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.
Here is a little diagram of the chaordic stepping stones mapped onto Sam Kaner’s Diamond of Participation. This is a pretty geeky Art of Hosting map, but essentially it describes the way planning unfolds in practice.
The chaordic stepping stones is a tool I use to do a lot of planning. These nine steps help us stay focused on need and purpose and design our structure and outcomes based on that. the first four steps of Need, Purpose, Principles and People are essential elements for the design of an invitation process. Getting clear on these steps helps us to generate purpose, questions and an opening for good participatory process to flow.
The next three steps of Concept, Limiting Beliefs and Structure help us to think about how we will organize ourselves to hold space for emergence. This becomes especially important in the Groan Zone, the place where a group is struggling with integration of ideas, diversity and creativity and where they feel lost and tired. Good process helps us to hold a group together through that struggle.
The last two steps, Practice and Harvest, help us to shape our outcomes, create a process for impact and create useful artifacts and documents of our learning process that can help others to continue the conversation.
The chaordic stepping stones are a design tool, meaning that we think through all of them at the outset of an initiative, and refine them as circumstances change. This diagram shows how they become active through the life of a process.
Yesterday at the end of our workshop day one of our participants looked out to the bay and saw a stirring in the water. He asked what it could be and I suggested it was a reef appearing at low tide, or a seal chasing herring or the Goldeneyes who have been engaged in their weird breeding behaviour of running on water and diving below the surface.
He said that it didn’t look like any of that, and when I turned around, I saw a small pod of dolphins ripping through Mannion Bay. I have never seen dolphins in the bay before, so we ran down to the beach and watched them move between the boats and back out into the channel. Our whole group was in awe of the scene, moved by what we were seeing, deep in the appreciation of these creatures.
This group has continually talked about how beautiful it is here on Bowen, how friendly people are, how lucky we are to have the forests and the sea and the park right by the village. Some went out to Docs on Friday and were blown away by Rob Bailey and Teun Scheut playing jazz and one of group members even joined in for a version of Nature Boy. They have enjoyed themselves here, and have opened my eyes to the qualities of place that we often take for granted. And we got to witness a surprise that even the most seasoned Islanders were delighted by.
Location:Cardena St,Bowen Island,Canada
At our art of hosting water dialogues this morning, several insights on the four fold practice of hosting:
- on hosting ourselves, one of the participants who used to work in emergency medicine shared his team’s mantra: in an emergency the first pulse you take is your own,
- participating means coming to any situation with curiosity and an ability and desire to learn something
- the practice of hosting doesn’t mean you need to be an expert. To convene you simply need the desire and courage to call and hold.
- the practice of co-creation is born from generosity and sharing resources, skills, opportunities and knowledge.
- as we move through the four fold practice we evolve from a learner to a community of learners to a community that learns. This last shift is often the hardest.
- at the core of this practice is intention. To come to the practice with intention is to activate it.
- it is surprising how quickly we can move to co-creation when we have practiced together once, we did a signing exercise that took the group through two rounds of co-creation and we quickly moved to creating music together that was unimaginable 10 minutes before.
I love how groups just spark insights. You can teach this stuff dozens of dozens of times and there is always something new to learn.
This video on The Four-Fold Practice was made by Kevin McKeever for InCommons, the initaitve we were working with last month in Minnesota.
This video really captures why we feel that this simple four folded practice lies at the heart of what the Art of Hosting is. Everything we teach and practice under the name “Art of Hosting” springs from an integrated practice of these four things. Enjoy.