Since the spring I have been wrestling with an evolution in my practice. It was prompted by a series of exchanges with Dave Snowden in response to his strong exhortation that those of us who say we are working with complexity should truly reflect on our practice. At the heart of the challenge, as I took it on board, is the claim that a hosted container is a consequential intervention in a system, but it is not the system itself. And from a complexity perspective, that also means that as a host I have an obligation to understand the effect that my role and choices have on the groups we are working with. Especially if I am making claims to be working in systems change, I need to understand that distinction more rigorously so I can become a better host and a better contributor to the change work that is being called for in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a letter to Dave from the perspective of an Art of Hosting practitioner, about why his challenge moved me and why I took it on board, and also what I think this practice, the Art of Hosting, offers to the world.
This letter is to my mates within the Art of Hosting community, to share where I have been challenged in thinking through this work and what it means for how I practice the Art of Hosting. And it’s an invitation to all of us to engage with these questions with each other and with those we teach, support, and serve.
Dear mates:
For nearly 25 years the Art of Hosting has been my practice home. The Four Fold Practice (being present, participating, hosting, and co-creating) offers key reminders to me about what helps create conversations that matter. The large-group methods we use and have developed make a meaningful difference to the organizations that I work with.
As a community we have accumulated authentic practitioner wisdom and knowledge about invitation, conditions for convening, the power of questions and inquiry, and the effectiveness of co-creation and collective harvesting. We have explored and documented an approach to facilitation that does not concern itself with the outcome, but attends to what shapes the container. We have extended that into forms of leadership, organizing, and activism that hold participation at their heart and find a home amongst those who long for inclusion, democratic governance, and better workplaces.
These are distributed, experimental, and messy lines of thought and practice that billow out from our core inquiry about hosting. For me now, the question is, “What exactly is working, and how?”
The distinction: the hosted conversation is not the system
Those of us who have been lucky enough to work in larger contexts and over longer periods of time will recognize that the dialogic container we are hosting is not the system. It is sometimes the hardest thing for me to hear when a participant says, “This is great, but what about the REAL world?” I get defensive. I insist that this IS the real world. Change can happen at many scales, including right here and now, in the midst of dialogue. And while that can be true, I have noticed that it runs the risk of dismissing what a person is saying: “I have real problems and I need this meaningful conversation to make a consequential difference now, or I have to do something else.”
For longer-term and deeper work in complex contexts, a hosted gathering creates a temporary set of conditions inside of which a group of people is gathered: I call this a dialogic container. Of course, these people and their questions are a part of the bigger context of work, but the container is not the system. It is not even a microcosm of the system. It is just a group of people with varying connections and influence in relation to the issues at hand.
A humble approach to my work invites me to consider these realities:
- People from a system are not THE system.
- Diverse perspectives alone are not representations of the system.
- Emergent insight is not the collective intelligence of the system.
- Changed relationships are not changed structures.
- Powerful experiences are not system change.
This isn’t to say that my work doesn’t matter. Temporary hosted conditions can indeed result in different interactions that can create new possibilities. It is true that small changes in a complex system can eventually lead to larger changes. But we cannot know that in advance, and making the link between different scales is especially vulnerable to exaggeration.
My engagement with complexity, including the work of Snowden and others, has brought me to a critical point in my practice where I am seeking to understand the bounded applicability of the work of hosting, while extending my practice in other ways to get at some of the real challenges associated with working in complex systems. That includes being clear about the influence that the host and the hosting team have when designing and employing methods, shaping the harvesting, choosing the questions…all of it.
Reconsidering the container
I think it is easy to be lulled into the hope that a meaningful conversation can generate what we call the “magic in the middle” that takes us to new vistas. So much good can happen in a well-hosted and meaningful conversation, and learning how to convene these moments is a good and important skill. We talk about creating and holding a container in which something beautiful can emerge.
This work comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. When we shape an encounter, we are shaping what is possible. Surprising, moving, and genuinely novel work can legitimately arise, even while it is conditioned through the architecture out of which it emerged. Because of the power we carry into hosted spaces, we shape that architecture in every move we make before and during the gathering. The nature of our methods and practices can sometimes have us believe that what happened was genuine collective intelligence, but the design, hosting choices, and harvesting work shape what is possible.
It may be true that under the particular conditions of any specific hosted gathering, participants became capable of seeing, saying, or doing something that had not previously been possible. We use methods because they create particular conditions for emergence by shaping the interactions of participants in particular ways. But the methods aren’t the sole source of emergence and change. World Café does not reveal collective intelligence. Open Space is not system transformation. Circle does not eliminate status and influence.
For change work, this is critical to understand. Groups of people are capable of finding and developing their own solutions to problems, even within the constraints of the structural systems that they inhabit. A well-hosted process positioned as essential to change work runs a deep risk of making the group’s outcomes dependent on the host, the tools, or the process. For me, this role is seductive. I like to think that I am a good change maker because I host conversations on important topics and people often leave feeling positive, creative, and motivated.
But what is the cost of that?
Hosting is an exercise of power
One of the core contributions of the Art of Hosting as a community of practice and a body of work is our deep collective inquiry into the idea that a group of people can know more than a single expert or facilitator, given the chance to use their agency. The Four Fold Practice reminds us of the conditions that can help enable that. Methods help us practice. Circle helps us slow down conversations. Open Space gives participants extraordinary agency. World Café surfaces many perspectives on common questions, making more ideas available to a group. These are legitimate contributions of our suite of practices.
However, the presence of agency, deeper listening, and diverse perspectives does not eliminate the power that a host wields in the container. In fact, my deepest fear is that it hides it.
Good hosting can create the conditions for self-organization, but critical hosting practice needs to remember that someone called the meeting, someone made the list, someone framed the purpose and selected methods, someone made logistical choices, and someone decided on the harvest plan. Even if these decisions and choices are made and held by a hosting team drawn from and informed by collective need and purpose, the container is still shaped.
Our methods may look like they fade the power of the host into the background, but the architecture of the hosted container carries the power. That power can shape possibilities, often invisibly. My own hosting practice is especially vulnerable to what I cannot see because I deliberately remove myself from engaging in group dynamics and shaping the output.
If my deeper learning of this last year (and maybe my whole career) has landed on anything, it has landed on the unsettling realization that I and we need to do a lot more work to take responsibility for our power as designers. This matters partly because I am often playing the role of an expert in process work when I am working with a client, and so my decisions are trusted. But it is also important because my presence in working with a group of people usually comes with the sanction and mandate of people more powerful than me who have chosen to work with me, chosen to endorse the design that I have suggested, and chosen to commit to what we think might happen.
The host has meaningful power because we are sanctioned by power to do what we are doing, in the way in which we are doing it. As I began to realize that my own self-reflection wasn’t going deeply enough into the effects of this power, I started to look for ways that I could account for it, be honest about it, and make better choices about it.
Three kinds of constraint, three expressions of power
If you have been following my work in the past few months, you will have seen these two posts in which I describe a way of looking at the architecture of a held container. This triangle has become extremely important to my practice because it gives me a place to locate my own power in relationship with the distributed power of a group and the power embedded in the structures that pre-exist a hosted conversation.
Briefly, the three points of this triangle define a space and ask us to locate our work within it based on the way power shapes a participatory process:
Interactions (distributed power): We hold it as a deep principle in the Art of Hosting world that the group has collective wisdom, collective knowledge, and the ability to co-create. People are entirely capable of organizing, collaborating, being in relationship, creating and responding, and making change without a consultant or a host coming into their lives. It happens all the time, and I find it incredibly hopeful. As a host I like to think that, whatever my work is, I am serving this.
Structure (contextual power): It would be great if groups alone could just go and do the work, but every group of people is constrained by the existing structure in which they operate. Folks in organizations work within resource constraints, chains of command, organizational purposes and policies, and time boundaries. People in communities are subject to laws, biophysical constraints, and the reality of the scale they find themselves working at. These structures are critical and not always visible, and they convey tremendous power. They can squash or enable good ideas. They can alienate people (or imprison them). And importantly, especially if you are a host who is hired to do this work, they implicitly and explicitly shape possibilities through mandates and permissions.
Design (privileged power): As hosts we do not operate independently of the above two sources of power in a container. We are enmeshed in the collision of constraints, and we bring our own small but significant source of power to the conversations. These are the intentional constraints we introduce into a space: the purpose of a gathering, the choice of methods, the invitation, and the design work that goes into shaping the experience. There is privilege in this position because someone, or some group, has the power to make these decisions in the room. Even if we are hosting an Open Space, the shape of the question, the choice of the harvesting template, the purpose, and subsequent uses of the work are all choices made by someone.
Distributed power, contextual power, and privileged power intersect in every hosted conversation we are involved in. Making this space visible has been tremendously helpful in my practice. It helps me see what is needed for meaningful conversations to become truly useful conversations, and it is helping me become much more aware of the choices I make as a host and how those can disempower distributed power from doing its work.
In the Art of Hosting world we focus a lot on the Design <—> Interaction axis, thinking about how our methods and designs will shape the interactions and experiences of participants. I think we have approached the question of how the existing context structures what’s possible, but the Art of Hosting alone, and a well-hosted process in particular, is not sufficient for sustained systemic change. Even developing participatory leadership skills still leaves leaders confronting the very real problems of power, resources, and politics within their settings. When we claim that our work contributes to systems change, the test of that cannot end with what emerges in the room. We have more to learn about whether and how the work we do in rooms contributes to change in the systems around them.
Contact with context
The Art of Hosting offers promise because the ways in which we use the practice to design and host conversations, lead teams, structure organizations, and work with power seem to provide immediate ways to engage the diversity of the system. A well-hosted gathering is often thought to be essential to finding new solutions.
But a well-hosted process and a powerful conversation that do not survive contact with the strategic context they promise to shift are a problem. While two days in Open Space, for example, can often unlock some important actions, it takes a tremendous amount of resources and commitment to make such a thing happen. If the promise is fulfilled, that participants will have transformative experiences and the organization or group will be better able to deal with their problems, then the investment is worth it.
But if that’s not what happens, then even a gathering with positive evaluations might have just delayed the ability of a group to activate its distributed capacity and, worse, may have made it seem like only good hosting can provide the conditions for engagement with complex problems. That can be costly where time is an important constraint on the context. The thing I most worry about in my practice is an outcome where people loved the process and the work, but nothing in their world changed.
What I am demanding of myself now is an honest accounting of the role I play as a host. It is easy for me to look at my own discrete contribution and say, “We did a good thing,” while leaders go back to the office shaking their heads and worrying that nothing has changed. This is an ethical facet of our work and one which we can always get better at.
When I was recently working with the Evans School for Public Policy at the University of Washington, my hosting colleague Amanda Bankston told me that the research literature on public policy and engagement is shockingly silent on the role of facilitators, consulting groups, and process designers in how policy gets made, or how it doesn’t get made. Consulting firms are often evaluated on their deliverables, but we know very little about the wider effect they have on whether resources were wasted, time was misspent, or distributed agency was trampled in the name of outcomes.
When she told me that, I realized that I don’t even have a framework for understanding my own role, and hence the triangle above. It helps me interrogate and name the boundaries of my work and influence, and it helps me to be more aware of the ways in which our work is shaped by the context. It has meaningfully changed my practice, most notably through the fact that I no longer do larger-scale work without doing a complexity-informed narrative capture and sense-making process with people in the system before we decide on a design for interventions. And often, just doing this work up front means that the interventions can be less reliant on the Designer and more embedded in the Interactions of people finding ways to make change within the Structures that no longer serve.
My Art of Hosting practice taught me to be aware of these things. My complexity-informed practice has brought me to a place where I am deeply discerning about the solutions I offer for convening.
The invitation
So this leaves me with an honest invitation to you, my mates.
Increasingly, some of my most important learning comes from people outside our community whose questions and observations expose assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Taking those questions seriously has not diminished my trust in this practice. It has made me more discerning about when and how I use it.
Questions like:
- What are the boundaries of the spaces I help create, and what can they genuinely affect?
- What forms of power am I exercising through design, hosting, and harvesting, and how can I account for their effects?
- What structural constraints shape the context in which my work is embedded, and how do they shape what I can or cannot do?
- What happens when what we are doing in any given conversation encounters the world outside the meeting room?
- What else do I need to learn to contribute when the work requires something that the Art of Hosting can’t provide?
This has been a year of honest accounting and reflection for me. I find myself with a deeper appreciation for the core of our work and the genuine contribution it makes, while becoming more careful about the promises I make for it. I want to know more clearly what this practice can do, what it cannot do, what power I exercise when I use it, and what else I need to learn. I offer you these questions too, in that spirit of curiosity, learning, and mateship.
A humpback whale called “Nova” that we saw the other day. She is about to dive deep.
Over the past year I have been corralling my thinking on the Art of Hosting, complexity, dialogic containers and practice into a new shape. If you have been following along here since January, you have seen this thinking taking place in the open. At the heart of the matter is my desire to wrestle with questions of power, epistemic justice and humility, and a desire to become a better teacher and host/facilitator.
It has been quite a year of reflection! A number of factors launched me into this work, and one in particular was an important set of blog posts from Dave Snowden that named the Art of Hosting along side other communities of practices and lineages who make a claim that they work with complexity. His posts sought to distinguish his approach to anthro-complexity from the systems thinking lineages out of which many of us come, knowingly or unknowingly. I think there is merit in this distinction and as a person that has been formed in my practice by both the Art of Hosting community (which does indeed owe a debt of lineage to these practices) and the anthro-complexity community, I felt it was important to wrestle with the similarities and distinctions between these bodies of knowledge and practice.
I recognize for many people that this conversation seems very abstract and theoretical, but I think it has deeply important practical questions to ask us as facilitators, consultants and Art of Hosting practitioners, and that is why I have spent the year thinking this through.
This is the first of a few pieces I will be writing about this. This post is an open letter to Dave Snowden, fulfilling a promise I made to him to take his critiques seriously and understand them through the lens of practice. I promised him my response would be messy, and it certainly has been over the past few months! But this letter gathers up what I have learned from his writing, and returns it to him. I find myself agreeing with much of his critique while also becoming clearer about the value I continue to find in the Art of Hosting as a practice, a community and a way of approaching these questions.
The global Art of Hosting community is a massive, distributed group of people who explore this practice from a myriad of perspectives. It is a community that learns and shares with one another and hangs together around a simple and generative practice framework, along with a set of hosting methods that largely informed that framework. Even saying that, it is almost impossible to make a general statement about how Art of Hosting practitioners practice. The community is more of a collision of experience than a settled and regulated body of work.
Having said that, here is my response to Dave, written after considering my notes, learnings and practical applications of ideas inspired by his work.
Dave,
Your estuary work sharpened something I had already been wrestling with: the danger of confusing a hosted gathering with the system of which it is a part. A workshop is not a representative miniature of an organization or a system just because we have gathered a diverse group of people. A powerful conversation is not evidence of system change. What happens under the temporary conditions of a facilitated gathering may have very little effect on the structures, incentives, networks and relationships that operate when people leave. It is easy to be seduced by what happens in a good conversation to believe that change and transformation can occur there.
As I was feeling my way through this, and trying to figure out how to write about it, your blog posts came along. I started to pay much more attention to whether the work we do survives contact with the context it is supposed to affect. I also became more reflective and precise about some of the language I use about emergence. We can choose the people, frame the question, select the method, set the time, establish the boundaries and decide how the work will be harvested, and then marvel at the emergence that happens inside those conditions. Of course humans interacting under any set of constraints will produce things nobody predicted. The more useful question, from both a practical and ethical perspective, is whether what emerges is relevant to the field from which those people came and whether it has any life once they return to it. That was the question I was beginning to ask in The Inundated Delta.
Your critique of the helper has landed too. I recognize in my own practice that facilitators and hosts can become far too important in our own accounts of what happened. We can frame the problem, interpret the group, name the pattern, harvest the meaning and then explain people’s experience back to them. The practitioner who is supposed to be enabling agency can become the central epistemic authority in the room.
The gift of this collision of ideas, and the directness with which they were offered, is that I became much more curious about what I think I am doing when I facilitate. Over the past number of months this has become the core research project of my hosting and teaching practice, and it will continue to be.
Where I now place the work of hosting dialogic containers
I think a hosted gathering is a temporary intervention in an existing field. People arrive already entangled in histories, relationships, identities, authority, obligations, institutions and material conditions. They don’t leave these things at the door. The organization doesn’t disappear because we put the chairs in a circle, and hierarchy doesn’t vanish because everyone gets equal time with a talking piece. I think broadly speaking many of my experienced colleagues in the Art of Hosting community know this too.
As a student of the phenomenon of dialogic containers, this has always been interesting to me, and my own thinking about containers has followed this curiosity for decades. Your work has massively contributed to this thinking.
Over that time I have changed my language about containers. I am much less inclined now to say that I create or hold a container, a common idea in facilitation practice. For me, a container is something that emerges from the constraints operating in a situation. As hosts we can influence some of those constraints, sometimes quite significantly, but we don’t control the pattern that results. For me, the practice of hosting lies largely in learning how to work responsibly with the constraints we can influence while becoming more attentive to those we can’t.
Over the past few months I have been developing a simple triangle as a diagnostic tool to help me pay attention to this. It distinguishes three sources of constraint in hosted work: structure, interactions and design. Structure includes what is already shaping the situation: authority, history, policy, resources, organizational roles, physical arrangements and cultural expectations. Interactions are what people actually do together, including resistance, relationship, coalition, interpretation, novelty and all the self-organization that nobody controls. Design concerns intentional constraints introduced by people who have enough power to make those intentions consequential: the invitation, the question, the boundaries, the process, the timing and the ways participation is organized.
I don’t think this is an ontology of human systems. It is a diagnostic for hosted work. It helps me ask what is already shaping this situation, what people are doing together, and what I am introducing through my own choices. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow the facilitator to disappear.
Design is an exercise of power
This is perhaps the biggest change in my practice this year. It has always been clear to me that facilitator’s and hosts have a tremendous amount of power in a room. This is an important fact and pre-occupation of the facilitation world in general. But through this inquiry I have become much more explicit about design as an exercise of power. If I ask a question, I constrain attention. If I choose Open Space instead of presentations, I change the affordances for interaction. If I decide who is invited, I make a consequential intervention before anyone enters the room. If a leader invites people to “co-create” something while retaining the authority to reject everything they produce, that shapes the container too.
In the Art of Hosting world we talk a lot about design, and we have developed tools and practices for bringing multiple perspectives into the design process and connecting the design to the field in which we are working. We work in hosting teams, and we use tools like the Chaordic Stepping Stones to create designs that can remain flexible and responsive.
However, I don’t think I have paid enough attention to design as a vector of power and constraint that can influence a dialogic container in ways that suppress emergence and distributed intelligence. Design as “fjordic,” you might say.
This isn’t a reason not to design. Somebody is going to design the gathering. Our work – my work o is to to become more conscious of the power involved in doing it.
Throughout my career I have found myself doing work inside channels already carved by power: some structural, through legislation, policy, resources and institutional authority; others intentionally created through the mandates and purposes held by people with power. And still others exercised by the distributed power of the people in the room. Until recently, I’m not sure I had a way to distinguish these clearly from the design choices I was then making inside them. In recent months I have found myself asking some very simple questions much more often: What is already fixed? What is genuinely open? Who can say no? What can these people actually influence? What will happen to what they produce? What does the person convening this work have the authority to change, and what are they prepared to let go of?
Those questions often tell me more about the possibilities for participation than a method ever could. They also make it harder to use participatory language to disguise a process in which the consequential decisions have already been made.
Why I think the Art of Hosting matters
Human beings gather deliberately. We gather to decide things, learn together, negotiate, organize, inquire, coordinate, grieve, celebrate, reconcile and make sense of what is happening. Some of those gatherings are attempts to intervene in complex systems and some aren’t. A community meeting, a strategy session, a memorial, a learning event and a group trying to figure out what to do next are different kinds of gatherings with different purposes.
In many of them somebody has consequential choices to make about how people will meet. I think learning to make those choices well is a legitimate domain of practice.
The Art of Hosting has given me a community in which to spend more than twenty years developing that practice. It taught me to pay attention to my own presence and power, to participate in the systems in which I work rather than pretend to stand outside them, to create conditions for people to exercise agency, and to work with self-organization instead of assuming that everything needs to be directed. These commitments were part of my practice before I encountered Cynefin. Anthro-complexity has made me much more precise about them.
I wrote in Control, facilitation, and the Golden Rule about the effect Open Space had on me thirty years ago. It changed my understanding of facilitation from managing conversation to working with constraints that allow people much more freedom to organize their own interactions. That remains one of the foundations of my practice. I don’t know what people will talk about, what relationship will form, what difference will become important or what somebody will learn. I don’t need to know. My responsibility is to make good choices about the constraints I actually have the authority to influence and then pay attention to what happens.
That seems to me entirely coherent with complexity. And it puts me in need of a heuristic to understand how to orient myself in this form of facilitation that we call hosting. The Art of Hosting community sprang from an inquiry into the forms of facilitation that are helpful to a group’s needs in the moment, and the work that needs to be done to ensure that whatever we do as hosts remains in contact with the context in which it is embedded. Complexity theory provides useful guidance for this stance when the work is complex.
Methods are not the practice
When I began my career as a facilitator of large group methods, I became enamoured with the process. Open Space in particular shows us what facilitation can also be, when one is not standing at a flipchart, listing and reframing ideas, or guiding the substance or tone of a conversation. One thing I am teaching differently now is the relationship between practice and methods. I am less interested in teaching people that participatory methods are preferable to other forms. Sometimes Open Space is exactly what is needed. Sometimes people need a tightly structured meeting. Sometimes they need to sit in a circle and listen carefully to one another. Sometimes they shouldn’t be in a meeting at all; they need to go out and observe what is actually happening before they have anything useful to talk about.
The idea of bounded applicability is critical. There is no intrinsically good facilitation method outside of the context in which it is useful. And so the question becomes one of practice simply choosing from a menu of methods. A method changes the constraints on interaction. That is why we use it. The question isn’t whether a method is participatory or emergent. The questions are: what does this make possible, what does it make harder, and is that useful here?
This is changing how I teach and use the Chaordic Stepping Stones as well. I am increasingly interested in the questions as ways of helping practitioners encounter context before making design choices: What is the need? Who are the people? What is already given? What principles or constraints matter? Who can say no? What will happen to the work afterwards? Each question can change what the practitioner sees, and therefore change what they choose to do. The framework improves the inquiry. In the next few months I’ll be updating that framework, because the current version is nearly ten years old, and we’ve learned so much in its use and application over the past decade. It’s time for a major version change.
How do I know what to do?
This has become one of the central questions in my teaching this year. If methods aren’t answers, and frameworks can’t prescribe action in a complex situation, how does a practitioner know what to do?
The answer, of course, is that we never know completely. We make choices, act and pay attention to what happens. But we can become better at making those choices.
That is where I now locate much of the value of practice. I want practitioners who can notice before interpreting, read context, understand constraints, see their own power, distinguish what is given from what is genuinely open, make an intervention without becoming attached to it, and recognize when less facilitation is needed. I want people who can learn from the response of the field rather than explain it away when their design doesn’t produce what they expected.
No framework can do that for us. Cynefin can’t. The Four Fold Practice can’t. The Chaordic Stepping Stones can’t. My triangle certainly can’t. They can all help us notice things we might otherwise miss, but practical judgment is something we develop by practising.
This is where I think the Four Fold Practice has considerable value. Presence, participation, hosting and co-creation aren’t a checklist of required conditions. They invite us into practices through which our judgment might become better.
What I have learned from you
When you wrote Leadership in the Estuary, you put Art of Hosting, systems leadership and anthro-complexity alongside one another and said that these traditions share more common ground than their internal debates sometimes suggest. I think that is right.
I don’t need Art of Hosting to become anthro-complexity, and anthro-complexity certainly doesn’t need to validate Art of Hosting. They are different bodies of practice with different histories, purposes and claims. But your work has given people in my practice community some important things to attend to: context before intervention, distributed rather than facilitator-centred sensemaking, constraints and affordances, epistemic humility, the brown-field nature of change, and a sharper account of power.
The effect on me has been quite practical, not just this year, but going back to where I first encountered your ideas. I am more circumspect about facilitation. I make fewer claims about collective intelligence and emergence. I pay more attention to what is already shaping a situation before I introduce a process. I am more explicit about power. I am more interested in what happens after people leave the room. I teach methods less as answers and questions more as ways of developing attention. And I have become increasingly interested in helping practitioners develop judgment rather than simply expand their repertoires.
I think Art of Hosting has something useful to offer in the other direction too. It has accumulated a substantial body of practical knowledge about convening: how invitations work, how participation can be structured, how hosts cultivate attention, how groups can be given room to organize themselves, and how practitioners can develop enough confidence to intervene lightly and get out of the way when they are no longer needed.
Neither body of work needs to swallow the other. Your critique has made me a better Art of Hosting practitioner because it has forced me to become clearer about what the practice can and cannot do, more modest about what I claim for it, and more attentive to the consequences of my own design choices. I am grateful for that.
At the same time, I remain committed to the idea that the practice of hosting itself is worth taking seriously. If human beings are going to keep gathering intentionally to do things together, then there is value in learning how to shape those gatherings with skill, humility and attention to the fields in which they actually live.
So this is my letter back to you, a promised report, with thanks, on where your work has directed my attention. And it is also a stand upon the ground of what we have built and developed together in the Art of Hosting world. I’ll compose a similar letter to colleagues in that community, because I think there is learning to carry in both directions. The work for me now is to keep developing the practice: testing it, adjusting it, being clearer about its limits, and continuing to build our capacity to meet the work that presents itself.
Over the last month I have been working with this diagram that depicts the architecture of held space. You can read much more detail about this at the post I wrote earlier in the month, including some of the comments that helped me to think it through a little more.
One very helpful set of comments from Corina Enache came during a good discussion at LinkedIn. I’d like to quote them at length so they are preserved here. Her main point was clear. If I’m trying to get the facilitator out of the centre, I’m doing what I want to do if I give the facilitator a specific place of their own in the diagram. Corina argued that the facilitator’s power can already be understood by the expression of Interaction and structure, and that the facilitator can be seen a a thick node or connections in that space. We both agree that power and authority are inevitable and potentially useful aspects of group work. We shouldn’t ignore or try to transcend them, but make them visible.
These are great points and I found that what I really needed was some field testing. Since that discussion took place I have worked with two clients in teaching and hosting retreats, and have brought a set of observations to this work. I promised Corina a reply and here it is.
The triangle helps us to understand the source of constraints in hosted spaces. The first observation is that this triangle is not a claim about the reality (ontology) of social fields. I agree with her that social fields can be described sufficiently with the structure – interaction axis. The triangle is however a way of looking at what I call dialogic containers (or “hosted spaces), and the three corners are sources of constraints on those spaces. Structure is a source of inherited constraints. Interactions are a source of emergent constraints. And Design is a source of intentional constraints. So I’m not looking to develop a new theory of social fields. I’m looking at creating a way of accounting for what happens in a field when someone says “Welcome” or “we’re here for…” or “This is what will happen next…” That could be anything from a courtroom to a party to a conversation to a pub, to a public meeting, a strategy session or a workshop.
The role of the facilitator should be visible. As a person who has worked for decades in facilitation, I think it’s important that we bring our attention to the practice of hosting but also the way in which we affect social fields. In my work with the Evans School of Public Policy last week, the director of the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC), Amanda Bankston, mentioned to me that there is very little in the literature on public policy that describes the role of the facilitator on policy making or democracy. This is an astonishing fact to me, and so true. For decades I have helped design and facilitate hosted spaces that have had impacts on policy issues like health care, fisheries, child and family services, Indigenous rights and title, poverty, forestry. marine stewardship and other issues. And in not one case can I ever remember that the design choices we made, and the facilitation itself being named as a source of what happened. Adam Kahane in particular writes about this function a lot and is always careful to say that the involvement of the facilitation team in his work, while important, must be held up against many other things that are happening in the social fields in which the process is located. He wisely guards against facilitators taking his own observations as universal truths about “how to do it.” Instead his books are about the thorny challenges of how to do it, and how to make some sense of what has been done. I appreciate his work so much, because he is one of the most honest voices in thinking about the role of facilitation in public policy and social change, especially at the scales at which he and his teams work.
Of course, it is impossible to assign any single cause to any single effect in a policy initiative. But the absence of the host and the process design in any kind of analysis about public policy making means that consulting firms, and facilitators become invisible in the work. Furthermore, the host isn’t the only source of intentional constraints, but is most often the vector through which other intentional constraints arrive in the room. The power and privilege behind the shaping of the process can enter a hosted container through design differently from the way they enter through structures that authorize them or interactions that change when leaders are in the room. I think this deserves to be distinguished in our work.
In complex work we are asked to be responsible for the foreseen and unforeseen outcomes of our choices. We need a way of seeing and accounting for this effect. Hence, the third corner of this triangle, one which lifts the hosted container out of the social field and provides a lens through which we can interrogate and understand what intentional constraints that are brought to the work.
Design is not sovereign. It exists in relationship with Structure and Interaction. So the Design corner of this triangle is not “the facilitator” per se, but rather represents the choices that are made in crafting a process. When I work with a client, I always try to learn as much as possible about the existing social field we are working with. What structures are already in place? What are the interactions that are important to understand? In long-term initiatives, especially those related to issues of culture, conflict or leadership development, we use detailed narrative captures before entering into the substantive work, and we continue to use narrative capture so the group can make sense of it’s own reality. At some point, we make a choice. We design a workshop. We make a proposal. The leadership makes a decision. A hosted space becomes a part of the work and what happens there collapses the potential of the social field into a dialogic container, one in which intention is introduced and which works with and influences structure and interaction.
The choice of how much or how little constraint in a container is brought to bear on this situation is an important ethical consideration. If I come into an organization or community with “a great meeting method that will solve all your problems” my intention may colonize the very real capacity in the room that could emerge from the interactions between people. A lecture delivered on how an organization’s culture should change will have a particular effect. Many leaders, consultants and facilitators may see the Design corner as a way to get their own way and introduce power and influence into a room backed by some amount of authority that comes from their role, positionally or privilege. The “dense node” or Corina’s observation has history to it, and I think that needs to be accounted for.
The triangle therefore gives us a diagnostic tool in which we can honestly weigh the sources of constraint in a hosted space.
The triangle as a diagnostic tool. By diagnosis here I don’t mean a tool that helps us somehow patholigize and organization before we set to work solving a problem. I mean the practice. Diagnosis is useful when it helps us see differences that matter. And so the triangle does that.
It makes a set of questions visible to practitioners to help understand what is needed and what is going on in a dialogic container. If a process is stuck or failing, it might not be sufficient to blame the people or the room or the agenda or the relationships. We can also ask what is shaping the conversation. This helps us to shine a light on some of less visible aspect of what is at play.
This is what I got to field test last week in Seattle. I convened a breakout session on working with the power that exists in the fields in which we are hosting. I didn’t draw the triangle. Instead we had a participant offer up a case – a long term and highly distributed culture change initiative she and her team were asked to lead. It was struggling and so we explored the different sources of constraints in the initiative to see what ways the work might be changed. The overwhelming thought was that “it’s just too hard to change people’s behaviour.” I thought this was a good observation! The question is why are we trying to do that?
I asked questions, informed by the triangle. These included questions like this:
- What is fixed or given in this process. What can’t you actually change?
- What does the mandate holder need to hold? Why?
- What does the mandate holder need to let go of to open this space up?
- What is genuinely open in the work?
- Who can say no to what you are doing?
- What can people in the work influence?
- What are you trying to do?
- What do you condor a good outcome?
I think the main learning was that the group was able to examine to role of the mandate holder – in this case a committee doing the work of a senior leader through the responsible implementation team – and see it both with empathy and curiosity. The mandate comes strongly through design and provides a massive amount of influence on a process. With something as significant as culture change, the mandate holder can be holding a very tight set of constraints that are impossible to deliver on and that rob the people of their own agency in creating and sustaining the kind of culture that is desired. In fact, in the absence of a decent narrative collection from the field it can be hard to know if the mandate is even an appropriate response to the situation. Are there NO examples in the field that prove the exception to what people think is going on?
The triangle is an instrument of attention, not a map of reality. So, this little triangle, at the end of the day, is a way to guide attention to what is already shaping a container, what is happening between people inside it and what is being deliberately introduced through the design. It might seem like overkill to spend so many words and thoughts on this, but the challenge that I have been grappling with over the past year is trying to figure out a way to honestly account for the influence of the host.
Facilitators, hosts, designers and leaders are not neutral participants in a dialogic containers. They are in fact the reason why a hosted dialogic container exists. Without their injection of constants on a social field, we don not have a hosted space. A leader does not just show up in a room and “hide in the corner.” Open Space Technology is not a value-free method that refreshingly makes everything possible. A desired outcome for a process narrows what can be observed and requires those holding power to scaffold their attention open so that they do not foreclose the work of the work of group.
This is my attempt to offer something to our field of practice to help us see the way a dialogic container arises from the different weights of constraint on a field. There is no ideal place for a process to live within this triangle. There is only the question of what is needed now. And now. And now.
Thoughts, comments, critiques and questions all welcome.
Corina’s comments in full:
…structure and interaction are group processes, they belong to no one but design, as you’ve drawn it, is a role held by a person. So the triad puts two field-level phenomena and one individual actor at the same altitude, and I don’t think that holds… The facilitator’s power isn’t a third source of constraint entering from its own corner, it’s already expressed in structure (the chairs in a circle) and interaction (naming the method). Giving it a separate spot double-counts it, and might do the thing you say you want to avoid: it puts the facilitator back at the centre.. i look at it as one field of structure and interaction in which power is unevenly distributed, and the facilitator is just a dense node in it, to be named and tracked, not given its own axis…
… I think we both want the same thing: power made visible and accountable. Where we might diverge – and tell me if I’ve got you wrong – is in the underlying stance. I read the post as treating authority as presumptively suspect, something to be caught before it does harm. I look at authority as a natural feature of any field, something to be held well rather than guarded against. – for example I really like your threshold idea and once the crossing can be held by a compelling shared purpose, or what lingers after the host goes invisible in Open Space you’ve stopped describing a role and started describing something already in the field because uneven influence is what fields do. Someone becomes a dense node long before any facilitator arrives; the facilitator is just a dense node who came on purpose…
For me the absence of explicit authority isn’t neutrality. When a facilitator disowns their power, “I’m only holding space” , it doesn’t leave the room. It flows to whoever was already dense in the field, now the least accountable authority present. Disavowed authority is the most dangerous kind, because you can’t track what insists it isn’t there…Which is uncomfortable because if power is in the chairs and the invitation, there’s no outside. Self-effacement is a technique. Even “stewardship” is a form of power, maybe the most effective, because it works while feeling like care. So if I can’t purify my way out 🙂 [then] the question is, given that uneven power is unavoidable and productive, the medium, not the contaminant, what distribution do we want, and by what criteria do we judge it?
…one more reflection on your triangle coming from our exchange. For me structure and interaction are what a container is made of. They’re always fully there, even your pub group, with no design at all, has both. But intention isn’t like that. Its weight varies with the work and sometimes it’s near zero. That’s not a third thing the container is made of, it’s a way the made-of-stuff can be oriented, a direction the field leans, not a substance alongside the two others. And every case you reach for to justify the pole dissolves back into the two, when I let power sit unevenly across them. The threshold is the field reconfiguring, structure and interaction shifting as people cross into “being in something.” The Open Space is persistent structure: patterns that outlast the people. The leader’s intention is a dense node bending interaction. None of them is a third kind of thing, each is the existing field, unevenly weighted and pointed somewhere. So I don’t think intention needs a corner but what it does need is to be named. A corner says it’s a different dimension but i dont think it is. It’s the direction I’m leaning a field I’m already standing inside. And I think the corner actually works against the intention you named in our exchange because it gives the facilitator a place to stand. A clean, legitimate-looking spot off to the side, as if design were something I bring to the room rather than something I’m doing to it from within. That’s the separation you rejected, “design acts upon the field”, but the geometry actually reproduces it if you add it as a third pillar. draw intention as its own pole and I get to mistake my lean for a location…
One of the abiding problems in working on strategy is that people like to set goals for complex problems. In my experience the hardest part about accepting complexity as a real thing to be wrestled with, is that one really, truly doesn’t get to set goals.
What happens instead, is that one can decide on a direction of travel and then look for the different ways one might move in that direction. It’s deceptively simple, and the hardest part is stopping oneself from measuring progress against goals!
Today, as part of a post that aims to distinguish different kinds of systems thinking from anthro-complexity, Dave Snowden posts a useful summary of this approach, in answer to the question, does anthro-complexity have goals? (I’ve added links to anchor the references):
Yes, but not in the Senge sense. In complexity, you look for the adjacent possible: the next move or moves that are available from where you are, and that requires mapping at some scale first, understanding the terrain as it currently is, not designing what you’d like it to be. [Viable Systems Models] and System Dynamics both seek to understand context, too (Beer’s diagnosis, Forrester’s and Senge’s leverage points), but they do so by imposing their map on the situation rather than surveying it. They arrive with the five-system architecture, or the causal loop diagram, already built, and then locate the organisation’s pathology or leverage point inside categories that were fixed before anyone looked. That’s imposing a map, not doing cartography. [Michael C. Jackson’s] own move with [Critical Systems Thinking] is better: the lens is built from how the people actually in the situation perceive it, not from a pre-specified causal structure. But it’s still a lens rather than a map, assembled once in a workshop and treated as sufficient thereafter, which is exactly where the perception/reality problem and the scale problem both bite.
So there are goals in a complexity account of change, but they are just adjacent possibles, what the map shows is actually reachable from here, rather than targets set independently of, or prior to, the map. The goal is downstream of the cartography, not upstream of it.
That still leaves Jussi Mäkelä’s follow-up question from the comments: if “good” means “preserves future optionality,” isn’t the evaluation circular, optionality judging itself? It would be, if you were running one probe and checking it against one criterion. But that’s not the unit of analysis in a complex adaptive system. You run parallel probes around any coherent hypothesis, several small, safe-to-fail moves at once, not one big bet – which is also where the plural in the title comes from. It’s the next right things, not thing, because in a complex adaptive system you never do this one probe at a time; you do it several at once, deliberately redundant, so that no single move is carrying the whole bet. And in combination, the substrate they’re all running on changes. The landscape isn’t fixed while you sample it; your own probes are altering it as they go. So you’re never judging one probe against a static rule. You’re comparing how a set of variants performs against each other, on a landscape they’re reshaping. That’s not circular; it’s relative and comparative, which is a different thing. Optionality isn’t a yardstick applied from outside the process; it’s a property of the parallel set as a whole, visible only after you’ve run it.
That’s also the answer to the scale problem CST runs into. A workshop needs everyone in one room, at one time, which is exactly what doesn’t scale. Parallel probing doesn’t: mapping becomes continuous and distributed, run through far more human sensors, spread across an organisation, than any workshop could ever seat.
There’s also room for something like a north star: a long-range navigational aid, not a destination coordinate. Kennedy’s “put a man on the moon by the end of the decade” is the standard example, and it’s instructive for what it actually required. It left enormous room; it specified neither the rocket, the trajectory, nor the method of landing, only a direction and a deadline. And it was set only after considerable pre-work by von Braun and others to establish that it was technically feasible, not merely inspiring. A north star that skips that pre-work, or that closes down the room it needs to leave, turns back into a fixed goal wearing a nicer name.
The last piece is path dependency, and it’s where the two accounts diverge the most. Ours takes it as a first-order constraint: where you can go next depends on the specific history of how you got here, and the map has to represent that history rather than abstract away from it. Systems thinking, across the traditions in this exchange, mostly doesn’t. Idealised design brackets history out by assumption. VSM and SD build a causal architecture that’s meant to hold regardless of a particular organisation’s history. Even CST’s workshop, for all its attention to perception, produces a lens for the room on the day, not an account of how that room’s perceptions became path-dependent in the first place.
That’s the argument in outline. How you actually build the map, the mechanics of adjacent possibles, how probes get chosen, how a north star’s pre-work gets done without smuggling a fixed destination back in. I’ve written it up in multiple posts and need to summarise them at some stage in the future.
The post is useful because it traces the distinctions between different kinds of cause and effect assumptions behind different schools of thought that try to address the complexity problem. To most of us, this doesn’t appear obvious on the face of it, but it is really important to understand.
To wit, the important lessons I take from anthro-complexity, and from this post in particular are:
- Causality is not knowable in advance, so we cannot know what will take us from “here” to “there”
- We can find Our way with multiple safe-to-fail probes that help us understand what the “next right thing” to do is.
- Our current state matters, as does the context in which our work is embedded. That will make something more possible in this moment than others (and conversely “we’ve tried that before” might not be an accurate reflection of whether something will work now). This is called “path-dependency” in complexity.
- Data precedes the framework. If I bring a model of change to the work, then everything channels itself into that map or framework. Instead it’s best to start out looking at the current state of things through narratives and to make sense of that current situation together in order to give us a better chance to see different ways of moving in the direction we want to go.
- “Alignment” – traditionally speaking – is not desirable in complexity. Orientation to our direction of travel is useful. When we don’t know where we are going, having everyone pull together in the same direction introduces a tremendous amount of risk. We risk closing off our awareness of possibilities that might emerge along the way.
I’m curious about the ways in which you encounter “goals” in doing truly complex work.
Chris Mowles reflects on the question of whether the consultant/leader is a healer or revealer and offers his thoughts that the second position is better:
To take the second position is to work alongside the client/team in a way which is open to exploring what might be going on in the team, where the consultant/leader also considers themselves to be a part of the inquiry. This is an acknowledgement that the consultant/leader is unlikely to have special insight into the truth, may or may not have specialist knowledge or wisdom, along with everyone else in the team. In the words of the psychotherapist Donald Winnicott, the aim is to show the limits of the consultant/leader’s understanding, but still to encourage exploration and interpretation, to try and make some kind of sense together about what might be going on. The principal value of the consultant in particular is that they bring difference: they only have a temporary stake in the game. To inquire together is to do so speculatively and fallibly and the method is to work with grain of the dynamics of the team. Whatever insight emerges is the responsibility of everyone to do something about. Or not. There are always power relationships, but the idea is to lessen dependency on the consultant/leader and to support the group in becoming more mature.
My posts of the last few days on the sources of constraints that define the field of dialogic containers are leading me to see these questions everywhere. There is a reaching for what the right role should be. That depends on what is needed, what is being asked, and what is ethically demanded of the practitioner. But the question persists and the role of the practitioner is the one which folks are asking account of.