A lifetime of appreciating self-organization in groups

Cedric Jamet and I together at the Art of Hosting Reimagining Education gathering a couple of weeks ago.

The other week we were sitting in the Queen’s University Biological Station in Elgin Ontario, opening our third annual Art of Hosting on Reimagining Education. Cedric Jamet was teaching about the chaordic path, the term we use for the leadership path that works with a dance of chaos and order. The chaordic space is the space of self-organization, where structure and form creates the conditions for otherwise chaotic spaces to produce direction, coherence, energy and engagement without top down control. It is a way of conceptualizing self-organization in groups, which is the kind of facilitation practice I specialize in.

The idea of self-organization, what it is, how it arises, what practices support it is been the single most important organizing question of my professional career. As Cedric put it in Elgin, this is what the world needs, to be hosted so that people can self-organize to improve their conditions, make beautiful and sustainable things and sustain good work with strong relationships. When we create the conditions that enable self-organization, we are creating places of “safe uncertainty” and relational connectivity. We create what I call “dialogic containers” which become places of meaning and sustainable connection. Strong dialogic containers can hold difference and conflict without rendering the relational field. They can provide spaces for meaning and depth and purpose. Sustained over time they can become “life-giving contexts.” As a facilitator and in my work leading and supporting leaders, everything we do points in this direction.

Over the past 20 years this inquiry has led me into two major areas of practice. I have studied and worked deeply with the Art of Hosting and the field of participatory process design and facilitation. Based around the “Four Fold Practice” – presence, participation, hosting contribution, and co-creation – the Art of Hosting is a simple framework for a practice that, as Cedric said, helps us enable self-organization. This is a well-established field of facilitation practice and I work with facilitation methods that are found in the fields of dialogic organizational development, collaborative change management, and anthro-complexity including those contained in the seminal collection of large groups methods, and small scale Liberating Structures, as well as the suite of methods from Participatory Narrative Inquiry.

The other area of practice I have explored is complexity, in an effort to understand the conditions by which self-organization arises. This has led me through the various threads of complexity in human and living systems initially through the work of Senge, Wheatley, Scharmer who came out of the system thinking world with new metaphors, models and understandings about how things worked. From there I dove deep into anthro-complexity, championed primarily by Dave Snowden who work on ontologies is a significant contribution to this field as it helps leaders, facilitators and process designers make good choices about the way they participate and intervene in different situations. I also read deeply and learned with other complexity-focused theorists and process designers like Cynthia Kurtz, whose work on story is especially important, and Glenda Eoyang, whose work on complexity and whose suite of methods and approaches called Human Systems Dynamics is accessible, simple, and extremely effective for the most part in seeing and working with complexity.

The two most significant academic works I’ve published reflected these two streams as I have written about and explored the ideas of dialogic containers as the key structures which enable self-organization and meaning-making. In Hosting and Holding Containers, I talk about the concept of a dialogic container and use the four-fold practice to describe how to work with these phenomena. In “Hosting Dialogic Containers: a key to working in complexity” I talk about containers from a more complexity-informed perspective and discuss the role of constraints in designing and hosting containers. A subsequent paper, published only in Japanese is actually closer to my current thinking on the constraints framework that I use.

This morning I am sitting in an Open Space meeting while all around this place a small team of folks are busy engaging in conversations that are necessary for creating their future. These people are interested in pedagogy and learning design, and I was struck by the fact that Open Space was a new experience for almost every single one of them. But I can hear the snippets of conversation and see the energy and attention in the work that is happening, and I continue to be astonished at how powerful self-organization is, given the right kind of container for it. We have an urgent question that is a deep attractor. We have connections and exchanges that are already strong in the team and made stronger by the visioning conversations we had yesterday. And we have important boundaries, including a threshold that was crossed with a new Director, a beautiful space that is full or opportunity and a timeline for the work that is both bounded and generous. There is urgency but not emergency, still room for excitement creativity and energy.

I have done many hundreds of Open Space events, large and small, and each one has delighted me as I watch groups of people self-organize and take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. I remained astonished by the powerful and generative nature of a life-giving dialogic container that emerges from a few enabling constraints thoughtfully applied and held. And I remain grateful for the immense body of work that underlies this approach to human organizations and communities and all those friends and teachers who guided and taught me along the way.