Geoff Brown put up a formidable blog post capturing the whole process of our recent designing, planning and facilitating a conference in Melbourne. If you are interested in multiple ways of learning and understanding process as well as ways of telling a story, set aside some time and go dive into what he has written. As one who was there, all I can say is, bang on, mate!
PS there should be some sort of blog award for “most formidable blog post.” This one would win it.
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I think it’s important to note that there is no research on “the art of hosting” that we know of but that there is much research out there in the world on what it is that we are working with and trying to evoke. One of the problems, as we are seeing in this thread, is that we don’t have the language or the conceptual frameworks to handle the extreme interiorty of this inquiry. In general, people looking for “research” on collective intelligence, emergence and social fields are looking for objective evidence that if we use participatory methods, things will be better than if we use top-down and mechanistic modes of working. This is such an elusive inquiry, let alone an easy project to undertake.
Of course there are models for looking at the world that balance interior and exterior modes of seeing the world, including Ken Wilber’s integral models and others. But I’d like to invite us to look beyond the Western scientific methodologies for some other clues.
In many traditional indigenous North American cultures, there are well established methodologies for understanding the world and understanding the social context for individual action and collective dynamics. Specifically, some of us in teh Art of Hosting CoP have been learning about Nuu-Chah-Nulth concepts of “tsawalk” which is a view of the world that is as foundational to Nuu-Chah-Nulth science as Cartesian world views are to western science. Tsawalk means “oneness” or “interdependence” and the methodology for understanding this world views is called “oosumich” which is a methodology in teh same way that empiricism is a methodology for Cartersian world views. Oosumich is both an individual and collective practice of accessing and understanding the collective and individual spiritual worlds (or the deep interior worlds, from which all forms derive their basic organizing pattern). It is a way to tap what is often called “source” and is therefore a very useful methodology for understanding design of structures and processes. Oosumich is also an evaluation method, being used both in real time and in reflective learning to gauge the various effects of things against the principle of Tsawalk. If something is understood to be contrary to Tsawalk, it can be said to have “failed” – if that is the right term, although I think there are more nuanced ways of looking at this.
Tsawalk has been written about in a very valuable book called “Tsawalk” a Nuu Chah-Nulth worldview” by Richard Atleo, who is a friend of our work. I sometimes use it in indigenous communities as an alternative to Theory U. Last december we structured an entire workshop on participatory process based on Tsawalk, and the participants were given Atleo’s book as a text. I wrote a little about it here.
At least one of our list members, Pawa Haiyupis, has been in this inquiry with me for several years. I think what it points to is thinking about the valid epistemologies that can help us understand what is happening in collective intelligence. It makes sense to me that we look at models that have been employed for centuries by societies who are collective in nature and whose concepts of the world are less about the split between subject and object and more about exploring the connection between things and their context, and especially the “unseen” dynamics that are at play in social and other fields.
Those of us working in the Art of Hosting community with indigenous communities have had this conversation and are in this inquiry with Navajo, Hawaiian, Anishnaabe, Skwuxw7mesh, Kwa’kwa’kawakw and other indigenous cultures. It doesn’t necessarily help us in putting western science to work, but I think it provides perspectives on ways of knowing that could open the inquiry in ways that are helpful from a foundational and conceptual point of view.
PS: Here is a report from a few years ago about using Tsawalk as the primary view to see systemic breakdowns in the child welfare system in BC.
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I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what I heard:
1. People support what they create. Where are you NOT co-creating? Even the most participatory process always have an edge of focused control or design. Sometimes that is wise, but more often than not we design, host and harvest without consciousness. Are we engaging with everyone who has a stake in this issue?
2. People act most responsibly when they care. Passion and responsibility is how work gets done. We know this from Open Space – as Peggy Holman is fond of saying, invite people to take responsibility for what they love. What is it you can’t NOT do? Sometime during this week I have heard someone describe an exercise where you strip away everything you are doing and you discover what it is you would ALWAYS do under any circumstances. Are we working on the issues that people really care about?
3. Conversation is the way that humans have always thought together. In conversation we discover shared meaning. It is the primal human organizing tool. Even in the corridors of power, very little real action happens in debate, but rather in the side rooms, the hallways, the lunches, the times away from the ritual spaces of authority and in the the relaxed spaces of being human. In all of our design of meetings, engagement, planning or whatever, if you aren’t building conversation into the process, you will not benefit from the collective power and wisdom of humans thinking together. These are not “soft” processes. This is how wars get started and how wars end. It’s how money is made, lives started, freedom realized. It is the core human organizing competency.
4. To change the conversation, change who is in the conversation. It is a really hard to see our own blind spots. Even with a good intention to shift the conversation, without bringing in new perspectives, new lived experiences and new voices, our shift can become abstract. If you are talking ABOUT youth with youth in the process, you are in the wrong conversation. If you are talking about ending a war and you can’t contemplate sitting down with the enemy, you will not end the war, no matter how much your policy has shifted. Once you shift the composition of the group, you can shift the status and power as well. What if your became the mentors to adults? What if clients directed our services?
5. Expect leadership to come from anywhere. If you expect leadership to come from the same places that it has always come from, you will likely get the same results you have always been getting. That is fine to stabilize what is working, but in communities, leadership can come from anywhere. Who is surprising you with their leadership?
6. Focus on what’s working, ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Energy for change in communities comes from working with what is working. When we accelerate and amplify what is working, we can apply those things to the issues in community that drain life and energy. Not everything we have in immediately useful for every issue in a community, but hardly anything truly has to be invented. Instead, find people who are doing things that are close to what you want to do and work with them and others to refine it and bring it to places that are needed. Who is already changing the way services are provided? Which youth organize naturally in community and how can we invite them to organize what is needed? What gives us energy in our work?
7. Wisdom resides within us. I often start Open Space meetings by saying that “no angels will parachute in here to save us. Rather, the angel is all of us together.” Experts can’t do it, folks. They can be helpful but the wisdom for implementation and acting is within us. It has to be.
8. Everything is a failure in the middle, change occurs in cycles. We’re doing new things, and as we try them, many things will “fail.” How do we act when that happens? Are we tyrannized by the belief that everything we do has to move us forward?
9. Learning is the only way we become smarter about what we do. Duh. But how many of us work in environments where we have to guard against failure? Are you allowed to have a project or a meeting go sideways, or is the demand for accountability and effectiveness so overwhelming that we have to scale back expectations or lie about what we are doing.
10. Meaningful work is a powerful human motivator. What is the deepest purpose that calls us to our work and how often do we remember this?
11. Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together. That doesn’t mean we can stop tsunamis, but it means that when we have tended to relationships, we can make it through what comes next. Without relationships our communities die, individuals give up, and possibility evaporates. The time for apologizing for relationship building is over. We need each other, and we need to be with each other well.
12. Generosity, forgiveness and love. These are the most important elements in a community. We need all of our energy to be devoted to our work. If we use our energy to blame, resent or hate, then we deplete our capacity, we give away our power and our effectiveness. This is NOT soft and cuddly work. Adam Kahane has recently written about the complimentarity of love and power, and this principle, more than any other is the one that should draw our attention to that fact. Love and power are connected. One is not possible without the other. Paying attention to this quality of being together is hard, and for many people it is frightening. Many people won’t even have this conversation because the work of the heart makes us vulnerable. But what do we really get for being guarded with one another, for hoarding, blaming and despising?
We could probably do a full three workshop on these principles (and in the circle just now we agreed to!). But as key organizing principles, these are brilliant points of reflection for communities to engage in conversations about what is really going on.
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Most of the indigensous languages of British Columbia are in danger of disappearing. Generations of residential schools, policies of marginalization and adaptation to English speaking society have rendered most of our communities mute in their own tongue. When I work in most places the only language you ordinarily hear is a prayer from and Elder or a conversation between to elderly speakers.
My friend Dustin Rivers is trying to change that. I’ve written before about how he is using an fun and interactive fluency game called Where Are Your Keys? To get people speaking his language, Skwxwu7mesh snichim, the language of the territory in which I live. Last week he took 16 or so kids from our homelearning support centre and taught them some basic conversational Skwxwu7mesh. In a couple of hours, the kids were identifying theings, responding to commands and directions and learning a little about the names and history of our home place.
Now Dustin is set to host a conference in Vancouver on June 5-6 for indigenous language activists from around BC to come and learn about how to use fluency games to get people using these languages so that they don’t die. Everyone is welcome. If you are interested, register and get thee to the gathering. It’s impressive what Dustin is up to and it’s EASY to learn it.
What if languages were saved and reawakened through fun? What better way to dodge the bullet?
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A quote from DH Lawrence in relation to what Lost is really about:
We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, which we have reached, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with subsequent self-glorification… my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.
via What the Lost Finale is Really About | Religion Dispatches.
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