We’ve just completed our 17th annual Art of Hosting here on Bowen Island. For 17 years I have welcomed nearly 1000 people to our home place through more than 50 workshops we have conducted here. I always appreciate seeing the island through the eyes of our visitors. And so, coming fresh off of that experience, I responded today on our community facebook page to a question posed by a long time Islander, Rob Wall: What is “The Bowen Way.”
This was my answer.
It changes over time and with waves of people who come and go. As a person who has been here for 18 years, I’ve been here long enough to see our culture goes through at least one major wave. Of course, I have no idea what it was like before I moved here or how I and others changed it when we came in the early 2000s. Whatever The Bowen Way is, it is both good and bad, positive and negative, visible and invisible. Every small community has its way, and over time, all ways change.
A long time ago I committed to living here for the rest of my life, and that means paying attention to the changes and embracing what is good and helpful, and rejecting what isn’t. And as waves of new people have arrived (more than 30% of our population has turned over in the past five years, and we have lost many elders who have died or cashed out and moved away) new ways emerge. For those of us that have been here for a long time, sometimes those new ways are as confounding as the old ways are to newcomers. As long as I have lived here there have been these kinds of funny tensions and confusions between old-timers and newcomers. If we can have a sense of humour about ourselves, and remember that really nothing makes sense, then it eases the tensions between folks that believe that THEIR way of seeing things is the right way. We’re all guilty at some point of becoming a bit precious about our views of the world.
I have learned that if I can’t embrace change, then I am liable to be encased in suffering as my projections of how things “should be” fall away to be replaced by stuff I don’t understand. I am so grateful for the many “new” people that have arrived here since I have, who have added immeasurably to this place, and also grateful to the “oldtimers” who keep the traditions I love alive and remind me what is uniquely beautiful about our community.
Bowen Island will never perfectly be the place you think it is or want it to be. It will always delight and disappoint you. Like any long term relations, you will fall in and out of love with it, and your view of it will change over time. Stuff you thought was essential to the place will fade away and be replaced with new cool things that you never dreamed of.
The character of a place is always in flux and change, like the seasons and weather, like the cycles of the forests and sea around ourselves, like the people we know and the ones we haven’t met yet. That is is the real Bowen Way, lives that come and go in waves, all linked into a complex mix of friendships, animosities, and surprises, on 20 square miles of rock surrounded by the Salish Sea.
Enjoy the ride. It’s easier that way.
It feels like Christmas Eve around here. I am sitting at home on Bowen Island and our house is full of friends and colleagues Amanda Fenton and Kelly Poirier who have now retired to bed. Along with Caitlin, we have completed a long and productive day of planning and design for what will be the 17th annual Art of Hosting on Bowen Island. This evening I am sitting by my fire, finishing a dram of Laphroaig and remembering the first one in 2003 when Toke Moeller and I sat by this same fireplace discussing teaching and learning and what this practice is really all about.
Back then the Bowen Island gatherings were hosted at Rivendell, a beautiful contemplative retreat centre on a small mountain above the village of Snug Cove on Bowen Island. That first one in 2003 was hosted by Myriam Laberge, Brenda Chaddock, Toke, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony (if I recall correctly) and supported by Marks and Marg McAvity, who we (and still are) stewards of Rivendell. That was the first Art of Hosting for me, and it was really a coming home.
For years I had been working as a facilitator specializing in large group participatory methods and I had a strong sense that there was a leadership practice in the way we hosted Open Space and World Cafe, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Luckily Toke and his partner Monica Nissen and friends Jan Hein Nielsen and Finn Voldtofte and others had done the ahrd thinking and realized that great participatory meeting had four characteristics: people were present, they were all participating, they were being hosted and they were co-creating something. The Danes postulated that increasing these patterns would bring more engagement, more dignity and more emergence in conversations and so they articulated the four-fold practice of theArt of Hosting, which are the four simple touchstones of presence, participation, hosting and co-creation.
In 2003 I came home to this and was invited the next year to come as an alumni and then the following year where I was invited to be on the hosting team . Every year since 2005 I have been pleased to welcome people to our island, known as Nex?wle?lex?wm in the Squamish language, to experience the Art of Hosting. SInce that time I have been privileged to be on nearly 100 hosting teams for Art of Hosting gatherings around the globe in places as diverse and far flung as Japan, South Africa, Estonia, Ireland, Turkey, and all over Canada and the US. I have worked with dozens of stewards of this practice, and thousands of practitioners, learning every day more and more about how to create social processes that truly affirm human dignity, invite folks into all kinds of storywork, and help people listen to each other in a way that makes it easier and maybe a little more possible for them to co-create the futures they need.
A couple of years ago my friend Scott Macklin caught the spirit of our gathering in a short film. It reflects the kind of pace and deep learning that characterizes the Bowen Island gathering, and is a beautiful record of our 2017 team. Have a watch:
So, as I get ready for bed tonight, I’m feeling deep gratitude for my teachers, especially Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen who guided me onto this path of my life’s work, and who have supported me over these 15 years with love and care. And I’m looking forward to meeting these folks that are coming, each of them like a little Christmas gift, full of surprise and delight and curiosity and possibility.
I travel around many different kinds of organizations. Many of them preach the mantra that goes something like “it’s okay to fail here. Please take risks and try new things!” Unfortunately, when I look around I can’t see much infrastructure in place that allows the work context to be safe enough to fail.
An organization needs to build learning and experimentation into its operations, especially if it is required to respond to changing conditions, improvements in services, or new ideas. And so the idea that “we want people to take risks” is promoted, often alongside an exhortation to do so prudently but really with no further direction than that.
Anyone who has worked in a large organization will know that risk-taking is perilous. There are many ways to be punished for doing something wrong, and the worst punishments are the invisible ones: shaming, exclusion, a tattered reputation, eroded trust, political maneuvering that takes you away from access to power and influence. Not to mention the material punishments of reduced budgets, demotions, poor performance reviews, and limited permission to try new things in the future.
Failure in context
Before going any further, let’s talk about what I mean by failure. Using Cynefin, we can focus on the difference between failure in complicated contexts and failure complex contexts. When we have a complicated failure in a stable and linear and predictable system, the answer is to fix it right away. Ensure you have the right experts on tap, do a good analysis of the situation and apply a solution.
In complex adaptive systems, failure is context-dependent. Here failure is an inevitable part of learning and doing new things. Because complex problems demand us to create emergent solutions, we are likely to get somewhere when we can try many different things and see what works and what doesn’t. Dave Snowden calls this “safe-to-fail” and it means taking a small bet, based on a hunch that what you are doing is coherent with the nature of the system and where you want to go, and acting to see what happens. If it fails, you stop it, and if it works, you support it.
I think I once heard Dave say something like “probes in a system should fail 8 out of 10 times or you aren’t trying to find emergent practice.” That is certainly a rubric I find helpful. This means that in developing new things, you should expect to fail 80% of the time and to do that requires that you put into place a system for supporting failure and learning.
Stuck on a cliff
Imagine you are free rock climbing – no ropes or belyaing – and there is a handhold you are reaching for that requires you to do something you’ve never done before. Your partner says “you’ll never learn to solve this problem if you don’t try something. Don’t be afraid to fail.” Far from being imbued with confidence, you are likely to be frozen with fear, seeing all the ways that things could go wrong. Better to just stick to what you know, and don’t try the move.
If however, you are in this same scenario, but you are roped up and belayed by someone you trust, you can feel safe to try the move knowing that if you fail, you will be caught and you will have a chance to try a different strategy. As you develop mastery in the move, you can use it more and more in your rock climbing life, and you may loosen the safety constraints as you develop more capability
Implications for facilitation and leadership
Safety is about creating good constraints so that your people can take risks and know they will be safe if they get it wrong. The job of leaders is to set the constraints for action in such a way that a safe space is available for work. This can take the form of limited time, money, the scope of action, or other things so that folks know what they can and cannot do. Within that space, leaders need to trust people to do their learning and create feedback loops that share the results of experiments with the bigger system. If you can have people all working separately on the same problem – working in parallel as we would say in Cognitive Edge-speak – then you increase the chances of lots more failures and also of finding lots of different ways to do things. This is called “distributed cognition” in complex facilitation and keeping people from influencing each other increases the creative possibilities within constraints.
The next level of this practice is to honestly incentivize failure. Give a reward to a person or a team that has the best report of their failure, the one that helps us all to learn more. You could easily do this in an innovation meeting by having different groups work on a problem in a fixed amount of time. Watch for the group that fails to get anywhere by the end of the time and ask them to share WHY they failed. Their experience will be a cautionary tale to the whole system.
Almost every organization I work with says that they embrace learning, tolerate failure, and want their employees to take more risks. When I ask to see how they do this, it’s rare to find organizations that have a formal process for doing so. Without that in place, employees will always respond to these kinds of platitudes with a little fear and trembling, and in general, take fewer risks if it clashes with their stated deliverables.
I’ve been enjoying Haruki Murakami’s early novels lately. Here is a paragraph from “Pinball, 1973.”
“On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing; a rosebud, a lost cap, a favourite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to all their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.”
–Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973