Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.
The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.
The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.
The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.
The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.
Yesterday at the end of our workshop day one of our participants looked out to the bay and saw a stirring in the water. He asked what it could be and I suggested it was a reef appearing at low tide, or a seal chasing herring or the Goldeneyes who have been engaged in their weird breeding behaviour of running on water and diving below the surface.
He said that it didn’t look like any of that, and when I turned around, I saw a small pod of dolphins ripping through Mannion Bay. I have never seen dolphins in the bay before, so we ran down to the beach and watched them move between the boats and back out into the channel. Our whole group was in awe of the scene, moved by what we were seeing, deep in the appreciation of these creatures.
This group has continually talked about how beautiful it is here on Bowen, how friendly people are, how lucky we are to have the forests and the sea and the park right by the village. Some went out to Docs on Friday and were blown away by Rob Bailey and Teun Scheut playing jazz and one of group members even joined in for a version of Nature Boy. They have enjoyed themselves here, and have opened my eyes to the qualities of place that we often take for granted. And we got to witness a surprise that even the most seasoned Islanders were delighted by.
Location:Cardena St,Bowen Island,Canada
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting:
- on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own,
- participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something
- the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold.
- the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, opportunities and knowledge.
- as we move through the four fold practice we evolve from a learner to a community of learners to a community that learns. This last shift is often the hardest.
- at the core of this practice is intention. To come to the practice with intention is to activate it.
- it is surprising how quickly we can move to co-creation when we have practiced together once, we did a signing exercise that took the group through two rounds of co-creation and we quickly moved to creating music together that was unimaginable 10 minutes before.
I love how groups just spark insights. You can teach this stuff dozens of dozens of times and there is always something new to learn.
This video on The Four-Fold Practice was made by Kevin McKeever for InCommons, the initaitve we were working with last month in Minnesota.
This video really captures why we feel that this simple four folded practice lies at the heart of what the Art of Hosting is. Everything we teach and practice under the name “Art of Hosting” springs from an integrated practice of these four things. Enjoy.
Yesterday I was giving a webinar and talking about some core Art of Hosting practices. We spent a while covering the four fold practice and then looked at the way in which various archetypal organizational paradigms play out in different organizational settings. I was trying to emphasize the idea of “practice” so that the participants would know that there is no right way of doing this work but rather the work itself is engaging in a constant practice, a constant searching for mastery.
Towards the end of the call a participant reflected that all of this was rather too much to take in all at once. She wondered aloud how she would be able to implement it all.
This is a common problem with learning, I find. Somewhere along the line many people imagine that being in a learning situation – a class, a course, a webinar or so on – means that they will receive a direct transfer of skill which they can then go and apply. While there are some kinds of learning that work like this, most learning, especially as it applies to leadership or facilitation is rather an invitation to practice, meaning that you begin and develop a competence over your craft in application.
So how to begin?
The advice I gave our participant yesterday was to begin by noticing first of all. Take two weeks and notice where the four fold practice appears in your own life, what you do unconsciously to become present, to participate in conversation, to host space and to co-create. Make a list of places whee you do this and notice how you do this. Raise your own natural practice to the level of conscious practice so that you can use that as a basis to extend it in new ways.
Beginning a learning journey helps to set a learning cycle into practice. It starts with noticing, with acting and then with reflecting before repeating again. I sometimes think that beyond any particular skill that can be learned, the skill of active reflective learning is perhaps the most important. It is how we create a learning journey for ourselves that has the possibility of taking us to mastery.