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A collective harvest of the four fold practice

April 18, 2012 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Practice One Comment

The last couple of weeks my deepening of perspective on the four fold practice of the art of hosting has continued.  In the Art of Hosting Water Dialogues we are teaching the practice and inviting participants to reflect on what they already know about the practice.  Here is a snippet of the harvest from our work this week:

Presensing and hosting yourself

  • Be place based
  • Sense what could be better
  • Develop confidence
  • Prepare for surprising outcomes
  • Centering before entering
  • Personal wellness: sleep, eat and hydrate
  • Give yourself enough time
  • Know your participants
  • Remember that you are always a learner

Participating

 

  • Connect people to purpose
  • Learn and speak with a common language
  • listen and ask questions and be curious
  • Take notes and connect to learning from elsewhere
  • Realize that you don’t need to know everything
  • Celebrate and reinforce commonalities
  • Ask good questions
  • Empathize and synthesize
  • Notice your projections on to other people
  • Response-ability
  • Act on your beliefs and values in a positive way
  • Trust yourself

 

 

Contributing and hosting conversations

  • Create space for dialogue and for a community that cares.
  • Bring together diversity for better innovation
  • Make people comfortable and invite them to push their boundaries
  • Invite respect
  • Pay attention to logistics and the quality of space
  • Create a space for invitation and learning, where disagreement is legitimate
  • Work from common purpose
  • Recognize and name the elephants in the room
  • be clear about the purpose of and the intended harvest of a conversation
  • provide the minimum structure to focus work while allowing for emergence
  • Host people to enable them to engage in uncertain cisrcumstances
  • Level the playing field for wisdom
  • Use methods that bring in diverse voices

 

 

Co-creating the community

  • Create collaborative buy in
  • Change must come from the margins of the system, sustained by a core that is willing to co-create
  • Do activities that connect rather than prescribe answers
  • Always plan with an eye to sustaining momentum
  • Develop a close network of mates and work together
  • Work with people and have fun with them too.
  • Collect and share stories
  • Collaborate with complimentary allies
  • Seek inspiration across disciplines.