A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system Photo by alastairb * NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it. At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation. At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or …
One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done. At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field. On that one we have been working with …
The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act. There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.
Photo by Darwin Bell Hyperlinks – follow these leads a thread. Haiku resources My friend Thomas Arthur, who weaves with gravity, posts Wooshclang! Richard Sweeney weaves with paper. A beautiful and complete list of what the world is made of. Does your disaster plan include conversation to mobilize quickly? Or is it still expert driven? Nice summary of Senge’s core concepts on Learning Organizations You, and many other living creature, have a billion and a half heartbeats to change the world. Change management myths. (Not including the myth that change can be managed, but still…) Doug’s blog: Footprints in …
From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work. We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt. There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work. But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate. People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold. …