The “Art of Hosting” is a term that has taken on a life of its own in the world of participatory facilitation and leadership. It came into use some 25 years ago to describe the fundamental practice at the heart of participatory facilitation and it has become a bit of a cipher. I’ve had a couple of conversations in the last few weeks that reminded me that it’s probably time to again bring a bit of clarity – but not too much! – to how the term is used. Here are three things it is and two things it is not.
A pattern of practice
First and foremost the Art of Hosting is an art. Of hosting conversations that matter. The practice is summed up with what we call “the four fold practice” which is derived from the idea that good conversations are made better by having participants be present, participate, be hosted in a way that invites everyone to play a role and to co-create. It’s called hosting to signal that it is a form of facilitation that does not involve itself in the midst of the conversations, but rather seeks to create the conditions for conversations to take place. As a simple practice, it invites facilitators to create the conditions for effective dialogic containers rather than . As a leadership practice, it invites participatory leaders to practice self-hosting, participation, hosting others and co-creation. And because the practice is so context dependant, it is literally a practice. One is constantly practicing, responding, learning and reflecting as a facilitator and a leader who practices the art of hosting.
A community of practice
The Art of Hosting is also a name given to the global community of practice, a loosely connected and chaordic network of practitioners and global stewards. For more than 25 years folks on every continent and in hundreds of different contexts have connected themselves to the Art of Hosting community to share learning, contribute thinking and explore participatory practice through a common language and inquiry. The stewards are experienced practitioners who stay connected locally and regionally and help organize trainings and maintain a global coherence to the community. The global community has an online home at www.artofhosting.org and an active Facebook page with more than 16,000 members.
A workshop
All over the world experienced practitioners offer Art of Hosting workshops giving folks the opportunity to learn and engage with the art of participatory facilitation. Sometimes, especially where the workshop is focused more on community and organizational leadership, it is called “The Art of Participatory Leadership.” While these workshops can offer differ significantly in terms of material offered and pedagogy, in general you will leave these learning experiences having learned about:
- the four-fold practice of hosting and harvesting participatory process;
- complexity concepts, such as the chaordic path or the Cynefin framework;
- Frameworks for planning and facilitating participatory gatherings, such art the chaordic stepping stones of the Diamond of Participation;
- Exposure and practice of facilitation methods such as Open Space Technology, World Cafe, Circle, ProAction Cafe, Collective Story Harvest and others.
- Self-hosting and inner practice work
You’ll find upcoming workshops listed on the Art of Hosting website. As I write there are workshops offered in Zimbabwe, India, France, Switzerland, Canada, Croatia, Netherlands, Brazil and the US. These workshops are taught primarily by local stewards and practitioners and can be very different expressions of the same basic material. It’s always fun to travel around and see how folks are teaching and practicing the art of hosting in different cultural and organizational contexts.
Two things it isn’t
It’s not an organiztion. The Art of Hosting is not a company you hire to work for you. It isn’t an organization or a certification scheme. It is a chaordic community that supports learning and practice worldwide
It is not a method. Sometimes people confuse the Art of Hosting with a method like World Cafe. That’s understandable as many people are introduced to participatory methods in Art of Hosting workshops, but there is no Art of Hosting method per se. Neither is the World Cafe, for example, a method of the Art of Hosting. The World Cafe is a method although, as Amy points out below, it is not MERELY a method. The Art of Hosting is a practice that can help facilitators better use that method. It’s like the different between music theory and music performance, or the study of poetics and the practice of writing poetry . One is the theory and the other is the practice, and together the Art of Hosting – the four fold practice – is praxis: the unification of theory and practice towards more participation.
The Art of Hosting is one way we point to what is sometimes spoken of as “the central garden” which is a common space of inquiry held by people who are interested to learn about how participatory ways of being together can help shape a world that values diversity, difference, and multiple perspectives. Thanks to my friend Amy Lenzo, who in the comments, points this out so eloquently.
Does all of this seem only half-way clear? Well, that ambiguity is something of a feature of this whole world. It allows and invites people to bring different expressions and experience to this global inquiry while also having some shared language and concepts that help us to learn together and evolve in the service of groups of people who are trying to build or reclaim spaces of humanity, dignity and sustainability. It continues to be an essential community of friends and colleagues for my work, for which I am constantly grateful.
One of the houses I grew up in as a kid in what is now called “Midtown” Toronto, but was known as Chaplain Estates back in my day, named for the farmer who sold the land for houses at the edge of Toronto back in the early 1900s.
On the road again, and this year is starting to feel like my pre-pandemic travel schedule, one that I thought I might try to cut back on. Not happening though! The trade-off for not being at home much is I get to work with with old friends here in Toronto, Ben Wolfe and Violetta Ilkiw. We just finished a three day Art of Hosting with an interesting group of people including a team involved in creating a Poverty Truth Commission in Mississauga, Ontario, some congregational leaders, restorative justice practitioners, community organizers and educators. A real delight.
Today I find myself wandering the neighbourhood where I grew up in Toronto, past houses in which I was raised, places I played as a child and homes where I spent time with my friends. Every so often, when I am visiting the city, I come back and sometimes just hang out in the spaces, letting the time spirits wash over me, trying to remember names and events, always being surprised by some long forgotten memory that will come back. Fifty-six years doesn’t seem like a long time, but being back in these neighbourhoods finds my mind drifting to the oldest stories this body carries. It must be a little odd to see a middle aged man slowly walking these streets, pausing to sense something, and recover something. I don’t know why I do it but there is a part of me that always belongs to this neighbourhood despite how much it has changed. Maybe we need these experiences of rootedness as humans, especially if we come from a people that never stop moving on to the next place, seeking settlement and leaving parts of ourselves behind. I have spent my life in two countries, nine towns, cities and villages, and something like 20 homes. Something in me misses a deeper integration of my life’s stories. Revisiting these old places brings a bit that into play.
Since the mid nineties one of the homes I have also lived in is the online world and ever since I signed up for my first email address at the National Capital Freenet in 1992, I have posted, discussed, argued, published and mused on the net. I’ve been in all the big social media places and seen them grow into places of incredible connection and generosity and then seen each one fall into enshittification, dominated by the needs to satiate the rapacious appetites of the venture capitalists that demand astronomical returns on their investment. Before long, all of that connection and community gets co-opted and used to train algorithms that activate the stickier parts of your brain. The brain I have is particularly susceptible to these machinations, and so it’s a big deal when I can pry myself away from these places. I think I’ve almost done it.
I have abandoned Twitter after something like 17 years, and my Facebook and LinkedIn use is just limited to sharing blog posts from here and some occasional check-ins with the global Art of Hosting pages. I opened an account on Bluesky because I am deeply involved in Canadian soccer and that is where folks meet. Bluesky is that place for now, but I have no doubt it too will go the way of all the others, and like a cloud of moths, the community will find another home.
But I have returned to blogging more often, you might have noticed, and I use my Mastodon account to post links and engage in some conversation with a small group of people. It’s more of a memory hole than an attempt to gain influence in the online world. Mastodon is structurally different from all the other networks, and it is protected from the kinds of inevitable arcs that will face each new attempt to recreate twitter or Facebook. It also brings the brain less frenetic energy. It is truly a microblogging space, and it helps to think of it that way. A blog and an RSS feed combined into one. I never see anything there I didn’t ask for.
I’m not even going to post link to my social media accounts, because you don’t really need to go there. Anything of substance I have to say, remember, reflect upon, or share I do here at my blog. A few hundred of you subscribe by email and others check in from time to time and I appreciate the connections we make and the conversations and observations that flow here. You will never be served an ad from this site and I only accidentally stumble across the numbers that Jetpack reminds of. This place is not here to harvest things about you: It is a place to harvest things about me out in the open. It is a place of open curiosity and open source learning, and half polished drafts of possibly useful ideas. Glad you’re here too.
It does feel very much like coming back to the old neighbourhood.
Motto by Bertolt Brecht
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
German; trans. John Willett