I’ve just finished co-hosting the Art of Hosting training with my mates Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Brenda Chaddock, We spent four days with 27 people learning the art of hosting and convening meaningful conversations. There is much that I learned in that, as I always do when I am teaching, but what seems most present for me this morning is Tenneson’s persistent quest to find the simplest way to host meaningful conversations.
As a facilitator, I believe strongly that we should meet only when there is a need. It is best to hold a meeting when you don’t know what to do. And when you are at that spot, a meeting serves to help you and your colleagues find the wisdom, however large or small, to make good decision and act smartly.
In the Art of Hosting we teach the “chaordic stepping stones,” essentially a collection of things to pay attention to as you think about designing meetings, projects or organizations. These include knowing the need, knowing the purpose of the meeting and knowing who should be there.
And then, once you are together, there are a few simple tools that come in handy:
1. Be present. Being present means simply turning off all of the distractions that take us away from the question at hand. If there is a more important place we need to be we should be there rather than in a meeting. And so, if this meeting is the most important place to be, be here in this meeting. This is a tough one to live in a world of cell phones, blackberries and wireless internet, but our best work requires us to be fully present to the task at hand.
2. Have a good question. It is harder than you think to find the most important question for the need. But a meeting that is called around a question that matters is a meeting that will work an be worthwhile. So even if it is a regular Monday morning staff meeting, drop a good question into it…”What is up for you this week?” “What challenge do you think we need to face together this week?” “How can we be a little smarter together?”
3. Use a listening piece. A listening piece is a physical object that helps slow down the conversation. When you hold the object, you speak, when you are finished speaking, you put the object down. For important conversations, there is a need to speak deliberately and listen deliberately. The listening piece focuses our attention on what is being said and causes us to speak wisely. I don’t use a listening piece all the time or even all the way through a meeting, but at least a meeting where we begin with it and end with seems to make the conversation that much more deliberate. And, if you find yourself getting off track in the middle when contention and struggle arises, return to the listening piece to slow it down so we can get back to the wisdom that is in the room.
4. Work with mates. It is always better if there is a friend working with you. Someone to hold your back, bounce ideas off and help to discern things. We are wiser when we are working together, not when we are striking out on our own. When we are stuck, having a team mate matters.
5. Harvest. Find a way to harvest what you are learning, Take notes, draw a mind map, make commitments, conclude with an agreement. Harvesting is an art in itself, but a good meeting is always judged by it’s ability to produce a good result, and harvesting, in it’s many forms, ensures that that will happen.
6. Be wise. Take wise decisions and act wisely. After all, the whole reason for meeting in the first place was to do things a little smarter and a little better, wasn’t it?
Yesterday, we were sitting in the forest, after the Art of Hosting was over and talking about this simple pattern and what it means to find a few simple practices to hone our skills. I had a strong insight about how one learns to do this. It’s quite simple really: practise. There are countless opportunities in a lifetime to meet people in formal and informal settings, in meetings, at work, on the bus, at parties, in families…If you really want to get better and better at facilitating and hosting conversations, practice the simplest tools everywhere. Next time you meet someone at a party get a little curious, and throw a question out there: “What do you do? Really? What is it like to do that in the world?”
Repeat as necessary.
[tags]artofhosting, Tennson Woolf, Brenda Chaddock, Teresa Posakony[/tags]
What is held
in the curl of new growth
is the lens through which
we see the peripheral light
streaming into the open eyeAnd a tension holds it there
meniscus rapt
membranes meeting and gently resting
in one another’s curves.
…and…
We don’ susbscribe to a lot of magazines around here, but one that gets read the moment it arrives is Life Learning Magazine. There is always something interesting or inspirational in almost every article, a level of quality that is amazing – but not surprising – for a small circulation publication.
From an article in the July/August issue on mindful learning comes this great gem from John Holt:
Since we can’t know what knowledge will be needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.
Great advice to carry around, especially for designers of learning programs. The difference between training and learning is captured in that quote; those who confuse the two will find themselves heading down one path while the othe heads away in the opposite direction.
[tags]training, john holt, life learning[/tags]
Kevin Harris, at Neighbourhoods has a nice rant about capacity building today:
As far as I can recall, capacity building the community sector has not been the problem anywhere I’ve worked. The problem is relationships. Too many people in positions of power are behaving in disempowering ways towards residents and towards those who experience exclusion, and then using the notion of capacity-building as a smokescreen. If there’s any capacity building to be done, it’s in terms of getting these people to behave in a civilised and grown-up manner towards those they are supposed to be supporting, or just get out of the way. If we get these people out of the way, IMHO, the capacity of the community sector will always reassert itself.
I tend to agree with him. In the world of First Nations community development, “capacity building” became a buzzword in the early nineties, around the time of the Royal Commission. I think it started out innocently enough as a term meaning to build up the ability of communities to self-govern and self-manage. It was always talked about without context however, and I have met few people working in indigenous communities here who understand capacity building in terms of asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry or other similar bodies of thought and practice.
The problem now with the term is that is has become completely degraded. When people talk about “capacity building” now I have to ask them what they mean. In its worst connotations, government uses the term to mean “Aboriginal communities taking more responsibility for their own futures” which is often code for “we want out of this.” Likewise on the community side, I hear the word “capacity” used in place of “funding” so that capacity building becomes about getting more funding to do new things. (Of course there are many examples that are counter to what I am saying, but this is a general trend).
I think we would do well to forget the term “capacity building” as Kevin suggests and just focus on what the real need is. By engaging in collaborative work around these well articulated needs, we create the relationships necessary to sustain the work over time. That creates a learning community, and only through self-organization, self-education and self-empowerment, can a community understand, harness and realize its own capacities.
[tags]capacity building[/tags]
For the past two years, I have been active in the Art of Hosting fellowship. This is a global community of practitioners dedicated to uncovering the new and emerging forms of meaningful conversation and organizational shape. Together we have been conducting trainings, working together on projects and deeply learning our patterns.
Several of our mates in this fellowship have been working hard to bring about an online presence for our work, and today it went live. So I introduce to you the brand new Art of Hosting site, a place that describes what we are doing, how we are doing it and invites you to join us. Please take some time to poke around there and draw some inspiration from the amazing resources and content that has been assembled.
And if you are interested in exploring this pattern more deeply, there are several opportunities to do so in upcoming trainings, including one here on Bowen Island BC in a couple of weeks.
[tags]art of hosting[/tags]