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More on holding space

July 17, 2008 By Facilitation, Open Space, Practice 5 Comments

As Marc’s conversation has unfolded at teh OSLIST, he dropped this lovely analogy about holding space into the mix today.   Here’s what he does when people ask him why they pay him:

Usually I then refer to my memories living in West Africa. We mostly had a night watchman in our garden (in many ways the reason was also to give another person a job). They were always there, sitting under a tree, brewing tea and they were great to have a chat with – they knew everything that happened in the neighbourhood! But they never actually did something. And that was the point: you have a night watchmen BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO and you have the great desire that they never ever will need to do anything – that was precisely the reason why you have (and paid!) them! They are “holding the night” – and your space to sleep free from worries. And you assume that their mere presence creates this safe space.
That’s always how I understood – and explained – my role and the space that I hold as a facilitator. People (who have experienced African night watchmen) always understood…

Follow up from the Good Food Gathering

July 15, 2008 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Facilitation, Flow, Open Space, World Cafe

Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference.   The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now:

By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a relevant, inclusive, and highly participative event, and in the larger, movement-wide goals of defining where our work currently stands, and where it must go to collaboratively progress towards a healthy, green, fair, and affordable food system for all people.

To help weave our work into the national consciousness, we posed hard questions of self-definition, movement-wide strategic thinking, and personal responsibility within the conference framework. Our speakers supported these questions, challenging participants to be inspired towards change and confident in furthering it. Thoughtfully crafted Learning Journeys enabled many to step beyond their desk-bound days to re-examine and experience the shared core of our work. The technologies of Open Space, Good Food Village Square, and Good Food Cafes shifted us from prescribed idea sharing to permit a more personal stake in not mere talk, but work in the moment, of the moment, with long-term vision. We all took our turn asking attendees to participate more than they had before at such an event; thank you for your creative assistance in making this happen to such great effect.

The gathering intended to provide and ignite a crucible for systemic shift towards deeper, more meaningful connections that will sustain the good of our communities; towards co-creating the bigger picture of the Good Food Movement; and finally, towards experiential co-learning through conversations, visual harvesting, performance poetry, dedicated blogging, and sharing nourishing meals at the table. With defined intentions and shared commitments, our efforts to make it so were strengthened, and many goals met. We sincerely thank you for these efforts, your sharing of time and wisdom.   And so shall our steps continue, following this collective lead. Together we will continue”

This gathering’s success is quite obviously an achievement earned through the hard work of many, of you: Planning Team members and our talented core of Art of Hosting facilitators, speakers who came from different locales and different backgrounds, authors who overturn the rocks that drive our knowledge, the maverick leaders who embraced ad hoc strategic planning in leading Good Food Village Square Sessions, the many persevering Learning Journey hosts who gave extra effort in order to connect with dozens of visitors, the hard-working Wild Horse Pass Sheraton crew, and last, but not at all least, the welcoming community of Native American generations who graciously hosted us at a most appropriate and inspired location, allowing authentic, challenging work to take place.

We, the Good Food Movement, are a living, breathing model of diversity, heart, and cooperative engagement for common good. Thank you for your efforts in helping us all realize this, and challenging us to maintain our necessary work!

This work was truly the next level of conference design for us, a completely participatory and challenging gathering and I’m so take with Erin’s description of what happened there.

Can groups look after themselves?

July 15, 2008 By Facilitation, Invitation, Open Space, Organization

On the OSLIST, Marc Steinlin posed a few questions that I took a stab at answering:

What means “holding space”? What is the function, if demonstrably one can do without?
The $100,000 question!   Several of us over the years have written things on it (I wrote a whole book trying to understand it) but it is an elusive process.   And I think it changes with the scale and size of the group AND most importantly with the pre-existing depth of their own relationship.

If I was to generalize I would say that holding space means helping the group find its highest potential realized.   For some groups, in some contexts this might be a very controlling kind of thing and for other groups not so much.   In my expereince where there is a deep underlying and pre-existing architecture of relationships and collaboration, there is very little an individual can do to control the outcome, so getting out of the way seems the best option.   Lately I’m learning a lot about working with fields of learners or people engaged in large scale and longer term change.   What I’m learning is that it takes a field to hold a field, as my late friend Finn Voldtofte once said.   In other words, at large levels of scale within organizations or communities, the act of holding space is actually all about attending to the relationships of the group of people that are holding the deepest intention for the work.   In an organizational development context this means that the core team spends a great deal of time working on its own relationships and in so doing, they are able to hold space for the bigger field of learning.

And then having said all of that, I think there is an art   to intuitively knowing how much or how little to “hold.”

Or is it really that the group as a whole can hold space (which seemed to be the case)? Any group?
Yes a group can hold its own space, but not any group.   My hunch is that we can let go into groups like this when there is at least a minimal form of relationship in place.   How much or how little is immeasureable, but you can sense whether a group has that capacity or potential if you let go of your expectations for the role of facilitator.
Why do we really need any facilitator throughout the event?
I am working a lot these days with the chaordic path, the idea that there is a way forward if we dance between chaos and order.   In that respect I think the facilitator can play a valuable role in brining minimal elegant structure to chaos so that the conditions for self-organization might be met.   At it’s most basic level, this structure looks like or is an invitation, a calling question that taps passions and responsibility   Once passion and responsibility are tapped, the group can look after itself.
And consequently under which conditions can we dispense with it?
Most of our lives are spent without facilitators helping us be around other people.   We can learn a lot from those situations.   If you engage in a little appreciative inquiry project on your own life, you might remember stories about times in your life when you experienced great strides without a facilitator.and then harvest the key conditions from those stories.
What is the risk? Can this go totally wrong?

The risk is always that it won’t work, that a group won’t discover its highest potential.   And although whatever happens is the only thing that could have (and that means you need to pay attention to the space to hold at the outset), if there is much at stake and the group finds itself unable to work without some form and leadership, the stake will be lost, as will the opportunity.   But in complex living systems, there is no such thing as totally wrong anyway – everything that happens is food for everything else.   If however you have an expectation that there is a right and a wrong result, there is always the risk that a group might acheive the wrong result.

In my experience, it pays to create the conditions in which the host team and the group itself understands this approach to complex systems and self organization. so that you are operating with a learning environment rather than a right/wrong dichotomy.

That’s the extent of my thinking this morning.

Either we talk or, or…

July 14, 2008 By Conversation, Flow 8 Comments

I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists.   I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed.   I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada.

We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.”   This is an impossible condition for victory.   At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no?
This interesting article in the NY Times is about Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian who brokered the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993.   In it he talks about the need to talk to people as an alternative to say, unilateral declarations of war on hundreds of previously unconnected networks:

Norway’s message to the United States is blunt: the next administration, whether headed by Barack Obama or John McCain, should pronounce the war on terror over. Because it has tended to isolate the United States, polarize the world, inflate the enemy, conflate diverse movements and limit scope for dialogue, its time has passed.

“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”

He continued: “Moderates lose ground if they cannot show tangible results. You don’t engage at any price, but the price can come down and we can achieve more.”

Norway has kept channels open to Hamas and to Syria. It has spoken with the Hamas leadership. It is convinced the West missed an opportunity by not talking in March 2007 to the elected Palestinian national unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas members. It argues that Taliban elements can be drawn out of terror into politics through talks.

In all of this, Norway has used the greater diplomatic latitude it enjoys as a non-member of the European Union. The E.U., like the United States, lists Hamas as a terrorist organization.

“We have enormous reason to be upset with Hamas because it spent every day after Oslo trying to destroy Oslo,” Store said. “But there is a strong realist tradition in Hamas oriented toward a political landscape. In general, it should be in our interest to get organizations out of military activity and into politics. The political working method has not been sufficiently tested.”

Interesting.

Join us on Bowen Island for the Art of Hosting, September 28 – October 1

July 14, 2008 By Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting 5 Comments

We’d like to invite you to join us for an Art of Hosting workshop here on Bowen Island in September. Myself, Monica Nissen, Caitlin Frost, Tenneson Woolf and David Stevenson will host you here at Rivendell Retreat Centre for three and half days of learning, exploring and playing with the art of hosting and harvesting conversations that matter.

Please grab the invitation, share with others and consider joining us. You can also register online through the Berkana Institute website.   And if you are already registered, leave a note in the comments to let folks know who is coming. Confirmed participants already include bloggers, facilitators people working in business, tribal communities and in the food sector.