Over the years the Art of Hosting community of practice has developed some methods for large group process facilitation that have become standards alongside the methods we have imported into our work, such as Circle Way, Open Space Technology and World Cafe.
One of these, Pro Action Cafe, is one of my go to methods for hosting small and rapid fire project development. Ria Baeck, one of the co-developers of this method along with Rainer von Leoprechting shared the Pro Action Cafe origin story on the Art of Hosting list, and so here are her words and observations, for posterity:
Quite some years back – Rainer will know the date – I was hosting my ever first World Café in Brussels; in a back room of a real café. One of the participants was Rainer. He had been hosting what he called Pro Action groups of change agents in the Eur.institutions. It is was structured as groups of 10-12 people who came together one evening per month. As there were more people asking to join, he felt the pressure on his evening time. Being in this World Café, he realised that there was a key in scaling the number of people, being present at the same time.
So, we joined our forces to find a way of how the purpose of his Pro Action Groups could be blended with the key features of the World Café. We actually had a meeting in Mechelen, a Flemish city, and walked around… I remember it as a collective sensing of how we could blend the piece of Open Space – where people bring there own topics and questions – with the element of World Café, where people mix and are talking about the same question in each round. That’s how we came up with the 3 rounds and its 3 questions.
We then started in Brussels with regular Pro Action Cafés, with some food and drinks right after office time, and then diving into the Pro Action Café. All kind of questions came forward, from very, very personal to very professional and more. This open Pro Action Café is still going on in Brussels, although there have been different hosting teams holding it over the years.
Some people come and join to just see what Participatory Leadership is about – as Art of Hosting is called within the Eur. Institutions. I guess that it started to travel the world through one of the hosts, working with Toke and Monica in the Eur.context. Ursula or Helen probably know more here.
Amazing to see it travel to so many places and situations. Something I could have never imagined up front. Lesson here is: don’t hold back when you feel passioned to do something, you never know where it will have some impact.
Isn’t that beautiful image? Here on the west coast of Canada the Douglas-firs and cedars and hemlocks that cover the mountains and islands rake the sky for moisture. As the rains return in the fall, the trees help the forest drink. Rain showers pass through and for hours afterwards, the trees drip water onto the forest floor, feeding all the understory and the mushrooms that keep them alive.
That image was one given to me by Chris Weaver, a fellow Open Space Technology facilitator and a poet and a friend who spent years on this coast, south of me, in Washington State. I say friend, in a particularly 21st century way. We never met in person, but the beauty of his words, our shared professional growth and our email exchanges from 1998 to 2006 were rich and playful and full of depth. He brought out a part of myself that I loved.
Chris died the other day, the second of my friends this summer to succumb to suicide from depression.
He is being remembered by friends and colleagues the world over, because his death was untimely and his life was one that touched many people very deeply, even if we were not always at his side.
When my father in law died in 2004, he consoled me this way:
my whole heart descends with you to that place of grieving, all interlaced withthe joy of life well-lived – the test so finely and passionately played insun and rain and mud.
He was referring to Test cricket in that blessing, a sport about which he knew nothing but he enjoyed witnessing the banter between me and Alan Stewart about the Australia-India test series of 2004. He could take something like that and, yes, weave it into a consolation.
Later that month, our mutual friend Ashley Cooper hosted a small conversation on her blog about how we all wanted to be remembered, and Chris shared this:
it’s funny, i have two pieces of music that are back-to-back on a cd called “the gentle side of john coltrane,” and for some reason when i listen to them, i often think, those two songs are all i need for my memorial. they are about feeling it all, and releasing it all into joy. track 11 is “in a sentimental mood,” duke ellington’s tune, a rare time when coltrane and ellington recorded together. track 12 is called “dear lord,” with mccoy tyner back on the keys, & if my life has a theme song, that’s it.
since you’re taking notes for the event ash, they’re both slow-dances
Well, the time has come for us to remember Chris, and so, here are those two pieces of music.
In that post I shared a vision for my own memorial in which I said that I’d love an Open Space with everyone who knew me to be gathered together to talk about good work they could do in the world. To that idea Chris Weaver simply replied:
“i’ll be there, chris (even if my own memorial comes first!)”
Chris’ words are spanning the globe right now as his colleagues and friends remember him. Cherish these drops of rain. Long after the storm has passed, they continue to slake our thirst.
Godspeed friend. See you at my memorial.
Last week I was a guest keynote facilitator at Econous2017, the annual gathering of Canadian community economic development practitioners. In all, 450 people from across the country gathered together in a traditional conference of panels, workshops and tours to learn and develop their own practices of social entrepreneurship, community development, planning and research.
The conference organizers, led by the courageous Barb Davies of Momentum Consulting were resolved to make at least part of the conference a participatory plenary. The idea was to put the intelligence of the network to use and to ground and apply the learning and experiences of the previous three days on actual projects. We secured 250 small tables that only seated four, which is essential for doing participatory work in a conference setting. Rounds of 6, 8 or 10 people are useless as people cannot hear each other and they are seated too far apart. The inimitable Avril Orloff designed some templates for us and Matt Mayer and Brenna Atnikov were on hand to help hold space and to be good sounding boards for design and harvesting ideas. Team, tools, physical set up all in place. We had a plan.
Pro Action Cafe is a method that was invented by Rainer von Leoprechting and Ria Baeck in Brussels in the early 2000s. It is now a core method in Art of Hosting trainings worldwide, as it is a brilliant combination of the self-organizing nature of an Open Space Technology meeting with the constraints of time, space and questions of a World Cafe. You can learn more about the core method by watching a short video or by downloading a user-guide to the process. While there is lots of scope for variation, the basic flow of questions: from need and purpose, through to what’s missing, to next steps, are as simple a planning framework as one can imagine. I’ve used the process in groups as big as 120, so 300 was going to be a new challenge.
For the conference we needed to customize the process in our planning and in real time. The initial idea was to have participants at the conference post project topics all week long on a long clothesline outside the plenary room. This was intended to save time, as having 80 or more projects hosts identify and name their projects in a plenary room would be massively time consuming and boring.
It quickly became very clear to me that everyone had a very different idea of what that clothesline was, and soon it became filled with information about things people were doing in addition to projects that people were working on. It was a cool news wall, but it wasn’t serving our function of being an emerging agenda wall for the final day’s plenary session.
This meant that we had to adjust our work on the fly. One important lesson for keynote facilitators when working with a conference is never expect people to remember instructions. When you are working with a group of people who are moving in 400 different directions, they can only respond together to directions for the next thing to do. Give them one instruction at a time. Conferences are bubbly and chaotic and participants are there for individual learning. Group activities need to take place within a well managed but not overly controlled container.
When it came time to begin our Pro Action Cafe on Friday morning following a panel presentation and some great rhythmic improv by Troo Knot. I knew we had to change our plan. Instead of asking people to remember what they had posted on the clothesline we took the 40 or so cards and laid them on the stage. I then led the group through these steps:
- Everyone move to a table of four.
- Anyone who posted a project on the clothesline who wants to work on it, retrieve it from the front and return to your table and sit down.
- At all the other tables, the first person to sit down gets to host a project for the morning. Host write there project on a table card
- Once every table had a host, participants had two minutes to cruise the room and find a group to work with.
- We then proceeded through a normal Pro-Action cafe.
This wasn’t a 100% ideal situation, as there may have been more than one person at a group of four that wanted to champion a project, but when you are working with a group of 300 people in an on the fly design, you simply can’t accommodate a very nuanced approach to individual desires. At any rate, there were no complaints at the end of the morning that people didn’t get to champion a project. One quarter of the room got to bring projects into the space and everyone else fulfilled the role of listeners and advisors. I let people find the projects they wanted to work on, but only a maximum of three advisers could join any round. I also encouraged people to just randomly sit at a table and offer a naive perspective to the work, one which can be very valuable.
Following three rounds of work (which included a short break) we had a popcorn feedback session where people stood to offer reflections and gratitudes on what they had received during the morning to the plenary
We had a number of really interesting projects emerge on the day covering the full spectrum of community economic development from food production to access to capital for entrepreneurs to community renewable energy models to creating labyrinths in a city. Participants left with filled in templates that captured their need and purpose, new ideas to improve the project and a list of resources and people that might help them move forward.
It takes attention and a small team, but creating participatory and productive sessions in large conferences is possible. It means disrupting traditional conference organizing and conference hosting, but the upside is that participants get to work with the people in the room, get to exert agency over their learning agendas and everyone gets a chance to participate. I can’t overestimate how important it is work with good physical space set ups and to build in more time than you think you need in order for participants to not be rushed. Moving three hundred people around a room is a lot of work, and the herd moves slowly!
Keynote facilitation is something I have done lost of in the past ten years. I’d be happy to chat with you about making your next conference more interactive and truly participatory beyond accepting questions to a panel from the floor, or having people tweet on a back channel to be engaged. Pro Action Cafe might just be the perfect tool to bring a conference to action in a short period of time and put the inspiration and learning to work.
One of the staple toolsets in the Art of Hosting community is the Chaordic Stepping Stones. Based on the chaordic lenses that Dee Hock originally put together, this tool is both a planning and project management tool that is at the very core of my work.
Now, T=thanks to Karen Mendez and Jose na Maturana of www.glocalminds.com I now have a Spanish translation of my version of the chaordic stepping stones tool. The document can be downloaded for free and is licensed, like all my work, under the Creative Common BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be shared and developed, for non-commercial use and with attribution..
This will be a useful tool for the Chaordic Design online course that I am offering with Beehive Productions in the new year. And of course the English version, which is slightly expanded, is available for use by all.
John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius.
The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I think he’s still best experienced in his books, whether the long form poems of the 1990s or the shorter works of his earlier years.
I am astounded at the breadth of his inspiration and the way he was able to draw meaning from disparate images and weave them together in a way that presented a musical, rhythmic poem that had what the Irish fiddler Martin Hayes has called “The Lonesome Note.” In his work you can feel the pining for the meaning that is his alone, privately held, implied, offered to you to discover or, in the absence of your ability to relate to what he is saying, to leave you with a sensation, an in-breath, sometimes an uneasy feeling, sometimes a feeling of delight.
He was prolific and left a huge legacy of work and a massive imprint on American and world poetry. Here’s one, sort of randomly picked, that talks about the sanitization of American life and reveals something of his poetics as well.
The One Thing That Can Save AmericaIs anything central?Orchards flung out on the land,Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?Are place names central?Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?As they concur with a rush at eye levelBeating themselves into eyes which have had enoughThank you, no more thank you.And they come on like scenery mingled with darknessThe damp plains, overgrown suburbs,Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.These are connected to my version of AmericaBut the juice is elsewhere.This morning as I walked out of your roomAfter breakfast crosshatched withBackward and forward glances, backward into light,Forward into unfamiliar light,Was it our doing, and was itThe material, the lumber of life, or of livesWe were measuring, counting?A mood soon to be forgottenIn crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadowIn this morning that has seized us again?I know that I braid too much on my ownSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.They are private and always will be.Where then are the private turns of eventDestined to bloom later like golden chimesReleased over a city from a highest tower?The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,And you know instantly what I mean?What remote orchard reached by winding roadsHides them? Where are these roots?It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.All the rest is waitingFor a letter that never arrives,Day after day, the exasperationUntil finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,The two envelope halves lying on a plate.The message was wise, and seeminglyDictated a long time ago, but its time has stillNot arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limitedSteps that can be taken against dangerNow and in the future, in cool yards,In quiet small houses in the country,Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.