Many of the circles I travel in instersect in many intimate ways. People I meet here on the west coast of Canada months apart turn out to be co-authors of papers and books. Folks I hear about from others turn out to be partners in crome later on.
The Art of Hosting world is a little like that, touching as it does on many many different networks. And through these serendipitous connections, it turns out that I am personally acquainted with two of the three authors of a great little free e-book called Mapping Dialogue. I met Zaid Hassan last year as he was travelling through BC on business with Generon. Marianne Knuth, I haven’t met yet, but she is an amazing woman, a close friend of my friend Toke Moeller and we are hoping to have her join us for the Art of Hosting here in September.
So while I am relishing these connections, I want to put a strong plug in for this book on dialogue. It essentially suammarizes what we know and do with the Art of Hosting and is a great primer to using these processes and approaching this work no matter what context you find yourself in.
[tags]mapping dialogue, Toke Moeller, Zaid Hassan, Marianne Knuth, Art of Hosting[/tags]
I have been working lately with friends and fellows Brenda Chaddock, Tennson Wolf and Teresa Posakony to co-create another Art of Hosting training. We will be gathering on Bowen Island here in British Columbia from September 24-28 in a practice retreat to deeply investigate these questions:
- What could my leadership also be?
- What if I would practice using collective intelligence and learning in my organisation and network?
- What could strategic conversations also be if I host them with wisdom and courage?
- How do I create authentic involvement that leads to real implementation?
The practice retreat is structured along the following principles:
- Our learning will grow out of participant contributions and presence – we will support each other as co-learners
- We will learn by observation, experience and practice, using interactive processes to build a safe and inspiring learning environment – we will explore Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Circle Council, reflective practices, World Cafe, and other participatory methodologies
- Taking a chance to explore – and experiment with – applying these tools to your own projects-in-progress will help you to apply your skills, as well as develop and continue a new practice that will last well beyond this training
And through a variety of processes and conversations, we will investigate:
- Hosting conversations as a core leadership practice and competence for leading change
- How the Art of Hosting is an organising pattern/culture that invites new ways of living and working
- The conditions needed to create space for meaningful conversations
- Specific interactive processes through which learning and creation can emerge
- Sensing and shaping the conditions and timing for using particular methods and tools
- How the practice of hosting can be applied to key strategic change projects in our lives and work
This is a powerful training, and we invite you to join us. For more information, or to register, visit the Art of Hosting page or contact me by email.
[tags]facilitation+training, art+of+hosting[/tags]
It’s a Tsimshian expression that means “of one heart.” It was also the name of a very powerful appreciative summit I facilitated last year on youth suicide in northwestern British Columbia.
Today Jane Morley, the Child and Youth Officer for British Columbia, and the convener of that gathering released her special report on the summit and its results. The report is available as a .pdf from her site.
The gathering was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. On May 4th 2005 I saw nearly 200 Aboriginal youth step into a gathering rife with fear and trepidation and emerge engaged and powerful. They achieved this by simply turning to one another with a set of powerful questions about what might be in their communities and after some conversation, they delivered an inspired set of messages to policy makers and politicians.
In her report, Jane summaraizes the transformation of the day this way:
By the end of the inter-nation forum, it seemed that a shift had taken place – from the overwhelming sense of loss, alienation and fear people had felt in the face of youth suicide, to youth beginning to take the lead in finding a solution. THe energy and power of the youth were palpable, as was the willingness among the others present to hear and accepttheir views, the mutual respect and the support for the emergence of youth voices and youth leadership.
The inter-nation forum, the work that preceeded it and the subsequent results were the fruit of hard work by many people, but first among these were the youth themselves. It was such an honour to work with them. I hope the governments involved heed Jane’s report.
On Monday I was up in Kamloops taking part in an annual gathering called the “Stop Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth” Conference. That’s a mouthful but it’s a truly wonderful annual gathering hosted by The Justice Institute of British Columbia (itself a great thing we have here in BC).
I was asked to come and deliever a workshop on dialogue and deliberation methods with youth, and so I showed up to do that. In my design I though it would be cool to see if I could give people a tast of what it feels like to be engaged so deeply that we experience emergence. I wanted people to experience what it feels like to work from their strengths and have something appear about youth engagement that no one person brought into the room with them. And I had 2.5 hours.
I began where I always begin, telling the story of the quadrants, and mapping the four open space practices in some detail (link opens a .pdf). Instead of filling in my own practices, I asked people what their practices were and we filled in the map together. This is important, because people truly do know how to do opening, inviting, holding and grounding. It’s just a matter of turning their attention to how they do it.
After that, we moved into an opening practice, with a bit of an Appreciative Inquiry experience. I invited people to pair up and interview one another on the question of “Tell me a story or two of a time when you felt deeply engaged by others. What might we learn from that about engagement in general?” People spent a very short time interviewing – 10 minutes each – and then they returned to the circle.
Next I gave them a taste of The World Cafe and we moved into fours to process some of this learning. The question for the first 20 minute round was “What can we learn from these reflections about deeply engaging youth.” After the first round was over, the groups mixed up and continued exploring the question. At the end of the second 20 minutes, I asked them to remain in their spots and turn their collective minds to discerning “What ideas want to hatch now?” The third round was quieter and more deliberate.
Finally we reconvened in a circle and I invited reflections about where we were at after spending this time thinking through this work. We got a number of ideas, including thoughts about deep listening, about approaching youth where they are, both physically and emotionally and about showing up completely authentically in engagement and with curiosity about where the process might lead. There were also a number of “aha’s” about detaching from outcomes.
In just over an hour and a half, using nothing but the resources and stories of the people in the room we did experience a little bit of emergence and a I think everyone got some good ideas out of the session. If we had had more time, I would have then worked with the most interesting ideas (as determined by the group) and perhaps split people up into little design teams to figure out how these principles might work in a grounded engagement process. Then we could have melded these conversations together into some tools and approaches that might be useful.
I think the biggest learning for people was just how fast learning can take place when you are engaged in deep conversation about stuff that matters. And how the most important person in that kind of process is not the facilitator or the teacher, but the experts you are surrounded by, and the stories and experiences of your own life, seen in a new light.
Robyn Stratton-Berkessel posts about a great training she was a part of last week, while we were doing our OST practice workshop on Vancouver Island. And what is really cool is that she posted this diagram of the appreciative inquiry process, which is a lovely frame for doing anything really.
Naturally, this process maps nicely onto the map we use of the Open Space practices. Discovery requires Opening, Dreaming requires Inviting, Designing requires Holding and Destiny requires Grounding. And even within the positive topic choice, all of these practices come into play, as the design process that leads to an AI project, or an Open Space event demands that you use the same practices in planning as you do in execution.
When you are doing the work of conversation that is informed and connected to the heart, fractal integrity is critical because you can feel the dissonance when it’s not there.