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Facilitating AND Hosting

November 20, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Leadership, Organization 16 Comments

A stump in a forest hosts life in a living system

Photo by alastairb

* NOTE: I changed the title of this post to better reflect the both/and nature of this conversation, rather than the unhelpful either/or way I originally wrote it.  

At the Art of Hosting last weekend, it finally came to me – the simple description of the different between facilitation and hosting as I understand it. So here are a few simple metaphors and a more detailed meditation.
At the simplest level, you can think of a party. A facilitator is like a party planner, or a wedding organizer, running around taking care of details, scripting the event and staying outside of the experience. A party host, by contrast, is inside the experience, invested in the outcome, bringing energy to conversations, not only form, and both affecting and being affected by the experience.

For the sports minded is the difference between a coach and a captain, the difference between being on a football team and an ultimate team. For musicians it is the difference between what happens when a conductor conducts an orchestra and how a string quartet hosts itself.

Scaled up to another level, facilitation and hosting can be seen as complimentary forms of leadership for two different systems. Facilitation comes from a mechanistic view of organizations, that they are machines that can be fixed. Facilitators typically take a neutral stand, bring their tools and tool kits to help things run easier. The facilitator is the mechanic and the group is the machine.

Hosting, on the other hand, is a practice of leading from within a living system. It’s like entering the machine, becoming a part of it and changing it by being there. In a living system you cannot enter the field without affecting the field. So the host enters the field with all of the resources and assets he or she has and offers what they can to the centre of the work. When I am working explicilty as a host (which is my practice most of the time now) I am actively involved in what is going on. Sometimes it loks like facilitation if I may be called to offer an outsider’s view, but I do that from INSIDE the field in which we are working. I bring my whole self to the work and host conversations that invite us to co-create the tools and forms and processes we need to move. Hosting is leading from the field, and it is a very different path from “facilitation” and it operates out of a very different worldview about the kinds of systems in which we live. Anyone can do it, and in fact it works better when there is more “hosting consciousness” in a group. That way the power of a traditional facilitator is not needed, and the group’s capacity to take itself to the next level is increased.

From a complexity stand point, facilitation is seen as a reductionist activity, reducing complexity to simple problems with simple outcomes and a simple path for getting there. Facilitators help groups to seek answers and end states. Hosting from within the field however is more aligned with the nature of complex systems, where there are no answers, but instead only choices to make around the next question, and the paths where those questions lead us. There are no end states. The idea of a healthy community is a vector, not a point. It is a direction to move, not something that can be acheived and then crossed off the list.

For me the critical need for hosting is in the fact that traditional approaches to systems problems are not working. The systemic problems themselves are now understood to be so interconnected and embedded in each other that they are impossible to disentangle. The mechanical world view is fading and the living systems world view is arising. We are in a period of transition in the world between these two ways of seeing things and I think the core capacity of groups, organizations, communities and nations to find sustainable futures lies in their ability to host themselves to their next level of responsibility and action. Consulting in the mode of the mechanic that fixes things is over. Hosting in living systems is here.

Working with core teams

November 20, 2007 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Flow

One of the patterns emerging from our work in the Art of Hosting, is the practice of developing and supporting a core team that can collectively hold the bigger work that is being done.

At the moment I am working consciously with the core team pattern at VIATT, with the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, with the Quinault Indian Nation on a tribal strategic plan and with smaller conferences and gatherings, including one next week – a conference exploring collaboration in the child welfare and family services practice field.   On that one we have been working with a core organizing team to co-create the process and a workbook for the conference to use.   Today on our last conference call before the meeting, the organizers asked about catastrophic plan in case something happened to me and I couldn’t make it on the day.   I replied that in that unlikely event, we should reflect on the fact that we have planned this entire gathering collaboratively and that if I got hit by a truck next week, any one of them could hold space on the day, working with the group through the set of exercises and experiences we have planned together.   Everyone immediately recognized the power of a core team and the power of co-creation.   It reuslts in co-ownership.

Working with core teams is differnt from facilitating a planning committee.   When I work with core teams I join them as a host to discover the heart of a project, and to develop a co-created capacity to host a project together.   This is not the same as acting as a facilitator for a team, inmy experience.   Core team work comes from the inside of the group, not the outside.   This is especially true of the large scale change work, because those projects need more than one person to generate and hold the deepest need, and to create capacity that lasts, that holding must be within the project.   The core team then becomes the host for the project and the project become the host for change in the world, or the organization or the community.   These fractal levels of work are very interesting to me at the moment, and very important to learn about as well.   We’ll be rolling a lot of this thinking into the module Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen and I are leading at the Shambhala Institute this coming summer.

Conversation as a radical act.

November 20, 2007 By Conversation, Leadership, World Cafe

The big posting from the Systems Thinking in Action Conference on a session with Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulis, Nancy White and Amy Lenzo on conversation as a radical act.
There are days, and this is one of them, when I pinch myself at how lucky I am to be able to call these women my friends.

Ten finds

November 20, 2007 By Art of Harvesting, Being, Collaboration, Leadership, Organization, Poetry

Photo by Darwin Bell

Hyperlinks –

follow these leads

a thread.

Where certainty comes from

November 20, 2007 By Appreciative Inquiry, Being, Leadership 2 Comments

From a conference call this morning with friends around some big work.   We spoke about the fact that the work we are in – large scale systemic change – is plagued with doubt.   There is no certainty that what we are doing is the right thing, or whether it will even work.   But the project itself exists in a field of doubt, and as that doubt begins to pervade our core teams, the search for certainty becomes desperate.   People begin to focus on little things that are going wrong and a depreciative world view takes hold.

Doubt hunts us on the trail.   It picks up our scent and dogs our heels ntil we find ourselves running faster and faster away from it.   We expend our energy avoiding it and become exhausted and depleted.

In these moments what is needed is a stand.   We must stop running from it, turn around on the path and face it down.   We need to muster up the courage and confront the energy of doubt unless we wishe to have it erode our efforts from within.

Large scale change is never certain.   Our running from the doubts simply feeds the fear of that uncertainty.   IN the worse case, we become consumed by it and look outside of ourselves for confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do.   The truth of it is that the certainty we need is not outside of us.   If it is not within us, we will never find it.   We must generate it in the field of our work together or abandon our work to the poisonous cynicism that wants to consume it in the end.   At some point we choose to confront the predator or become its prey.