I just opened space here for 550 people at the Food and Society Conference. This was the biggest OST gathering I have ever facilitated, and it’s huge in importance as well. There must have been close to 100 sessions proposed for today and I’m just gathering my energy for a long day and night ahead of compiling the proceedings document.
I’m a stranger to the good food movement in the United States, and so it’s hard for me to know what the agenda looks like, but like all Open Space events I trust that it is what is needed right now. Our organizing question was: “If you take the margins and social justice seriously, what are the bold conversations you need to have to amplify and accelerate the impact of good food.” I stepped into the circle following a powerful talk on structural racism in the food system given by today’s provocateur, Maya Wiley from the Center for Social Inclusion. She dropped a great challenge into the centre of the circle, speaking about the radical nature of this room full of people. People were ready to get to work. I have rarely seen a flood to the centre of the room as I just experienced. It’s kind of overwhelming.
So the participants are in a break now, and soon enough the remainder of the day will be self-organized. Learning a lot about working with great friends, all of whom had my back this morning and had the logistics nailed down pretty well. We had to prepare 140 breakout spaces, in a conference facility that is over the top luxurious and is pretty concerned about the aesthetics of randomly places pods of chairs. Within these constraints, the conference staff have been great and the hosting team rocks. It’s impossible to do one’s best work alone.
You can follow along with the gathering at the Food and Society website.
[tags]fas2008[/tags]
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Taking a moment here in the newsroom to blog a little about the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society 2008 gathering here in Phoenix. It is halfway through day one of this two-plus day gathering to look at connecting and inspiring leadership in the good food movement across the USA.
For the past nine months my Art of Hosting colleagues Tim Merry, Toke Moeller, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Monica Nissen and Phil Cass and I have been working with the Kellogg Foundation and their partner Winrock International to craft a conference that was fundamentally different from the previous eight conferences that have supported this movement. Last year, Tim was invited to attend Food and Society as a slam poet to help with the harvest at that gathering. As a result of him sitting in the design meetings and debriefs, he was able to show up more and more as the process consultant that he is most of the time. After inviting the possibility that the conference could shift to focus on relationships, Kellogg opened up and decided to try something different, to connect and inspire leadership instead of a traditional conference format of keynote speaker and break out session. That’s how we all got involved in the design and hosting of a gathering of 550 people looking at fundamentally changing the American food system.
This year we are tipping the conference design much more into a participatory and engaged gathering. We are in the middle of a Good Food Village Square, featuring 17 projects from around the United States who are sharing their leading edge questions, rather than slick presentations. They are inviting people to work with them to address issues like scaling good food distribution, working to alleviate the poverty embedded in the food production system, growing small operations larger while retaining core principles, and engaging community in the production, distribution and consumption of their own food for health, culture and prosperity.
Instead of keynote speakers, we have provocateurs, including Norma Flores, an incredible woman who works with the Association of Farmworker Opportunities Programs spoke this morning of her experiences growing up as a farmworker from a very young age. She spoke of the child labour practices, the health risks and the exploitation of farm workers to produce cheap food cheaply. We also had an incredible montage about migrant farmworkers from The Migrant Project to focus our thinking on the social justice imperative for this movement. Later on today we have a world cafe to sense what is cooking with good food.
Tomorrow we’re into Open Space for most of the day, looking at how to organize for action within the good food movement and see what good food can also do. 550 is the largest Open Space I have ever run, but despite the logistics being more complex, the feeling is the same. Working with good friends also makes a huge difference.
[tags] fas2008[/tags]
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I had a lovely conversation the other day with Rob Paterson and Johnnie Moore as we discussed three videos that are lovely examples of living systems in action. It was all recorded and uploaded at The Phoric, and I encourage you to go there and have a look and listen to our conversation.
Thanks to Rob and Johnnie for the invitation. What fun!
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From a conversation with Tenneson this morning, we were playing with a pattern of shifting systems that flows from skilfully hosted conversations. A simple pattern emerged, which is about bringing people together, shifting power and developing and hosting emerging beauty. In a linear form it goes like this:
- Gather people together from wholeness, including inviting the deeply personal into the work.
- Understand and work with a willingness to shift power.
- Cultivate curiosity: what could we really do together?
- Harvest what our Navajo friends call “the beauty way” a way forward that serves life and keeps people engaged in their pursuit for change to the better.
Simple eh? Right. The shifting power one is especially interesting to me. Working with leaders to move control and power to their people is the most challenging aspect of working systemic change. Without this shift, only constrained action is possible and sustainability is difficult. With a shift, many things can unfold and the people themselves can take responsibility for the results.
Where this really hits the ground, it seems to me, is in the process of invitation and calling. Leaders who are callers must be willing to let go of power and control if new levels of work and being are to emerge. They also have to shift the culture of the organization or community from an answer-based one to a curiosity-based one, where inquiry and co-sensing becomes a normal way of working. Communicating this in an invitation to a gathering is difficult and not adequate. We look at many more ways to invite that builds a field of inquiry, an appetite for curiosity so that when people meet together it is simeply one phase in an ongoing project to change the way things are done.
So what are your experiences in shifting power and generating curiosity, especially in large groups?
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A great quote from a fun article on knuckleballers:
“Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox” – Willie Stargill.