’ll start publishing blog posts based on these learning reports and Praxis logs at the end of the month. A monthly cadence for this work is about right. I’m appreciating having an LLM to track and engage with the material and help me see things I would otherwise miss. And then as always, blog readers and commenters help tremendously.
In addition to improving my work, I’m appreciating the method of keeping a praxis log and using it to refine both my theory and practice. So stay tuned for the first set of learnings.